As someone who used to play a lot of visual novels, and at the risk of generalizing too much, about half of gacha games out there are essentially serialized VNs with some gameplay tacked on.
Games like Arknights, Reverse:1999, Path to Nowhere, and Nikke are perhaps the most obvious examples of this. Higher budget gachas like Honkai Impact 3rd, ZZZ, and PGR style their cutscenes like VNs but with 3D animated character portraits. Fate Grand Order and Heaven Burns Red are both, at least partially, written by two of the most famous VN authors of all time.
What all of these gachas have in common are putting out novel length stories about gay women and men on a near monthly basis. Especially Chinese gachas where queerphobic CCP laws mean writers need to get more creative and subtle about queer subtext.
The primary demographic upon which these games glean their revenue from, the typical dudebro gacha gamer rolling for their waifus, don’t realize they’re playing a VN because they’re often skipping or blitzing through the dialogue. And if i said this is usually a gendered divide then it wouldn’t be far from the truth, especially with a casual look at gacha Youtubers, social media, forums, subreddits, etc.
It’s because of this why arguments about yuri subtext pandering to straight men or the misassumption held by some women/queer/progressive players that those chuds are in a position of good faith is giving them too much credit.
I’m not saying this is an absolute certainty, but "man who rolls for their wife and only watches character build breakdowns" is the classic gacha game demographic. It’s why mihoyo was able to get away with writing kiamei and bronseele for well over a decade - this demographic doesn’t care about reading into things too deeply.
Lately, you can tell it’s always the same demographic because it’s always queer shipping and theorycrafting SPECIFICALLY that gets their jimmies riled up. And it’s these same chuds that complain about "yuri slop tourists" even when it’s yuri fans that have been around from the start or are involved in the art/writing team. I’ve been noticing Umamusume’s been going through this right now and it’s just really visible. The same homophobic and queerphobic arguments being made again and again to quash shipping culture and literary fan analysis.
As a reminder to my fellow girls and gays, himejoshis, fujoshis, and yumejoshis : They don’t engage with the text. They don’t read between the lines. Guys like them are surface level and do not possess any complex interiority. What you think is the bare minimum is still more than they can handle.
