Before going into the focus of this post I have several good news (at last!):

All my games are on sale on the Steam Autumn sale:
https://store.steampowered.com/pub/winterwolves

And second, we’re only waiting for a missing animation (the animator is on holiday right now) before we can start the Glamour Photographer beta! It is a matter of a week or so now. Also, we’re planning to release the game next month, in early November!

Last but not least: things are getting better at home, so I was able to work hard again, and we might even release At Your Feet 2 sooner, like in December!!

And now back to the topic of this blog post, that is the current state of the market:

Market changes

Being indie since over 20 years has taught me that the market can change over time.

So far I used to think that yuri games are the best ROI for visual novels. However in the last months, I had some very interesting results. If I add the amount I got from Kickstarter for my two latest yuri games (Christine’s Care and At Your Feet 2) I slightly beat the amount I got for Glamour Photographer alone!

However, if I look back just to 2024, games like TFTU: Lilith or House of Chavez, even if yuri only, raised both more than Glamour Photographer.

It’s always hard to draw conclusions to be honest. It could be many things:

• the market for modern setting / slice of life games is really shrinking. Indeed fantasy games, or horror games did better, regardless of the kind of romances
• BxG games are getting more popular even on Kickstarter. I already knew they’re popular on Steam but maybe now even on KS?
• it’s just the market in general that’s doing badly. Indeed, while I’m happy for Glamour Photographer result, such a big game with so many love interest (nine!) maybe could have done much better if done 2-3 years ago?

As you see it’s really hard because there are so many factors to take into account that’s really impossible to pinpoint the exact reason.

So what I’m going to do next?

First of all, the bigger games (like the RPGs) I will always have all the romance combos, so those are “safe”. I mean, they are a pain to create since are very big, however they always have all kind of romances, so that should make everyone happy: I’m aware that some games (like ToA: Reign Of War) don’t have an even amount of male/female love interests, but that’s because they were originally started… 10 years ago, while for all future games will try to have an even amount of love interests!

For the smaller games, I’ll keep doing more yuri games but also more BxG games at this point, also I want to do some more experiments with some more gameplay-focused games. For example, I still have the artwork for Spirited Heart 2 that one day I might want to finish.

Also, while I need to look at the market, sometimes I might want to make games only because I want to do that specific kind of game, sometimes finding artists that can draw males well is hard (and that’s why I haven’t done many games with male protagonists or love interests!), other times an artist who was supposed to draw female protagonist/CG first and then the male version disappears suddenly, leaving you only with the female art, etc etc

So: there can be a gazillion of reasons why that “game A has only male / female protagonist and/or love interests” and many times isn’t even what I really wanted to make but I’m forced to do that because of external factors. Players ignore this but it’s a very common issue across all VN developers.

Conclusions

I already posted this on Patreon a while ago, and people misunderstood: I am not saying that from now on I’ll ONLY make straight BxG games!!!

I’m going to try adding a variety of other genre combos, more BxG, even more otomes, etc. As I said, mainly depends on which artists will be available and what they are capable or want to do (some artists don’t do gay stuff for example, etc).

I think the best combo for the shorter games would be that I’ll try to have GxG and BxG games so I could make my “core” fans (yuri) happy but also reach new people who are into straight stuff. And this only because I’ve recently found an artist (the comic CG one) who can draw well also male anatomy and has no problem with adult stuff.

I’m a bit shocked that some people thought I was IMMEDIATELY STOPPING ANY YURI GAME DEVELOPMENT. Where did I write that??? lol!!!

Stay tuned for Glamour Photographer testing later this month!