I was going to write something else entirely, but then this popped up while I was writing and caused me to just scrap it.
So I'm just going to copy/paste a post I made with a very similar theme already over
HERE. TL;DR - If you have a passion to tell a story, then tell that story. You can't poll an audience your way to success.
To double down on this, you're not going to find a story worth telling by polling the audience.
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might be able to complete a game through crowd-sourcing, but it's never going to write the next
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.
Being a trend follower is how you get executive decisions being dictated by marketing, releasing products years later that feel out of date even when brand new. It's how you get a game studio like Arkane Studios, made famous for their single-player exploration and problem solving focused immersive-sim games like
Dishonored and
PREY, to release a multiplayer open world always-online games-as-a-service looter with
Redfall; only for them to crash and burn as yet another studio tries and fails to recreate
Destiny 2 (See Also: Anthem, Marvel's Avengers, Godfall, Babylon's Fall, etc.).
If you have a story worth telling, something you desperately need to get out of your system and share with the outside world? Then just tell it as best you can. If however you're just waiting around looking for a trend to jump onto? You've already lost. Nobody is gonna be knocking down the door and throwing money at a creator to get custom commissioned artwork for characters like Alice or Shizuku. The reason why that happens to larger and more successful projects is because they've created stories, worlds, and characters that resonate with an audience. But those creators didn't make those games for those audiences, they made them for themselves. But they put in the work, and their quality allowed them to slowly rise to the top and gain a following in the process.
This goes doubly so if you're not catering to a really niche audience. If you want to make niche content (NTR, gay-furry, head-pats, etc.), then you can probably get away with low effort and low quality. A lot of these sub-groups don't have especially discerning palettes and will consume whatever slop comes their way. But lovey-dovey romance? That shit comes with a certain expectation of quality, and the stand-out success stories are the ones offering a premium experience. Which is made even harder if you're going to double-down on short form content. Writing short stories that people care enough to get invested in is very hard. Writing good characters is already challenging, and doing that in short order is even more difficult.
So if PsianDiameter really has a strong story built around step-siblings, and the characters being step-sibling is crucial to the plot? Fuck what everyone else here says, and ignore those pleading for 'real incest'. They should stick to their guns, and tell the step-sibling story they wanted to tell originally.
But if the characters being step-siblings is not actually that crucial? If swapping out their relationship to be blood-related siblings does little to change the narrative? Well, that makes me think they didn't have an especially strong narrative to begin with. That they're not making this because they have a story they need to tell, but rather they're shopping around for a potential story to sell. Which going back to my earlier point;
if you're just trend chasing, you've already lost.