Consumer AND creator oriented market disruption

The visual novel industry is held back by outdated workflows and fragmented platforms. Creating a VN typically requires a full team—writer, artist, musician, and developer—or a single creator with multiple disciplines. Production takes months, distribution requires separate demo and full builds, and releases are often limited to Windows unless teams invest additional time into porting. Consumers face high upfront prices, large downloads, technical issues, and no guarantee they’ll enjoy or finish what they paid for.

By moving creation, publishing, monetization, and reading into a unified browser-based platform, nearly all of these problems disappear. Standardization removes the need for developers, and a social ecosystem lets artists, writers, and musicians easily collaborate by sharing assets. Readers get instant access across any device, pay only for chapters they actually read, and engage with the community through ratings, discussions, and collections. Unifying everything—novels, creators, assets, and fans—can finally allow the visual novel medium to grow.

Cultural significance

The cultural significance of books and stories in general needs no words spent on it. In an age of shrinking attention spans and a growing hunger for connection, books are losing favor more with every generation. However, there is a hole left by movies, video games, and short form content. A hole in the shape of a slow-paced, nuanced experience that enriches the mind. Truly a visual novel platform would be literature adapted to the 21st century. Characters can be highly expressive and come to life with vibrant sound design. You can consume it anywhere from any device just like any other media. Where other media leaves a hole in the shape of focused intellectual activity, a regular novel leaves a hole in the shape of connection. Sure platforms exist to talk about and review books, but the book and the platform are disconnected. A visual novel platform would fill the hole. It is like a 21st century book club, but instead of discussing words, you discuss complete audio-visual experiences paired with the literature.

If this medium will grow like I've predicted, this platform could provide further representation for even more groups of people. As a person of color myself, I tend to notice that niche Japanese media often becomes more diverse and inclusive when it goes mainstream in the west.

More creative jobs world wide

For digital artists and musicians, this platform can be used as an "asset store". Which is a concept that has existed for well over a decade in the game development industry, but is usually more catered to programmers and 3D artists. Will not only provide a storefront for creatives, but allows their assets to be directly implemented on the same platform. The goal is also to work in automatic payments of artists if a transaction comes through on a novel using their assets. This could essentially create a passive income stream for artists and musicians.

As the platform and the visual novel medium grow, there are bound to be new novelists coming to the platform too. They not only profit from this growth themselves, they contribute to it. More people making novels means more good novels to read. More good novels means more readers coming to the medium. More readers means more incentive to write novels. More incentive to write novels means more people making novels. This could snowball a currently underlooked medium into a new industry of opportunity for the creative and entertainment sector.

Inclusivity, free speech, and safety

To protect both the rights and dignity of all people groups - minority and majority alike - a centralized platform for the medium bears great responsibility. Content moderation should seek to prevent and destroy and misuse of the platform. Sexually implicit material concerning minors, inciting violence and hate, illegal content, and cyber-bullying should be reported and removed. Furthermore proper labelling and filtering should be implemented to not alienate any consumer. Inclusivity and freedom of expression should be a great priority of any medium, but unfiltered and unmoderated content can have undesirable effects on the medium as a whole. For example, light-hearted visual novels often get buried in a sea of mature and sometimes greatly sexually explicit content. Both forms of content are valid expressions of creativity, but it can be greatly divisive for the community. If someone is not interested in certain material, or if something politically disagreeable gets presented to someone unfamiliar with the medium, it might scare them away from visual novels as a whole. A genre does not represent a whole medium, therefore proper categorization, labeling, and filtering can create a more inclusive environment where people who don't share love for a genre can still share their love for the medium and the talent of all creators within it.

Over 26.000 creators are making visual novels!

VNDB has 26k visual novel producers documented. According to our calculations, every year roughly 600 new producers of any scale explore the medium of visual novels.

On VNW a creator can be a solo writer, digital artist, or musician. Meaning that besides a VN "producer", anyone who can draw or produce a soundtrack is also welcome to profit from VNW.

On the platform creators will be able to create full visual novels, or assets packs in an intuitive editor (requiring no setup or technical skills). They can post novels directly on the platform for consumers to enjoy, or they can publish assets to be used by other novels.
Are you interested in creating on the Visual Novel World platform?

Reach out to us

A great opportunity to reach a highly targeted creative audience of creators and pop culture consumers

R&D and community building

🕐 Pending

Phase 1 - planned to take 4 months - will be when the majority of core features will be developed and deployed. Also a format of hosting visual novel competitions with cash prizes, and visiting events and conventions will be explored as a method of reaching out to creators and consumers to join the platform.

- Have a first W.I.P build running live

- Have a handful of consumers and creators on the platform to provide feedback

- Use the outreach format to get general awareness of the platform out

Monetization, documentation, feedback

🕐 Pending

Phase 2 - planned to take 4 months - will mainly revolve around technically implementing a monetization model that is fair to both consumers and creators, and also provides a structure for the platform to sustain itself or grow profitable.
This phase will further focus on tackling user feedback, and proper documentation and landing pages on the platform. The latter is specifically interesting to partners, since documentation is a great way to implement referrals and recommendations.

- Have a monetization implementation running live

- Engage in discourse with the community and collect feedback

- Provide detailed documentation and landing pages

Accessibility, refinement, advertising

🕐 Pending

Phase 3 - planned to take 4 months - will see the project finishing up to the official launch of the complete 1.0 version. Everything incomplete should be finished, refined, debugged, polished, and future-proof. During this period, dialogue will be engaged in between the project and the partners on technically implementing an effective yet unintrusive advertising system.

- Release a clean complete stable 1.0 version live

- Implement advertising

- Have the platform ready to sustain itself until further development

For our future vision beyond the three initial phases, consult the full dossier.

Funding strategy

Most of the money will be raised through grants. To ensure a diverse source of funding a diverse partnership structure has been developed. If there is a lack of funds but a decent network built up towards the end of phase 0, then a crowdfunding campaign will be launched. During the three phases of development, further monetization and donations could help fill the gaps if not all funds are attained during phase 0.

For an in-depth breakdown of the funding strategy, consult the full dossier.

High quality low commitment partnerships available!

Partner profile

A good fit for partnership would be any company or connected individual within the industries of illustration, digital art, music, gaming, or Japanese pop culture, any company, studio, or individual already established in visual novels, comics, or any other graphic literature. If you don't fit the profile, you can still reach out to us if you're interested.

Partnership structure

For our partnerships we categorize them into several tiers:

Observer
If you are interested in the project, but do not want a formal partnership, you can join the mailing list, or follow our social media.

Partner
What: Public endorsement of the project. Partners are listed on the partner page and may be mentioned publicly.
Why: Project gains credibility; partners gain exposure. Good first step to establishing a professional relationship with the project.
Who: Ideal for companies or creators who want a low-commitment relationship. Artists/musicians must provide one piece of work usable as promotional material.

Ambassador
What: Public endorsement plus a one-time contribution of at least €2.000 (or equivalent value in exposure, hardware, expertise, etc). Ambassadors get a dedicated section and relevant promotion throughout documentation.
Why: Project gains credibility and meaningful support; ambassadors gain long-term visibility and new leads.
Who: For those who want to boost their product or services and support the platform more substantially.

Sponsor
What: Public endorsement plus a €300 monthly contribution. Sponsors receive a dedicated section, promotional links, and future in-platform ads targeted at creators.
Why: Project gains recurring support; sponsors gain consistent visibility and highly targeted advertising.
Who: For partners seeking regular exposure and strong integration with the platform's creator ecosystem.

For an in-depth breakdown of the partnership structure, consult the full dossier. We highly recommend this before reaching out.