future dating sims might be female romances only

Games with gameplay beside the story: raising your skills, map systems, life simulations, etc
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jack1974
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Re: future dating sims might be female romances only

Post by jack1974 »

Troyen wrote: Sat Jun 02, 2018 8:50 pm Out of curiosity, how well did C-14 (otome) and Heirs and Graces sell in comparison to your games that are primarily female romances?
Otomes like C14 (even if had a single bonus yuri) still do OK, Heirs despite being my game with highest review rating on Steam, is the one who did worse of all games published that year :oops:
Many things have been said (could be the art etc) but even PSCD had that art and still did better. While I don't know what I'll decide to do in the end, for sure I'll never make a yaoi only game in future, that's certain (would be a commercial suicide).
But as I said I was a bit grumpy on my own. One negative review means nothing, Love Bites overall is doing well and I was just taking it the wrong way :)
Also there could be a lot of things to say about romance number vs actual length. For example that reviewer compares this game to Heileen 3. Heileen 3 had 4 male and 4 female (so twice) but just a female main character, so that's why I could do this. Miakoda even wrote separate routes for each gender (instead for example of reusing texts like I did with Cursed Lands).
Overall I think Love Bites texts each route is longer than Heileen 3 routes. But people see 4 love interests vs 2 and think it's probably worse, while it's not necessarily true. It's a tough world :mrgreen:
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Callista
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Re: future dating sims might be female romances only

Post by Callista »

Heh, it's been a while since I logged in (although I do read up on posts here frequently) but I want to give my two cents here as well.

I kind of find it a bit sad if there are some who say that a game is bad because the ratio of male to female romances in unbalanced. Also, just personally speaking, I'm not a yuri fan BUT I have made exceptions in the past. It isn't so important whether the VN is otome, yuri, etc. For me, if the story is very well-written, that in itself will override anything else. I haven't had a chance to play Love Bites yet although I do have the game. Knowing that Miakoda wrote it, I anticipate that it'll be very good and I'll be quite happy with it. ^^ (I've got quite some games in my Steam library nowadays so it might take me a while before I get around to playing it although that's definitely the plan. XD)

I do understand going where the market is currently trending but trends do always change. On Steam nowadays, it looks like either yuri only or very cheaply made VNs. I suppose that's why I've been pickier in what VNs on Steam I want to play but yeah. So in short, I really don't mind VNs with both genders like in Love Bites although, to please certain fans, it might not be a bad idea to make the romances more balanced.
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DarkWolf
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Re: future dating sims might be female romances only

Post by DarkWolf »

I don't think there is a perfect choice here. If you go full yuri you will gain more support from people like me who are huge yuri fans but lose yaoi fans, if you go full yaoi the same will happen just in opposite direction. If you continue having both you will keep both sides but won't have their support to extent if you ware to go just one way.

I myself am ok with having only 2 yuri romances as long as they are good, I mean my favorite of your games is SOTW since while it has only one yuri romance that one yuri romance is really great. That said I would lie if I said I wouldn't prefer more yuri romances, I mean while quality comes before quantity, 4 good yuri romances are better then 2 good yuri romances (If you are yuri fan) and fully lesbian romances are better then bisex romances (Cause that way romance can be more gay rather then neutral like in cases where you have bisex characters and their lines are adjusted to fit ether gender).

It is a line in witch the closer you come to one side the more you satisfy that side while the more you lose the other side.
No matter what you decide you gain some and lose some, there is just no way to keep them all satisfied.
That said from business perspective and fact that yuri is the most popular genre when it comes to VNs and VNs hybrids there is more to gain on one side then the other one.

Also you do have some fully yuri VNs coming out so they might be a good way to help you make decision.
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jack1974
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Re: future dating sims might be female romances only

Post by jack1974 »

Some good points, personally I feel the same: it's not about quantity but quality. Of course when you decide if to buy a game or not, seeing one with more romances it's more attractive and could lead to impulse buy, but since all my games have demos people can try and see if they like the writing/romances before buying.
Anyway, I have still a lot of games with all content to finish (PS2, Loren 2, Undead Lily, etc) so there'll be time to decide haha
I also have VBH which is yuri only and as Patreon supporters know, I also have a unannounced fantasy game (but I don't know when will be out) that has male/female protagonist and only female romances.
For sure I won't need to rush any decisions :)
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Re: future dating sims might be female romances only

Post by cergyn »

You are one of a few devs who offers a male/male options. It's sad to read this.
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jack1974
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Re: future dating sims might be female romances only

Post by jack1974 »

Even in the case I do this, I have still at least 6 games which include male/male to finish. So we're talking about 4-5 years in future at least. Who knows what might happen/change :)
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Re: future dating sims might be female romances only

Post by sofalisa »

First time posting here (I prefer to be just a lurker, but thought it was important to give my opinion on this).

I think I mostly agree with Callista here, as long as the story is nice, I'm gonna wanna play all routes. I don't understand why people are unable to play a route because it's not their romance preference, even if the story behind it is interesting. Maybe it's because I'm bisexual XD, but still, even when the character doesn't look attractive to me, I can still enjoy the story for itself.

I also find it kinda selfish to give bad reviews for reasons like this. It's good to have a variety of gender and sexuality on the games, it's an effort I appreciate a lot, and well, it happens there might be some more than others sometimes, and if the routes available were warned at the game description (which I'm pretty sure you always warn), shouldn't be reason to complain, really.

But well, if that's really giving you too little profit, I can't judge you for taking whatever decision is better.
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Ryocchi
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Re: future dating sims might be female romances only

Post by Ryocchi »

The things is the perspective you took for Heirs, is yaoi games weren't profitable, or Good we would never had such an awesome game like Coming Out on Top.
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jack1974
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Re: future dating sims might be female romances only

Post by jack1974 »

There are exceptions in all fields of course. But I'm not so cocky to think I can make the game that is the 1% of the topsellers of that genre :wink:
But in general, yaoi games on Steam aren't profitable as yuri ones. This is a fact. Then of course if you have a top selling game or a big company like Dream Daddy (lol 3,6M twitter followers!! if only 1% of their fan bought it, they're already rich) you can have a game profitable of any kind.

Coming out on top from what I know took years to make, and many times people mistake ROI with "profitable". Two random examples:
I can make a game in 3 years and earn $50k.
I can make another game in 3 months and earn $10k.
First game is more profitable than second. But the ROI? the second has a much better ROI than the first :)

I never made games thinking about if is profitable or not (otherwise I wouldn't be spending months doing the RPGs, but I would make just quick yuri porn games like 90% of other VN devs :lol:) but as I said when I originally posted this thread I was a bit pissed off because it seemed that all my efforts to include more variety produced only disappointed fans, so you can imagine how I felt.

Anyway as I said, there's still a lot of time and many games in progress which will include yaoi content :)
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Re: future dating sims might be female romances only

Post by fleetp »

For those who don't know, ROI means "Return on Investment"
Wikipedia defines it as
"... the ratio between the net profit and cost of investment resulting from an investment of some resource. A high ROI means the investment's gains compare favorably to its cost. As a performance measure, ROI is used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiencies of several different investments. In purely economic terms, it is one way of relating profits to capital invested."
Why? I like big ones, that's why.
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