Industry Practice: Market Research in-depth

 Industry Practice: Market Research

This week we went through different categories of visual novel games, looking for trends in art styles, narrative subjects etc. Even though I made the market research slide for the pitch presentation for a few weeks ago, It is good for me to look more in depth for trends in the market to make our game more successful in the niche that we are going for. 
To cover the most subjects, we completed both qualitative and quantitative research relating to the market.

Most Popular


In terms of the top games in the Popular tab for visual novels on Itch.io , these are the games that show up. We can immediately see the use of more saturated colours in all but the top game in this category to make the games stand out. We can see that there are themes of romance and horror in some of these games, and that the primary art style seems to stem from anime/manga. The main standout in this category is the top game, you're just imagining it (npckc 2024), which uses a more cutesy simplified art style with a very restrained colour palette. What we can take away from this is that the art style and colour palette doesn't really matter, as long as we commit to a consistent art style that stands out.

In terms of the 4 most popular games on Steam, we can see that the trend is mostly the same. The art styles all stem from anime/manga, and every game has a bold, unique art style to differentiate from each other. Since these are visual novels, it is very reasonable that these games would be dependant on their visuals more than anything else to draw attention to themselves.

Another thing interesting to note here is that Limbus Company (Project Moon 2023) only includes elements of visual novels with its approach to character dialogue, and that the real gameplay is found within the combat and other avenues. I also feel like the tone of the narrative is dark and very intricate having played it, which definitely contributes to it overall. 

Another thing to note is all 12 games in the most popular tab on Steam have another category or label attached to them that adds another gameplay mechanic, such as choices matter, Action RPG etc. This is good since we plan to add choices that determine the ending in our game.

Most Popular: Benchmark

For a benchmark game and a game that we have already decided on using as a huge inspiration for the art style, I decided to look at Monster Prom (Beautiful Glitch 2018). This fits in very well with the trends I had already noted, with bright, saturated colours, a very cartoony and unrealistic use of anatomy, and some ties back to an anime style.
The game is very popular, with 11.605 reviews overall as of the time of writing this, 93% of which being positive. As noticed with other games in the popular categories, this game has a very unique art style with a use of standout colours which it commits to, which is what we aim to do as well. It also includes different monsters as the main characters, which gives us a good benchmark for how unique we want to make our characters. In terms of something that uses a similar style with the mental health category, this seems to not exist yet, which gives us a niche to fill.

References:

Beautiful Glitch, 2018. Monster Prom [Video Game]. PC. Barcelona, Spain. Steam. Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/743450/Monster_Prom/ [Accessed 22 November 2024].

ProjectMoon, 2023. Limbus Company [Video Game]. PC. Suwon, South Korea. Steam. Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1973530/Limbus_Company/ [Accessed 22 November 2024].

npckc. 2024. You're just imagining it [Video Game]. PC. Itch.io. Available at: https://npckc.itch.io/youre-just-imagining-it [Accessed 22 November 2024].



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