Why is 80hrs suprising? its a novel, wouldnt you be willing to spend 80hrs reading a book if you liked it? Even people calling VNs games, good games can be played well over 80hrs witcher 3, skyrim even CK2 can rack up hundreds of hrs easily.
Viewing post in The Results for the Furry VN Audience Survey are Here! comments
I suppose I find it surprising from my perspective as
A) someone who can't afford to spend time on a lot of media that takes 80 hours to finish, and prefer my entertainment short and sweet
and B) a content producer, from this end making 80 hours of content is a herculean task- compounded with the submitted comments at the end of the survey, it's evidence of unrealistic expectations from a lot of the respondents.
I mean, both monetarily (regardless of the seemingly bottomless well of disposable income that is the furry fandom) and in time investment, these fuckers take a lot of effort to make. Yeah, you can play Skyrim for hundreds of hours- but we can't all be Todd Howard.
There's also burnout, both creative (where the fuck can I take this story after 40 hours?) and physical (I've seen people in this niche fuck up their sleep schedules to meet Patreon deadlines) that I don't think most VN players are aware of.
And sometimes, you just want to see a writer/creator you admire take a stab at different ideas, and some premises are somewhat restrictive. You want to see them complete their projects and try new things.
I hope I'm not coming off as whiny, I love making this shit and so do the other wonderful VN creators I've met, I'm just wondering how many people replied "yup, I'd like to see this go on for 80+ hours" without considering that, you know, someone has to make all that stuff!
Yes but the survey question was 'Assuming an enjoyable VN, what is the maximum length it can be before it becomes excessive for you?' not how long do you expect VNs to be, so its entirely up to the creators how long they want to make their project this just show how long the audience is willing to spend enjoying it. If you like somthing it's more than likely you would be willing to spend over 80hrs with it.
Howdy! Thanks for the comment. Before I give you a proper response I'd like to add a detail: we kind of fucked up a bit with that question because we asked what was the maximum time people would be willing to play instead of the ideal time. So we, and by we I mean the devs, have to take that with a grain of salt.
Keeping that in mind, what I would point out is that furry visual novels as a niche have a few pervasive issues going on. One of them is bloated scope — almost everyone is trying to make big, sprawling games with multiple routes and hundreds of thousands of words in length. Minotaur Hotel is a bit contained in this regard because we only have one romanceable character but we did go crazy in other places so we are also knee-deep in this problem. And along with bloated scope comes bloated length.
This is largely the reason why so few furry visual novels ever get finished, you know? Echo and Extracurricular Activities are the longest-running projects in this niche and it's taken them years to get close to finishing.
This is the issue as it comes from the side of the developers. Now when we look at the players we see another side of it. Lots of players are quite willing to go for these very long projects. And it's no surprise, really — I've heard a number of very good points here and elsewhere on why being willing to go over more than 80 hours is a more natural thing than most might imagine. If you play some of the more successful and acclaimed Japanese VNs you'll have to invest more than 80 hours, for example.
Regardless of these very solid points, ultimately what I want to point out is that this whole thing does relate with how FVN devs struggle with finishing their games. The expectations on the table is that these games should be on the long side, and (through no fault of the players!) this in turn pushes us towards bloat in a number of ways.
I think we the developers benefit from being aware of this. We do have to keep in mind some VNs do hinge on being very long — I have talked with Basket, developer of Tennis Ace, and from the get-go he wanted to write a slow burn-style VN in the mould of the Japanese ones, with a very organic build-up of the characters' relationships. And if I look back at the issue I pointed out — bloated scope and devs giving up on their projects — I have to say Tennis Ace doesn't bring me any fear that Basket will give up. Quite the contrary, he's extremely dedicated to it. So yes, there is a lot of nuance at play here.
Thank you for your comment and for bringing up this interesting reflection.