The problems that plague the eroge industry
It has become a popular topic recently to talk about the declining eroge industry and its impending doom apparently. This post is mostly translating what people have been saying, and this is also an extremely long post that you don’t want to read!
Zukeran no tera yaritai houdai writes that a large number of brands in the eroge industry have been restructuring their staff, and usually the writer is the first to get outsourced, there was even a case where the writer was retrenched even when he was the main writer for a game that was novelised and published in bookstores.
On the other hand, brands have been trying their best to get their hands on good artists, the reason being so that they want to make sure they can at least sell the game just on the art alone.
Part of the reason that all of this is happening is the growing doujin industry bubble.
It has been in recent years where it has become increasingly possible for somebody to live off just from selling doujin products alone as it seems to have become normal for megahit brands to be born in comiket. And in doujin, you get to avoid most of the troublesome stuff that comes with being a commercial entity.
As eroge becomes a less attractive industry to be going into, the number of new people in the talent pool available will also diminish, while veterans in the industry will move to the more established brands that continue to thrive. As a result, the smaller eroge brands will start to have trouble getting ahold of staff.
Noumu -gNorm- supports what Zukeran wrote by commenting that he has heard from people in the PC game sales industry that eroge brands have been unable to get proper staff recently which has made it hard to maintain a level of quality in their games.
While Zukeran wrote mostly about artists running into doujin, Noumu writes about the lack of writers in the eroge industry, as a lot of the good writers that once had the writing skills to be able to lead the entire eroge industry forward have moved on from eroge and started writing novels instead.
As a result, eroge brands are forced to look for freelance writers to write their stories which results in games that are sometimes good and sometimes bad.
Now, while everybody understands that the true hit sellers in the eroge industry involve great storywriting, but with the difficulty in getting good writers, brands try to get good artists instead so they can at the very least be able to sell the game just based on the good art. And for that, they put storywriting as a second priority, and in some cases even retrenching the writer and get freelance writers instead.
And while all that is happening, good writers that have gotten famous in the eroge industry leave the industry to write independently.
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Personally from the user side of things, I think many have probably already felt the lack of energy in the eroge industry over the past two years or so.
I don’t know how the current situation can be solved, but maybe if there are new charismatic games once again in the industry that inspire more talents to come back…
