Visual novel development is a joy – you get to create your own stories and bring them to life in a medium that relishes in the marriage of stories with visuals. For some people, making visual novels and releasing them for free as a hobby is enough. For others, they make visual novels as a side job or a fulltime job.
While both groups are making visual novels, there are some very important differences between making commercial visual novels and making free visual novels as a hobby. If you know how to make visual novels and want to take this hobby as a side gig, then this is for you.
I’m a hobby dev turned commercial dev, so today we’re looking at things to consider if you want to move from free visual novel development to commercial development!
money
Let’s get the scariest part out of the way – money. It costs a lot to make a commercial game if you pay yourself for your time spent on it (which you should at least try to do).
everything costs money
There’s a lot of extra fees associated with game development when you decide to make commercial games. Here’s some examples…
- Equipment & software to actually make games
- Rights to use assets commercially
- Steam & other platform fees
- Dev kits for consoles
- Festivals and event fees
- And more….
Let’s assume you already have a great working computer, maybe an extra monitor and anything else you need (drawing tablet, audio software, video editor, etc.). There’s still quite a few other costly things on the list, the most notable being the right to use assets commercially.
right to use assets commercially
It’s not enough to just commission artists or to buy asset packs. Once you’re making commercial visual novels, you have to double check that you can use the assets in a commercial game.
If you’re commissioning an artist, that typically means a 3x rate for the commission. While you might’ve paid $100 for the artwork for personal commissions, you might be paying anywhere from $300-500 for that same artwork now that it’s for a commercial project. It’s not uncommon to see this multiplier go up to 5x, where the artist charges 5 times the amount for a commission if it’s for commercial use.
This is because you will be making money off of their artwork, so they are entitled to a higher pay (obviously, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll make money off of their art, but that’s the thought process).
Similarly, some stock asset sites have different tiers for cost associated depending on the use case. While a font might be free for personal use & free projects, it might cost $20 to license for commercial use. You’ll also want to be sure you’re getting assets from websites that have the right to sell these assets – look up the original creator of the asset to see if this is a place they uploaded the work to.
Get into the habit (if you weren’t already) of checking out the licenses to the assets you use!
Steam & other platform fees
Some platforms, like Steam and Google Play, charge you upfront as a developer to publish games to their platforms. These are fees you can’t avoid as an indie developer.
Steam – $100 per game
Google Play – $25 account setup fee
Apple – $100 yearly fee
Some of these platforms also have added hidden “costs”, such as the amount of time it takes you to accomplish all of their checklists and do all of their requirements. Mobile app stores require frequent updates to games, almost every few months. Can you “pay” for all of that additional time spent?
dev kits for consoles
If you want to port your visual novels to consoles and not go through a publisher, you’re going to have to get into the developer programs for each console maker (which can be very hard) and also pay for the dev kits to publish a game to their consoles. Some dev kits range anywhere from $500-2,000.
Trying to get into these exclusive developer programs and porting your visual novels to consoles is a lot of work – can you justify that amount of time spent on it if you pay yourself?
festivals and event fees
Steam festivals and gaming events are here to stay and are sometimes the best ways to get exposure for your visual novels. Steam festivals are events ran on Steam itself, highlighting a variety of games with some core theme (local co-op, visual novels, horror, etc.). General gaming events are a variety of things, such as in-person events like Tokyo Games Show and online only trailer showcases like Wholesome Games.
While there’s plenty of great, free gaming events & festivals to enter (like the annual Storyteller’s Festival), there are some events with fees attached. Some have a fee if your game is accepted or even a fee to enter your game. Depending on how the event is ran and how well your game matches their audience, you may or may not get a return on your investment.
budget & taxes
Now that you’re a commercial dev, you’ve got to make a budget and stick to it. How much are you going to spend to make this game? Even if you make it all by yourself and don’t have to buy any assets, how much will you pay yourself hourly? And once your decide on that – are you accounting for taxes? Do you know how to file for yourself and as a company?
