Scaji has mentioned on Twitter that the biggest difference between eroge and anime is that eroge don't have production committees to answer to - if you can get your project funded in the first place, you can basically do whatever.

The problem with the current state of things is that everyone is risk-averse to a stifling degree. Everyone is obsessed with chasing a steadily shrinking bottom line, so companies aren't willing to pitch projects that aren't as "safe" as possible and investors (from what I understand, largely distribution companies in eroge's case) aren't willing to fund anything that might piss people off or fail to turn a profit. So we've ended up with an industry that has pigeonholed itself by refusing to expand out of a dwindling, conservative userbase, since they simply see the risk of failure as too great.

This is why a game like Tokyo Necro is so refreshing in the current industry. No part of it was compromised over monetary concerns, and the staff were able to devote themselves to creating a solid product while having access to ample development resources and specialized talent. Very few other players in the current industry would even be capable of pulling something like Tokyo Necro off, let alone willing.

So, while I think eroge still have the potential to do great things, I'm not terribly optimistic about the future of the industry if there's not some major paradigm shift soon. Yes, there are still decent titles being produced, and I don't think we'll ever see *literally nothing* but derivative moege and nukige being produced, but the trends are apparent. It doesn't help that the pool of writing talent has dwindled in recent years, either, with influential creators leaving for greener pastures or simply vanishing entirely. Honestly, short of Nitro+ making another game by Narahara, I'm not sure we'll see another "kamige" by anyone except Scaji. He's the last person left with the ambition to shoot for the stars, the talent to actually pull it off, and the resources to make the game in the first place - I really doubt Sakura no Uta could have been made if Scaji weren't the head of the company behind it. He's said he was willing to let the company go bankrupt if it meant finishing Sakura no Uta, and I don't think that's a stance many people in his position would feel comfortable taking.

There's still hope, though. I think that if a doujin title of the quality of JQV or Seabed managed to make waves in a big way, it could be just the kick in the ass that the commercial industry needs to realize that there *is* a wider audience out there and it's okay to take risks and make something that doesn't play it by the book. To be honest, I don't think there's any other doujin writer out there on the level of Hiruou - I already consider him one of the best writers to ever work on eroge period, and I think Suicide Fence is the only future title other than Sakura no Toki that has the potential to reach the level of "kamige" - but there's a wide enough range of ideas out there in the doujin scene that I think novel games will be hanging on for a while yet, even if the commercial industry never gets the wake up call that it so desperately needs.

Hell, you could make the argument that in the current soshaga-addled, smartphone-addicted climate, risky commercial ventures are on their way out in the broader gaming industry as a whole, too. Increasingly we're having to look to indie games to find weird, adventurous concepts or creators who simply aren't willing to compromise their design concepts for the sake of the lowest common denominator, and I think there are definitely some parallels here to be drawn with the VN market as well.

Things are going to get interesting after Rance X finally comes out, in any case. Here's hoping there will continue being great Japanese VNs for the years to come, in any case.

(Shumon mentioned recently that he's writing an eroge again, maybe some crazy person decided to give him full control of a game like he had with Asairo again... I can dream, can't I?)