Romantic games for girls (otome sim) are growing in popularity in the Land of the Rising Sun, EDGE reports.
What and why?
The gameplay of such games boils down to choosing the ideal man from the user’s point of view, who will build a relationship with you throughout the project (it is implied, of course, that the user in this case is a woman).
The games look something like thisBuilding relationships is reading a huge number of dialogues by the user, during which some simple intrigue and its resolution will flash by.
By the way: in the West, such a genre is still commonly called interactive fiction. By the way, the Russian studio Dreamlore even released a game in this genre six years ago. Only in it there was no romance and hentai, which is characteristic of such male sims (otaku sim).
The boom in women’s interactive was facilitated by the growth of the mobile device market and the high demand for romance among the “weak” gaming audience in Japan.
The fact is that 49% of unmarried Japanese women between the ages of 18 and 34 do not have partners (among men there are even more lonely hearts – 61%). As a result, the number of dating services is growing, as well as games about the one who will say kind words.
Japanese women dream of love and care“Our users are working women 20-30 years old who play on the train on the way home and want to distract themselves by finding love in a fantasy world,” confirms the theory of EDGE journalists, Elementree studio screenwriter Hikari Mizukami.
How and how much?
Otome sims are distributed for free on freemium and free-to-play models. That is, either the girls, after trying the application, download its full version, or buy IAPs that help to establish a relationship with a virtual lover.
Most of these games are designed by women.
As for revenue, then, according to Wakase Basashi from Sunsoft studio, the conversion in her projects is about 20%. At the same time, the user base of the company’s flagship series of games, to put it mildly, is not very large – 200 thousand players.
Wakashi Basashi in the costume of one of his charactersDo we need to?
The Japanese mobile market has always been noticeably different from the Western one, but it must be admitted that the social problems faced in the Far East are also relevant for our society. At the same time, there are no gaming products designed for the audience of single women in the American and Russian markets, but this is a whole niche.
A source: http://www.edge-online.com