This all was a major consideration with Sucker for Love: Date to Die For. While it's tagged as a dating sim, we actually banned the phrase "dating sim" from our own marketing copy, for genre comfort reasons. We only had one datable girl, which is a negative aspect for players who expect a dating sim
I don't think we did a great job of communicating that Thirsty Suitors is at first a turn-based RPG and everything else stems from that. The progression, skills, story, cooking, skateboarding, all fit to show Jala's journey to redemption and eventually battling her grandmother in a boss battle.
May 7, 2025 17:28We saw this mismatch of expectations crop up when we first released the demo-- we noticed some players were disappointed that the 2nd game deviated from that dating sim structure the 1st game had, w/ only one main route and one main love interest. (Cont)
And to a certain extent w/ the genre shift from the horror-comedy of First Date to the the heavier lean into horror of DTDF. For a lot of players, this is an unexpected but welcome change! But for others, the shift was not hitting.
So we started being very deliberate in setting expectations (cont)
in our marketing. Esp. in the Steam copy and in the trailers. Also leaned on word of mouth and press interviews to emphasize the changes: more horror, still funny, and a visual novel- not a dating sim
Luckily(?) we had a lot of time between the demo and full release to correct this mismatch
If we hadn't have had the time to do that, I think we would have gotten a lot more negative reviews at launch 🤷♀️
me sitting over here with two date-able characters in my dating sim 😬
weird dating sims get a pass, wouldn't worry haha
Players were fine w/ SFL: First Date only having two (kinda 3) datable characters, i think b/c word of mouth pitched it as a weird game lol
"I promise its good" is common phrase i hear 😆
Not even labelling and presenting it properly works sometimes. I'm suddenly reminded of when Digimon Survive, which has 'visual novel' all over its store page and in the tags, got review-bombed at launch because there was more words than strategy.
Of course, it also makes sense that the people that failed to read the store page would be blindsided when the game asks them to read more.
Estir in the thug hood of Carcosa
Otep - Rise Rebel Resist
YouTube video by DAA Entertainment
