Anime Expo takes place over the weekend including or closest to American Independance Day, and being one of the largest conventions in the country as well as near the US branches of many a Japanese company, it was not surprising that Idea Factory International chose that time to announce the English langauge release of My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! -Pirates of the Disturbance-. (Yes, that's a long title, but that's what you get when you add a subtitle to an already long title with a subtitle.)
I've read a few of the books, watched both seasons of the anime, and wrote a little about the series, so when a game was announced I hoped it would eventually be localized given the series' popularity. But I was uncertain this would happen given that it was a licensed title, meaning more stakeholders would be involved, and this was an otome game, which is growing but still a rather niche genre in the US.
Because of that niche genre bit, it was probably inevitable that someone was going to raise a fuss over Catarina not being able to date women.
You see, in the series, Catarina is a high school girl reborn as a character in the otome game she was currently playing at the time of her unfortunate demise. She uses her knowledge of the game to avoid her character's inevitable death or exile (depending on the ending) and in the process makes the rest of the cast fall in love with her by being a nice person who encourages them and cares about their problems (though some of that was motivated by trying to avoid getting killed/exiled by them or their loved ones).
So even though the setting is that of an otome game and there is some lampooning of otome game tropes, Catarina's romantic interests includes both boys and girls. This is where the potential fan expectation mismatch comes in.
My Next Life as a Villainess introduced a lot of people to otome who had never given the genre a second thought, and as a result don't have a clear image of what is it or what the tropes are. For instance, the idea of having a villainess at all runs from extremely rare to non-existent, but because of the series, there are a number of fans who will ask around for otome games just like the one in the anime only to learn that no such game exists outside of possibly the indie scene.
Hearing that Catarina is having an all new adventure in an otome game, might lead such a player to assume that they will get to date any of Catarina's would-be love interests, leading to disappointment when they leave that only the male options are available.
Of course that's the case. Because this is an otome game.
The market for romance games is fairly segmented in Japan and each runs with their own tropes. There's BL and yuri for queer relationships, galge (or bishoujo) for male protagonists romancing women, and otome for female protagonists romancing men. You don't have everyone can romance everybody else games except possibly in the indie scene. (In the English speaking world, there is a small movement to create a new grouping called amare that covers that niche.)
On occasion there are otome that will include one same sex or non-binary romance option, but the majority will be male. That's the expectations of the audience. So when My Next Life as a Villainess was announced by Otomate, Idea Factory's otome label, everyone familiar with the market knew that it was going to be male options only. In the world of My Next Life as a Villainess Catarina's admirers are split between four boys and three girls, so there was no way to accomodate all seven of them and fit in genre convention, and trying to chase multiple audiences would likely result in a significant chunk of the players feeling they paid for content they don't care about.
Otome visual novels generally aren't like picking a romance option in Mass Effect or Fire Emblem where the romance consists of a few scenes wrapped around a larger central story. Depending on the game, as much as 90% or more of the path from start to finish can be unique to a particular love interest, which is why I often break out otome into multiple posts on my blog. There is such much that can be unique to each route and all the dialogue is voiced in a game that mostly consists of reading text.
While there is certainly a subset people who would play every route in the game no matter which gender the love interest is, the otome player who is more an otome fan than a Villainess fan might be disappointed when half the routes aren't something they would be interested in playing. Similarly, fans who want to set up Catarina with one of the girls might not be interested in having the boys as options at all. It's a big ask for someone to pay full price for a romance game when they know don't care about half the love interests before they even get started.
And the thing is, Otomate is its own label for a reason. Everything it makes is otome and there are annual events in Japan like Otomate Party which are dedicated to fans of its games. It's a brand. If a game comes out of Otomate, it had better have female protagonists romancing male love interests or it has no business being there. I know of one blogger who bought the Japanese version of the Pirates of the Disturbance game without having watched the Villainess anime or read the books because playing otome games is something she does. Otomate would not win points with its core audience's expectations by deviating from their brand.
So, one might ask, why didn't the IP holders go with someone else?
I'm sure they considered the possibility of giving Catarina a chance to have a happy ending with everyone, but there are two things I think that made it inevitable any romance game for My Next Life as a Villainess was going to be otome. First, there's the fact that it's a parody of otome, and a creative team that works within the genre will likely be able to lampoon it with love better than an outsider. And second, it's just not a good fit anywhere else. Galge tends to be the closest romance subgenre to mass market (the venerable Fate stay/night and all its spin-offs started as an adults-only galge), but Catarina is not male nor does she fit the self-insert nature of most galge protagonists. Yuri is even more niche than otome, leaving otome as the only pre-established option.
As for going it alone, I suspect that the cost of advertising a romance game to the general masses would be too much for the amount of people who would likely buy it (who again, likely have their own romantic preferences). Even if it meant cutting out half the would-be lovers to make sure that Otomate could also release it to its regular fans who are fans of the genre rather than Villainess itself, it would allow the game to remain closer in spirit to its source material (while being financially viable) than anything else.
The anime stakeholders, and quite likely author Satoru Yamaguchi himself, signed off on the deal so everyone knew going in what the concessions were going to be.
Would I have played all the options if they were put in? Sure! I like the characters and I find the in-fighting in Catarina's "harem" entertaining. But I have my romance game preferences too, and if half the love interests were women in a game I had no prior connection to, the hurdle to get me to play that game versus another otome would be much higher. It would have to be a game that's recommended to me by a friend, or the developer reached out to me as with Kiss the Demiurge. And it's likely the stakeholders were cognizant of that.
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