Wow. That blew up quickly.
I'm seeing a lot of people making what sound like good points. But interestingly, they're
different good points.
Of course the game engine depends on the project design, not the other way around. I wouldn't try to make a JRPG in RenPy, even though it's technically possible. I probably wouldn't make a straightforward VN in RPG Maker. The menus would get in the way and basically add nothing... unless I also wanted to make map exporation and/or turn-based problem-solving intergral to the experience.
But what if the project design is just "text-based game with pictures," and I'm going to be rendering Daz content in Blender either way, and I have the option of either making it easier for this community of madlads to hack in various extra features, or else using Ink to hack together cleverly-a scripted dynamic choice system, and then display it in Unity with some nice performant shader effects?
Or what if making maps and enemy designs and fight choreographies are obviously a lot more work, but the extra attention the title gains would be significant?
What if I'm rolling my own animations anyway, so it would actually be faster and easier to do the whole thing in realtime in Unity and skip the pre-rendering step? Ah, but that requires Daz's Runtime Licenses, which is an added expense, which means it's only viable in a business sense if the engine alone brings in more players.
I don't have enough information (I.E. experience) to quantify the trade-offs, in these cases. So the hope was that a reasonable tie-breaker might be... maybe "popularity," was poor phrasing on my part, but let's call it "common sense?" "Conventional wisdom?" "Community preferences?"
And it seems like I keep seeing random dudes saying the same thing, and nobody much saying the opposite. This is what singles out the "RenPy or die" attitude from other opinions-- it just keeps coming up, over and over again, in various threads. (Not to single you out, chainedpanda, but basically your post sums it up.) :
I've been playing adult games for quite some time now. The major issue I believe that I have with Unity, RPGM or basically any engine is that they aren't Renpy. It's honestly that simple. I've played so much Renpy that to play adult games without the features of Renpy can be pretty jarring.. No rollback feature? Trash. No developer tools? Trash. Plus, despite not knowing much of anything about coding, I can nearly freely edit, and even add limited code without much problem, and do it fairly quickly. That's simply due to editing some pretty code heavy games in the past which took a lot of trial and error and looking at examples from the code itself. I can't really be bothered to learn something new or get used to said new thing.
Plus, since I have been around for a longtime, most RPGM games were pretty shit, I don't know about now, but I still associate them with being shit. Similar with Unity, just less extreme.
That said, I will play the occasional RPGM or Unity game if it catches my attention, but that rarely happens honestly.
If the community's general behavior
as consumers lined up with this oft-repeated sentiment, then I would intuitively know what "common sense" means in this situation. But it doesn't. It seems like the silent majority is either sick of VNs, or else has such a glut of VNs to choose from that they spread their attention across tons and tons of highly-specific titles looking for their niche dream-game. To put it another way: no VN will ever approach Milfy City in raw views, even though Milfy City is abandonware, simply because Milfy City was popular back when there were only a few games competing for eyeballs. This is why Last 30 Days is so much more meaningful as a metric: there's no lesson to take away from Overall Popularity but "Start In The Past." The Indiepocalypse has trickled down to bootleg porn games.
Actually, this is a distinction I think needs to be made: What about when the game is not a VN? Are VNs, in general, a dead medium? Too easy to make and too thick on the ground to attract a significant audience? (But that conflicts with what I see on Steamspy, where the median price for a VN is twice as high as the median price for a JRPG made using RPG Maker.)
Maybe I should do a deep dive into the top 20 games and see what makes them tick. Just distinguishing between VNs made in other engines and those engines playing to their strengths will probably clear things up a bit.
And this lead to the main reason why Unity and RPG Maker represent most of the games in the "most viewed threads last 30 days": They are the preferred engines on the Asian Scene.
Take a better look at the list, you'll see that most of the threads concern Asian completed games released recently. So, obviously that they are the most viewed ones for the last 30 days. People want to take a look at the thread, in order to decide it they'll give this game a try or not.
It's something that rarely happen with WIP games, where curiosity in more diluted over time, and over updates. There's people who will look at the game right from its first release, those who will wait few updates, and even some that will wait at least one year before trying the game, if it haven't been abandoned before that. Then on top of that, there's those who will not care before the game is completed.
That's a very good point, and it could go a long way towards explaining the disparity. Assuming what I learn in my deep dive supports your interpretation: would it make sense to demand a new "western releases" filter? I will never personally be an asian developer, and It's very likely that I'll continue using Daz Studio + Blender, at least until I have a reason/budget/artistic ability breakthrough to switch to 2D, and it's so hard to gain traction in the west on launch day, that any design lessons from "the asian market" will probably never be lessons I can meaningfully use.
Real talk: On some level, I know I'm seeking justifications for shitty AAA industry practices that I don't even have the scale to walk the walk of. Picking an engine based on what's popular? Madness. Nonsense. We all know it. That would be as stupid as making a game about incest or bestiality when you're not into incest or bestiality, just because the numbers look better. Maybe the only real solution is to make a small, self-contained demo in each engine, (With a narrative throughline and at least one sex scene, of course! I'm not a monster!) then see what kind of response each gets.
Worst case scenario, It'd give me a ton of personal experience with each engine, which might shape my ideas much better than any community conversation ever could, even in a community as thoughtful, experienced and cool as you guys.
