There might have been some demand for slow paced games in general, but if history has gone a bit differently, with real time games ivented first, then turn based mechanics wouldn't have made intuitive sense, destined to be invented. Other non-action-based forms would have been invented instead and filled the demand.maninahat said:You raise a good point, but individual genres and mediums usually have a reason to stick at a threshold of "efficiency". Turn based games still endure in spite of the existence of real time strategies because some (myself included) like having the luxury of taking the time to decide on your move, without there being a pressure to act fast.
The very fact that a VN fandom exists, proves that the same is happening here.
There might not have been a deep inherent demand for the sprite+bacground+text format, but there was some general deamnd for stories with the narrative detail of novels (that comics can't provide, when a chapter with barely any sentences in it takes a month to produce), but with some visuals and music.
That this particular format got stuck, is just legacy, but not a more unnatural one than the support for turn based systems in particular instead of just slow paces in general.
The law of supply and demand suggests that publishers in general are not pocketing excessive amounts of profits. If they would be, there would be a gold rush from more creators trying to make a profit.maninahat said:It is very easy for me to sit here and say that VNs would be better if only they spent more money on them, but that said, I don't believe that every VN developer is working on a shoestring budget. They are a massive market in Japan, and established, successful studios probably could afford to be a bit more extravagant, or at least experiment more.
A medium that is cheap to produce and highly demanded, leads to a wide scene with many artists. The book publishing industry has about as much revenues as movie publsihing: That manifests itself in the form of there being more books than movies, not by writers being that much richer.
As far as fans are concerned, a low production costs medium means more niches filled with a bigger diversity of artists. A Hollywood movie has to appeal to pretty much everyone on the northern hemisphere. An anime series only has to have tens of thousands of viewers, so it can be about some obscure hobby, pet issue, fetish, art experiment, or sense of humor that very few people share.
Likewise, even if the biggest VN publishers could afford to escalate with CGs, they would just separate themselves from the mainstream, and form a hard-to-enter "AAA VN" industry, where every new work despearely needs to sell hundreds of thousands of units, and there is no chance of some guy with an idea just entering the industry with his work.