I don’t know, the dev of the same "Shadows" writes that it takes him a lot of time to code and text. Therefore, his game is purely kinetic, he said that if add the choice and different paths will increase development time significantly.
I’m not a programmer, i don’t know how much time this actually takes.
In regards to paths; It's not just the code and script, but also a ton more images to generate, more story to develop. The more routes with various characters, the more complicated it gets. You'll have to plan ahead like...alot, otherwise you might eventually run into situations where previous scenes won't make sense based on dialogue or interactions between characters unless every individual route never crosses another, but at that point it's like creating a game inside the game and basically doubles or triples your workload if you wanna provide content for every route in every update, making a single update take way longer to develop (nobody wants that). And if you don't do that, you'll have to constantly go back in the story and create content for routes that have been left behind for months or however long, which all things considered would be a net-negative for everyone.
Way too many developers go down this path and we all know how it ends in most cases. 1-2 updates a year with luck or straight up abandoned. The way CG is doing it is, in my opinion, the way to go. Tons of people really enjoy his vision and the story, and those who don't, well, shit out of luck I guess. There are plenty other games to play.
I mean, there are rather simple choices like "Fuck character X in doggystyle / missionary / the good old Tokyo Sandblaster" as those kind of choices don't really have to affect future scenes, not much extra writing, only a handful of extra images, but creating entirely different choice-based routes for several characters is a pretty big task unless you have a dev-team behind you or the money to commission/outsource entire scenes. And even then, the time required to think of new content for each route alone is a mission in itself and a pretty darn exhausting creative task. This might work better if the entire game is planned out before the first image is generated as then you'd just follow the already existing script. Or, as you mentioned before, after the base game is finished (DLC). But it's questionable if the dev would be able to keep his fanbase around for god knows how long until he can start a new project due to the work on an already finished game.
Anyway.. Wall of text achieved!
