[stevenameyer]

I do believe that a good romance game could be very successful and I would be interested in seeing one made, but the issue would be making one that is a quality game in and of it's self.

When you look at a lot of the latest successful games the majority of the entertainment value comes though exciting and engaging game mechanics or some sort of role playing aspect where the playing is able to feel like they have the ability to feel like something they are not able to do in their normal lives.

This has driven a lot of games to go the route of high paced cinematic game play with the player taking up the role of an extremely powerful person in order to feed their superiority complex. It's one of the main reasons good horror games, adventure games, or heavily story based games have really fallen in numbers in recent years.[0] And a romance game would not only have to execute known mechanics and characters well, they would have to invent them.

A solid romance game would require an incredible amount of detail in the story, innovative mechanics, and incredible amount of character work with solid voice acting to fulfill what someone looking for a romance game would be looking to get out of it.[1] On top of that convincing a publisher to put up the money for such a risky project would be incredibly difficult.

While I do believe that there is a market for it, there are just so many challenges surrounding creating one that is actually good that I can't see one being made that would be successful.

If you are even casually interested in video game design, I would suggest watching the videos made by Extra Credits[2]

[0]exceptions including Amnesia, Tell Tales' Walking Dead, Bioshock, Spec Ops the line etc.

[1]I would assume emotional connection to characters, a sense of adventure, and an engaging story arc with characters. Mostly it being very relationship and character driven which is very difficult to pull off. But these assumptions would need to be tested.

[2]http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/show/extra-credits

[catenate]

> On top of that convincing a publisher to put up the money for such a risky project would be incredibly difficult.

Sounds like a good use case for Kickstarter.

It's not purely romance, but at least one project apparently models relationships: "Amaranthine uses simple game mechanics to reflect the ebb and flow of relationships, and lets the power of those relationships influence your success or failure now."

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/machineage/amaranthine-a...