When I was in college right before covid, they were already amending the old saying of “it takes 2 years before a business is profitable” to “it takes 3-5 years before a business is profitable”. With the lengthy time of development that games can take, I imagine most people will be looking at the 5 year aspect. How do you keep yourself afloat for that?
Some people do it by keeping commercial development as a part-time job, where they use their full-time job to fund development. Some reach out to investors to offer royalties in exchange for funding. Some apply for grants where they can secure funding without having to pay it back. Some host crowdfunding campaigns where they raise the money in a public fashion by offering rewards to backers.
There’s plenty of ways to go about funding and budgeting, but you need to keep 2 things in mind:
- You have to keep yourself afloat while developing the game.
- Your first game may not make back it’s budget, much less fund your next game.
audiences
Once you decide to charge money for a game, you’re no longer making it just for yourself – you’re making it for others as well. Whether you want to take the cynical approach that this makes it lesser than a game and becomes a “product” or if you want to take the optimistic approach that this makes it a collaboration between you and the player, the end result is the same – audiences have expectations when they pay for something.
When you buy a ticket to a movie (or rent one, nowadays), you expect that the movie will fulfill some kind of expectation you mentally created based on the title, the poster, the trailer, the genres, etc. The same can be said of games (including free ones, to a lesser extent). Maintaining audience expectations and learning from them is an important part to being a commercial developer.
audience expectations – researched
While you’re still early in development, you should do market research. This can be as simple as browsing through tags on Steam and itch.io for similar games and get as granular as noting down features, key artworks, and more. Market research can inform you on what other similar games exist and what people like (and don’t like) about them.
Here’s some quick examples of market research you can do:
- Browse Steam & itchio tags that you’re considering using
- Browse the top categories & newly released categories for visual novels on Steam & itchio
- Find 3 games similar to yours in terms of length, polish, and aesthetics – see what people are saying about it in reviews and social media
- Gather a collection of screenshots of visual novels
- Gather a collection of key arts & thumbnails for visual novels in your category – do they have any similar branding methods?
Looking at reviews of similar games can be especially enlightening. What parts did players like? What parts did they not like? Were they satisfied with the length of the story, or did they feel it needed work? Were there any features they enjoyed that made the experience even better? Was the price point for the game a “reasonable” cost, or did they feel it was overpriced? (side note: if the game feels overpriced to players, oftentimes that’s a symptom of other issues such as them feeling it’s not long enough, not polished enough, etc.)
audience expectations – response
Art is a collaboration between the creator and the viewer, putting yourself out into the world and being interpreted by strangers. Game development gives artists the opportunity to tweak our art, to refine it and make it better by getting feedback from others via playtesting.
Demos can be a great way to not only see which parts are lacking but it can also help you see how players interpret the story. A good demo should show players a good example of what the full game will be like and leave players wanting more.
Getting player feedback from the demo or during playtesting sessions (such as open betatesting events) via surveys or interviews can be a great way at pinpointing any issues that might exist. When we’re developing a game, we tend to get tunnel vision—we’ve spent so much time with the characters, the world, that we aren’t able to see it from the eyes of someone who’s never experienced it and we become blind to issues. A character’s backstory and motivation may make sense to you, the creator, but you may have forgotten to explain parts of it to the players. You’ve solved this puzzle a hundred times while playtesting it for bugs, but to a new player it may seem obtuse to solve…
audience expectations – realized
Some people will like your game. Some people won’t like your game. Hopefully, more people will like your game than dislike it, but once enough people play it there will always be someone—several someones—who don’t like it and will tell you that and will tell their friends that. That’s normal.
It’s hard to look at our games objectively. They’re our babies that we spend months, years raising before releasing them out into the world. But when you release a commercial game, people expect certain things. They expect it to work. They expect to be able to save their game. They expect it to match the screenshots and marketing copy they’ve seen.
When you buy a meal at a restaurant, you expect it to match what’s on the menu. You expect it to match the ingredients listed, to be cooked the way it said it would be, and for it to be edible. Think of commercial games like that—you’re making a promise to someone in exchange for their hard-earned money. If you don’t want to make that promise to them, then stick to donations only on itchio or kofi.
