#cheaper than a solmare date

[another-lost-mc]

STOP THE ROMANCE WITHOUT PAYWALL TAG IS KILLING ME AKCKGKEKKKE

You're giving me way too much courage to share my own au and OC's now pfft thank you for your service 🩵✨

Last night in the middle of my “Forty dollars, are they serious right now” tirade across various conversations on Discord, I said I was gonna reblog some fluff and smut with that tag. #cheaper than a solmare date was another contender I suggested and I think some of them used it too. 😂

If you’re an OM writer or artist or follow any of the wonderful people that create for this fandom, I welcome and encourage you to do the same.

(Props to @onyourowndaisymae @arvandus @misc-obeyme @silverrings-n-prettythings @thebellearchives @featheredcrowbones @lonely-north-star @cosmicstarlatte @antique-remains @folkdevilfables @meggs-wonderland for indulging the madness btw.)

Also, I stan for other OCs! Please, for such a gigantic universe of world building potential, the OM world feels like it’s home to sixteen characters and the rest is a barren, soulless wasteland. This is the perfect fandom for creating MCs and OCs and I encourage anyone with their own characters to share them. 💖

(Mostly I’ve spent the past six months in OC brain rot hell and hyper-fixating on a forty-something chaptered story for them. You’re in good company if you’d care to join me!)

[arklayraven]

Solmare: Give us $30 to date the character once in our game!

Me: Or...OR...HEAR ME OUT. I pay a few indie devs for their games. Which some cost much cheaper than what you're offering. And I get a whole game to play, not just one tiny pathetic feature, for that price or even less.

[aromantic-misguide-to-romance]

There are so many issues with Voltage that make them extremely unreliable that just yeeting a game onto the market with no advertising or promotion whatsoever is the smallest of the problems honestly.

Before I start, I need to also mention, that it's not just Voltage losing its fandom. Route otomes seem to be now outdated as a genre on the mobile market. I believe it has something to do with card gacha games taking the niche. Those games offer a longer investment in the love interest and are very expensive and time-consuming. A card gacha won't leave much time and money left for anything else and they have a faster pace with more to aim for than other, even theoretically stingier gachas.

The purge that AppStore and Play Store did a few years ago didn't help either (Voltage seems to have been largely spared but those two stores basically wiped out the entire genre at some point with only the biggest companies spared). Abracadabra Inc. was entirely nuked overnight and never recovered, Okko aggregated their stories in Honey Magazine, that is much more paywalled than standalones were and never made it back to the old grace either, Solmare survived but eventually shutdown and deleted most of their SWD games sometime later.

Now, back to Voltage.

First, Voltage releases EN localisations with discontinuation in mind. When Lovestruck and the US subsidiary of Voltage went down, I read some of Voltage's financial reports and plans. The company isn't actually interested in running global games - their main method is to ditch old ones for new ones. AyakashiRR was doing decently (and it's absolutely active in JP), but because Voltage prioritises new releases and doesn't keep too many active games, it got discontinued to make room for MirPri. One of the currently running games will be replaced as well with a new app at some point (I bet on CoD or MirPri). That did not make me want to invest in anything released by Voltage ever again - it comes with an expiry date their JP apps don't have, and that a relatively popular and profitable game can be replaced by a new title.

I belive that people from neighbouring Voltage fandoms do notice that the company ditched a game and theirs might not be safe either. Who would invest in a game that's already on borrowed time?

Especially considering there's no promotion or advertising, it seems very deliberate. Voltage releases games basically exclusively to the same playerbase - a playerbase that already got burned or scared. Voltage is basically setting the localisations to fail. And I would bet that's why they're also not lowering the prices or requirements for MirPri. If something isn't meant to last, it doesn't have to be friendly enough to keep the playerbase invested. They absolutely do know that keeping it as expensive as in the original won't work because they lowered costs in AyakashiRR and made several cost adjustments when it was still ongoing. They know that and I believe they have a very good idea why they're doing what they're doing in MirPri and what for.

And lastly something that offends probably exclusively me: the Switch ad games. Games released there are incomplete, just to be an ad for the Love 365 app. Those games are often barely described, with only character list and how much of the route it covers, in a way that's virtually uncheckable without the app. (They're still cheaper than buying the same in the app... they're still cut halfway to make you go to the app to buy the rest of the route so there you have it.)

It's not just Voltage, I'm rather not going to touch anything new by Solmare or Cybird either (those two have their own offence lists) because of how they treat players. Not investing to just see another shutdown.

Voltage Inc Games...

So in my eleven years of otome gaming I played almost all of Voltage Inc games (also tried various companies including cybird and several indie games on steam.). I still play a lot games, mostly voltage inc games, and today I was thinking of their reduced player number... and nonexistent fandom. I see a few hearts and reblogs for cod and some for SLBP but their recent app MirPri? No one seems to be playing this lovely game. Of course not every player might have a tumblr account... Even so cant help but feel Voltage isnt garnering as much attention as it should.

i once again truly feel voltage should change its policies

like they have to reduce the PP required to clear main routes... They can keep the events hard to clear but main routes, do average players have that much patience...? yes you want folks to spend but how many can? and to how much extent? I spend with regrets, I always overspend and I know a few others like me and a few more others who are rich enough to afford every event but seriously... they need to rethink their strategies and get more people to play their games if they don't want to shut off their games prematurely

Marketing strategy is a real thing. As a book writer I learnt it the hard way that initially for a rookie author, low priced books are more likely to sell. You can't expect to write a massive book and wish people will buy. If you want to reach more you have to rethink your strategies