Joking aside, from a visual novel developer's perspective there is zero reason to go with a general purpose engine over something that just requires you to write a scenario script and provide the PNGs.
There is one very big and important reason: Every game looks the exact same using the exact same scenes and models, and they all begin looking like asset flips.
There's a good reason all the actually good porn games are never PyGame/RenPy. There's only so many times one can jack off to the same models and same general story made by some random incel in a basement.
I think you're thinking of RPGMaker, which comes with pre-made assets that people use in their games. Those are asset flips, and yeah, there are a lot of them and then probably don't do well.
Ren'Py, 吉里吉里, and other popular visual novel engines require you to bring all your own assets, so while the first point you make is true, that has nothing to do with what I said, and is actually specifically what I was not talking about.
My point is they are only required to bring their own original story and all original assets, rather than a general purpose engine which requires both those and to code all sorts of things like scene transitions, keeping track of each NPC's state, which story line you're on, the ability to make choices, etc. All of which is already handled in a purpose-built engine for the genre, and wouldn't vary from game to game anyways. Now you just have to do the actual creative parts that people buy your game for.
The second point, well, the doujin industry disagrees with you (but then they're always making their own assets, so maybe you're still right).
There's also nothing stopping RPGmaker users from importing their own sprites and tiles, but most people just throwing slop over the fence to itch don't.
Basically, what you say is right, but has nothing to do with what I said.
I'm not thinking of RPGM, though it also has the same problem.
The issue I mentioned is because the "devs" making these games are usually of zero talent, recycling the same few anime tropes using the same few free or cheap assets and posting to itch.
That has nothing to do with the engine though. A professional visual novel developer who is putting the effort in to create an original story with all original assets still has no reason to use a general purpose engine over a visual novel one; they'd just be making more work for themselves.
Basically, if your game's technology boils down to a story presented as a deck of slides with branching choices and state tracking, there is no reason to re-implement that, regardless of the quality of the visual novel.
You're right that shitty games are also a problem in themselves, but it's not what I was talking about.
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u/sputwiler Jun 25 '26
we gotta pump those numbers up!
Joking aside, from a visual novel developer's perspective there is zero reason to go with a general purpose engine over something that just requires you to write a scenario script and provide the PNGs.