How long the LitRPG trend will go on?

[RavenWolf]

I think litRPG as genre is just starting. Currently it is very small dust particle in fantasy/sci-fi genre but it has so much potential. You have to think this deeper than just some passing fad because how huge gaming has become. Still litRPG genre which almost no one outside of webnovel or LN readers have never heard, yet. Why is that? Because mainly only youth reads those. Same with current isekai anime. Anime, isekai, litRPG and even games are tied to together and youth are age group which mainly consumes these. Sure lots of people consume games but litRPG is so new trend that older gamers has not heard of it and anime/manga industry is that which had spread this genre knowledge. For most anime is new thing. It is only after turn of millennium which when anime started to become really popular and now it is mainstream with youth (but not with older folks).

So now we got this 80's retro trend. Why is that? That is because those people who matters, meaning those who have money now, are 30-50 working adults and entertainment industry is geared to take their money. People pay for nostalgia. So, when current youth who are now gamers, consume anime and read litRPG are age of 30-50 we really start seeing mainstream litRPG renaissance. As long as there are games litRPG is not going anywhere. Especially when almost 99% gamers has not even heard of term of litRPG. There are so much growth potential in future but first we have to start getting more gamer movies like Free Guy etc. so we can get people acknowledged that this genre exist.

It is like Game of Thrones TV-series which made grimdark huge popular fantasy genre. It is only matter of time until there is some western litRPG book adaptation which is huge success then we are going to see this genre explode.

I mainly wrote about litRPG but same is for iskei. I see that isekai as whole is going to be even more popular in future because people are going to need and want to escape from reality. I see escapism hugely growing trend. Our world is going to be harder place in terms of income equality. Automation is robbing most jobs and people find themself more and more in between jobs. So escape from reality is thing.

LitRPG is a genre with great variety. However, since it's so easy to write, it's literally everywhere. This saturation will eventually cause a 'tolerance' for the genre, which will raise the standards higher till it's not worthwhile to write about anymore.

I remember the rise and fall of idle games, for example, which created a sea of mediocre, low-effort games purely made for clicks.

I'd give it around 2 years before LitRPG runs out of gas.

It is not everywhere. It is only in your peer groups mostly. Ask random book reader from street has he/she ever heard litrpg books or isekai they say no. I'm part of small internet gaming community forum which has couple hundred active people who do variety things like read fantasy books and nobody has ever heard term of litRPG. I have tried to get them read some but they don't get it. Mostly they are over 30+ age group.

Even in r/fantasy you can find that most of users there have never heard of litRPG books.

 

[Snusmumriken]

LitRPG will continue as long as there are RPGs. The reason it is popular is because you have a swath of readers pre-trained to feel good when they see numbers go up because of all the games they have played.

 

[LinXueLian]

I don't think they'll ever go away, but they'll probably evolve! LitRPG's pretty old IIRC... I remember the old "game-books" my cousin used to own. I even played some with my cousins and our eldest cousin would literally have an empty notebook and cook up stories for our chosen characters each time we rolled the pencil with numbers in it... he'd edit the stats as the game went on.

If I'm not mistaken, Avatar (the one with blue people) is an isekai. We've also got that dark fairytale classic, Pan's Labyrinth. Westworld,

Spoiler: spoiler

once everyone was uploaded into a Cloud

, is technically an isekai too. What we're reading in novel sites right now are Japanese anime-based ones, but I'm pretty sure things will keep changing as more people join in and experiment on the concept.