Sadly, though, sometimes people will be rude no matter what. Look up any visual novel on Steam with more than 50 reviews and you’ll see at least 1 negative review that says “it’s just reading”. There’s not much you can do about things like this.
However, sometimes you’ll get critiques that are harsh but ultimately trying to help. Sometimes the person is rude, but sometimes they’re just thorough. Accepting and understanding critiques is an important part of commercial game dev. Here’s how you can go through critiques:
- Take a deep breath. Good critiques are not critiques of you but rather of pieces of the game you can improve. This isn’t an attack on you.
- What are they really saying? Are they saying “the CGs need more shading”, or are they more vague like “the CGs feel off”? If you can, ask them to be specific with their feelings.
- What parts are actionable and what parts are impossible? A comment like “the music stops and starts randomly” can be fixed with some programming or music edits, but a comment like “the art style is bad” is something you can’t fix easily.
- Are they your audience and how relevant is their advice? Getting feedback is great, but it’s not all going to be relevant. Someone who doesn’t like the fact you have romance in an otome game is probably not your audience and that feedback isn’t relevant.
marketing
And now I get on my soap box.
If you want to sell visual novels, then you have to market your visual novels. “Marketing” is not a dirty word—maybe “advertising” is, depending on your view—as it simply means communicating with others. As defined by the American Marketing Association,
Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
American Marketing Association
What does this mean? Simply put, it means if you want to sell a visual novel, you have to first tell people it exists. That’s what it boils down to, really. People can’t—and won’t—buy a game they don’t know exists.
social media =/= marketing
Social media is one aspect of marketing but it is certainly not the entire picture. Don’t jump to creating social media accounts on every site just to call yourself doing something “productive”.
Sit down and create a plan, first off. How are you going to tackle social media? How do you want to tackle it?
A big part of marketing is the research part—it’s figuring out how to communicate your game to others. See what other visual novels are doing! You can learn a lot from your fellow devs.
you’re already marketing
Yeah, hate to break it to you, but you’re kinda already marketing if you’ve decided on the story and art style, even if it’s yet to be announced…
so what do I actually do then?
First, read my guide on how to market visual novels. After that, check out my marketing visual novels FAQ. I’ve also written a guide on fundamentals to marketing indie games and several similar articles on my blog. I’ve written extensively about it.
…After that, though, you should answer these questions.
- What are you making? Really, what is the core of the game?
- How much of the game—artwork, screenshots, concepts, etc.—do you have to show off? How much do you want to show off?
- What is the best way to describe your game? How can you easily tell a stranger what it’s about?
- If you were scrolling through your social media of choice, what kind of post would make you want to share it?
- What kind of timeline are you looking at for the demo? For the full game?
- Do you have any outside funding or need outside funding (such as investors, grants, crowdfunding)?
You’ll need to keep an eye out for Steam festivals to enter. You should befriend fellow developers to learn from (and just make some friends). You’ll need to get good at trying out what sticks and figuring out why it didn’t work—and why other things do work. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to start playing other indie visual novels.
And most of all, you’ll have to realize that this is hard. All of this. There’s an old saying that there’s no money in visual novels. It’s not entirely true—there’s definitely some people out there making money from selling and making VNs—but it is partially true. There’s not much money to be made in VNs, so if you’re going to do this, you need to really love them and understand that you have to stick around for the long haul.
Wow, two months have already gone by in the year! I’ve been busy with release after release this month as well as an impromptu brand new jam—Trans Joy Jam, which just concluded. I’m also busy getting ready for the annual Visual Novel Festival on Steam (as The Storyteller’s Festival just concluded) and my own Otome Games Celebration, the first otome-oriented Steam fest that I’m hosting. This will be the largest scale event I’ve ever ran, but I’m excited!
If you have games on Steam (which you should be doing, if you read this article) then Steam festivals are a must-do. They’re relatively easy ways to earn a lot of wishlists and visibility for your games. You can find a lot of festivals here.
Speaking of game jams, the annual Otome Jam and Josei Jam are coming up in May. I recently created a landing page for both for easier access of previous years, a brief overview of the events, etc.
— Arimia