*EVNs refers to English Visual Novels or VNs made in the west by western developers.

One of the biggest underlying problems facing Western-made VNs and is especially true about critics of these games is that in the west we've never really dealt with $50, $60 even $120 price points being the norm for high budget titles. We've never spent what amounts to PS4 game money on a visual novel. So the community lacks the perspective on what is fair or unfair.

From a developer perspective it's an admission, these devs are going "Hey, we spent the last several months of sweat and tears on this, but I know it's not a $60 game. It's $3 (or 5, 10, 15) but you'll still get a good enjoyment out of it".

This is all the critic of VNs knows or understands (even fans who also play japanese VNs and mostly pirate them also have this problem, they've very rarely reached into their pocket to pay for that themselves). So their perspective is skewed from the get go.

The thing is that they don't grasp is how slashed those price points actually are, because they've also lacked the experience in making VNs and do not know the challenges of it, from a logistics, technical or even emotional level. So they see they dev with their $10 VN, who already can barely feed themselves living game to game being told, "It should be cheaper!"

The critic in VNs today wants everything a high budget game has, without the price point. and if your game doesn't have that your fucked right? You have some sketchy assets, you have bugs, some things need patches? Well than they'll receive a 2/10 (in the case of NOBY on Fuwanovel), let's not forget that Bethesda still charges full price for their games (they're also a full blown studio and not an indie team) they still get away with it and are defended for that, a VN studio is held to a higher standard than Bethesda for god's sakes!. This, is for largely no other reason in that the score is based largely around Japanese studio's games which have been around for decades now. EVNs are just starting in the west, it's still a completely young medium. Yet the critics in the EVN community or who cover EVNs are likely to attempt a direct comparison to Japanese games that are produced with 100x your budget?

Let me illustrate the reality for you if you will, you're a dev who makes some silly voxel shooter that's actually quite fun, and you put it up on Steam for $5, now imagine if Siliconera, Destructoid etc, covered your Greenlight/Release but instead of the topic being "This looks fun and promising", and not carrying the mindset that AAA and Indie are incomparable, rates your game 2/10 and calls it trash, the years you spent making this game are down the drain, and you get piddling sales due to the poor response. This would never happen on these sites, and if it did the community would be outraged. They would cite (quite rightly) that you cannot compare a indie dev to a AAA dev, it's ridiculous to assume you can!

EVNs are just not here yet, people want Clannads or Muv Luvs like RIGHT NOW and they're super pissed that your game isn't like that. It's the impossible task, critics and fans expect devs to deliver AAA quality at indie prices, again and again, and they won't take "this is a cheap fun game" for an answer.

At some point it has to give, and critics are not doing their part to elevate the medium, either inside or outside the community. This doesn't mean policing the medium for content (Which is all too common in the EVN community already) but rather, pushing for higher budgets, higher support for devs, and bigger games. Being critical but having a perspective that understands that from the get go a $10 VN is already ridiculously cheap.

Let me illustrate the point clearer. Say a team spent a year making a game, working maybe 4 hours a night, 5 nights a week for one year. In my state the minimum wage is 9.25/hour. Assuming that is generally the norm across the board for your team, and you have 4 team members (1 writer, 1 artist, 1 musician, 1 programmer), it's costing you 35k in raw man hours to make this game, that you expect to maybe, maybe get 1000 sales on (And that's if you're lucky, most devs are sub 1k in sales). Minus taxes and steam fees, you're maybe getting a 4th of your money back, minus any costs you have to pay back for contractual work like trailers, songs from other musicians, you might be lucky if each person on the team gets back 1/5th of the money they spent producing the game in the first place!

Critics feel that that's too much. That's a poisonous sentiment that hurts every creator who believes in this medium, who's trying to make some sort of living in it. The cost/return ratio in EVNs is atrocious right now, yet you can look everywhere in terms of EVN reviews and see the comparisons drawn, they are compared directly to studios that have 20+ employees games with full voice acting, animated openings, animated sprites. (Do you know how many times you as a EVN developer wish you could illustrate how much voice acting actually costs for QUALITY voice actors to critics, and maybe throttle them a little bit?).

Right now we're in a race to the bottom, people are trying to rationalize charging less and less for their titles because the popular statement has been "Cheaper, no cheaper! CHEAPER!", those critics then crone and whinge and throw tantrums when developers manage to escape this and become insanely successful such as Winged Cloud making scoff 'fanservice games' scoff, while doing very little to actually grow the community themselves with their own toxic behavior.

Because if the EVN community can't change it's mindset and embrace creators creating, it's better that it dies quickly and something else takes it's place, than to ruin the careers of promising developers that are shackled to it's carcass.

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