Why don't we all just play more visual novels?

Visual Novels are extremely similar to regular novels in that they are primarily story driven, in addition to having other attributes including animated sprites, voice acting, and being able to choose your own adventure. 

So why is this artistic medium relatively unknown to the western world? Probably because of this:

This is a Visual Novel. Yeah...

The first stigma against visual novels is that the majority of them appeal to a niche audience enthralled with 2D girls. This results in a large majority of visual novels that are targeted towards that audience. In turn, the overall opinion of the general public towards this genre lowers, despite the potential for a powerful narrative.

The second stigma is correlated with the first. There is an inherrant lack of deep storylines and more emphasis on visuals novels that are targeted toward the audience described in the first stigma. In a positive feedback mechanism, these visual novels are less inspired from original concepts and its writers are less populated with those interested in literary fiction. Because, unfortunately, literary fiction doesn't sell as well, and, compounded by the fact that visuals become a primary production expense, literary fiction isn't as popular as topics as visual novels. The topics that are are generally twisted, like Saya no Uta, a story about a man who becomes a cannibal with an incomprehensible flesh monster:

Do not let this caption fool you. This is about an insane man who sees the world as a mass of flesh- imagine what normal looks like.

The final stigma is that several people who would appreciate these novels do not want to read in general. Reading is a time investment and the presence of dynamically updating sprites and a branching storyline is not enough to convince these people to read them. In fact, these aspects may in fact discourage them from reading them at all- since visual novels are relatively unknown in the western world, most of them are difficult to acquire legally and require torrenting. Most people are unwilling to learn how to or take the time to torret, much less read instructions for installing Daemon Tools and patching the game to install to their computer. And then comes actually reading the novel itself, which will take even longer since you are fed only one line of text at a time.

Maybe we will all play more visual novels in the future when books do not require high production costs to generate visual novels from literary novels.