I have a problem, and you only have to look at the last screen of my iPhone to know what it is. Two successive rows are full of apps with names like “Choices,” “Whispers” and “MeChat.” Each thumbnail shows an attractive person or couple drawn in an anime-esque style. If you got a glimpse of my battery usage stats, you’d see that those apps use a vast amount of my precious phone charge – and you could draw some totally correct conclusions about how much time I spend on them.
Yep, I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of visual novel apps, and I don’t see myself climbing out any time soon.
Visual what now?
Take the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels where we traumatized ourselves as children by making bad decisions and getting bisected by alien portals or eaten by sharks that were also us but in an alternate timeline. (As if Don Bluth movies didn’t scar my generation enough.) Add graphics and more variables to influence what ending you get, including occasional systems where you can gain or lose statistics like Strength or Diplomacy. Make it digital, meaning that you have to reload a game rather than keeping your finger on the page with your last choice.
That doesn’t really cover the whole visual novel genre, but if I tried to do that, this article would be 10 times longer. Many VNs are more romance-centric and less horrific than the CYOA books. Others really aren’t. The first VNs were developed, sold and marketed like any other video game, and a good number still are. With the growth of both smartphones and content bundling, though, companies like PixelBerry Studios, Pocket Gems and Your Story Interactive developed visual novel apps with multiple stories.
Here’s the story
When I log onto a VN app, I can pick from a couple of dozen visual novels in genres ranging from horror to heist. Each chapter generally requires a ticket to play – users get a certain number and they refresh over time periods that vary from app to app – and new stories release chapters on varying schedules. Once in a book, I can customize the character I play in a few different ways. Usually this is the first place where I encounter premium choices.
Premium choices give you extra content in a story. One might give you a cool hairstyle but not really change the plot. Another might let your horror heroine pick up a nail-studded baseball bat, which she can then use to save her friend from a zombie a few chapters later. Premium choices can also unlock bonus scenes, including, yes, some spicy ones.
To make these choices, you spend resources – generally called diamonds, rubies, crystals or just “gems.” New players start with an initial balance, which can fall to zero pretty quickly if you’re set on making the best choices. Then you have a few options – and that’s where visual novel apps take an approach to ads that I haven’t seen from any other kind of mobile game.
Let’s start with the basics. Gems do refresh over time or with every login, often the rewards increase if you open the app every day for a week or similar, and you generally get some every time you complete a chapter or a book. It’s a very slow process, especially because rewards tend to be in the single digits while even a hairstyle purchase can cost 20 or 30 gems, but it’s free.
You can also buy packs of gems, shelling out $5 for 50 or similar when you really want to make a particular choice.
Finally, you can gain gems by watching ads: usually a limited number per day, plus extra at the end of a chapter.
So far, this all follows the mobile game standard, with free, freemium, and ad-supported tiers. Options don’t stop there, though.
One unusual angle comes from memberships. For $15 or $20 a month, you get some title like “VIP,” but that doesn’t give you access to everything or make your experience ad-free. Instead, these memberships typically increase the daily number of ads you can watch, chapters you can play and rewards you get from each of the tasks. (They also often provide advanced access to new stories and other benefits.)
Events provide another wrinkle. Whether focused on holidays, updates or an internal schedule, most apps have periods when choices don’t cost any gems, letting players move ahead more quickly than just watching ads and less expensively than buying them. Official social media accounts tell players when these events are coming up. So do unofficial communities, where users gather to talk about stories and share promotional codes.
Community, consent and collaboration: Marketing opportunities
In an environment where many media companies are struggling to figure out how many ads customers will tolerate, situations where some users will pay for the chance to watch more ads per day obviously have some appeal. Visual novel apps show that plenty of people will consent to ads as long as they get appropriate rewards for them. By setting specific rewards per promotion, these games may also make their audiences more aware of the connection between the two and thus more accepting of the system.
Other opportunities come from the communities visual novel apps build. Whether discussing stories, contributing codes or trading assets like collectible gallery photos, fans keep groups hopping on social media platforms like Reddit and Facebook. They know and follow their favorite writers and have passionate opinions about issues from plot developments to the use of AI.
While fandom can always be a double-edged sword, genuine, transparent marketing could tap into visual novel communities via writer endorsements, sponsored Ask Me Anything events or other forms of participation.
Apps like Chapters offer resources for would-be writers and host their stories, building investment with user-generated content, but there’s room for more and deeper collaboration with brands. One tactic might simply be expanding the variety of ads. While I’ve seen a range from other games and apps to prepared food delivery services and veterinary insurance, I haven’t encountered many ads for beauty products or clothing. Those could be a big market for visual novels’ largely female player base, as could music, movies and snack food.
For deeper connections, brands could take advantage of the apps’ highly visual nature. We pay out diamonds for special outfits all the time: maybe show us real-life outfits with a similar vibe, or team up with companies like Poshmark or Stitch Fix for game-based styling. How about music recommendations based on the club scene somebody’s just played, or a list of movies, shows or books that inspired a particular story?
I could even see a dating service collaboration that uses personality tests to show you people you might like if you picked a particular love interest in a story.
The End
Media and advertising always influence each other as they change, with shifts in one sector driving innovation as the other adapts. The rise of visual advertising shows changes in both: people are consuming stories in different ways, video games are reaching more diverse audiences and users are adopting new attitudes toward ads in their entertainment. Finding a place in this emerging landscape could be the right choice for many brands.
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