BunnyAdvocate

I’ve recently read a few thoughtful discussion threads on the state of the VN market here in the West. Some taking a negative stance, some with a more positive outlook. I thought I’d try to put some numbers on these statements and look at VN ownership on Steam, still the predominant market for PC games, and use that to analyse whether VNs are on their true route or have stumbled into a bad end. Data collection I checked just over a million steam profiles to try and get a random sample of gamers. With Steam’s new private-by-default profile settings, only 8% of those users had public game lists, but that still gave us 80k user profiles to work with. I could then compare my sample with the “leaked” owner data and scale up my numbers accordingly to represent Steam as a whole. Steam is rather haphazard with what gets tagged as a Visual Novel (RPGMaker games like A Bird Story are tagged as VNs), so I’ll only be including games that also have a VNDB entry. Steam VN releases So let’s start simple, with a simple plot of how many VNs are being released each month. At first glance things seem rosy for VN fans, there have never been more VNs being released in the West. But let’s break down those results a bit: Note that these trends are cumulative but NOT stacked. The EVN, JVN, and other VNs trends include only non-free VNs. Here we can start to see the reason for the differing perspectives on the state of the VN market depending upon whether you read more JVNs or EVNs. While the rate of EVNs releases has steadily increased, the number of new JVNs has remained fairly static since 2016, despite Steam’s lowered release requirements. Steady release rates aren’t definitely bad news, but in general profitable industries want to expand, so the lack of expansion tells you something about the industry. But as someone with a plan-to-read list that grows longer by the day, I’m not complaining if the rate doesn’t increase. One under-reported development in the VN market is the recent rapid growth of Chinese VNs (listed as other here), who have quietly been doing well in their home markets, but are rarely translated. So while more VNs might be good for us fans, how does the market look for developers? Let’s have a look at VN sales. Note that these trends are cumulative but NOT stacked. All sales are back-dated to the release date of the VN on Steam. Free VNs count sales as the number of users who have logged some playtime in it. Unfortunately Steam’s API doesn’t list when someone bought a game, so we’ve got to group sales by the release date of the VN. That means there will be a bias towards older releases which have been out longer and so had more time to build up sales. Here we can see some justification for the doom and gloom perspectives, with more recent VN releases selling significantly less than older ones. With new JVNs in 2017 selling only half what they did in 2016. The EVN downward trend is especially stark given that the number of new releases has been increasing, so that’s less revenue split among even more VNs. Not all VNs are equal, some are priced higher, so let’s look at total revenue rather than total sales. Note that this assumes every user pays full price, so this is more the maximum possible revenue than actual revenue. Here we can see the difference between EVN and JVN markets. While JVNs sell only half as many as EVNs, they earn almost as much revenue due to their higher price. We again see the same dip in more recent revenue though, 2017 was only 46% of 2016′s revenue, and 2018 looks even worse so far. Remember, this fall in revenue coincidences with an increase in the total number of releases, so to fully comprehend the drop on revenue, let’s look at the average sales per VN. First, we should note that this massively overestimates the average revenue generated as it assumes every user pays full price. I know devs who would sell their soul for 282k per VN. Oh wait, they already did when they signed up for Steam... (just kidding, I do like Steam, but it has issues). The important aspect here isn’t the y-axis total which is unreliable, but the consistent downwards trend. But it might not be as bleak as it seems, older VNs are more likely to have been in bundles and in Steam sales, so their revenue is likely overestimated compared with more recent releases. So I’d be hesitant to claim that revenue is necessarily dropping, but I think we can confidently claim that revenue isn’t increasing. VN Reviews Nostalgia for a past golden age is common everywhere, not least among VN fans. It’s not uncommon to hear that newly released VNs aren’t as good as older ones, but can we get any empirical data on this point? We can get close by looking at the Steam reviews of VNs over time. Each dot represents the average thumbs up/down ratio for any VNs released that month. Within the JVN market, we can see some truth to the nostalgia viewpoint. Older releases were more consistently rated higher. But that isn’t to say there aren’t new highly rated JVNs. They still maintain enviously high scores overall. As for EVNs, while they had consistently scored lower than JVNs, they’re catching up and are now pretty comparable in review ratings of JVNs. Just for fun, let’s see how the total review count compares between VNs. The two free-VN spikes are for Emily is Away and DDLC. As I’m sure anyone familiar with the VN community can tell you, JVN fans are vocal, and it shows in the total reviews VNs get. Despite there being only half as many JVNs as EVNs, they still attract more reviews than EVNs do. This is perhaps because JVNs are typically far longer than EVNs, so might be worth the time of writing a review. What free-VN fans lack in the wallet, they make up for in their word-count. Although this is massively skewed by two free VNs which compromise 70% of all free-VN reviews: Emily is Away and DDLC. They seem anomalies rather than trends. As shown by the graph when we exclude those two: *Excluding Emily is Away and DDLC. Despite the drop in position, free-VNs still out-perform what we’d expect given their lower count of total owners, but that may be because EVN and JVN totals include users who own the VN but have never read it. Whereas the free-VN total only includes those who have logged playtime in that VN, so there’s a larger pool of possible reviewers. Potential Issues There are a few sources of uncertainty in the dataset. The selection of users who have set their profiles to public might not be representative of the wider Steam userbase. It probably undercounts more casual fans who are less likely to configure their Steam profile. We also don’t know when someone purchased a VN, so it’s possible VN sales are increasing, but a lot of that money is going to older releases, especially if they’re in bundles and Steam sales. In inclusion of VNs in game bundles may be distorting the image of the VN fandom, as it’ll include those who have little interest in the medium and only own a VN by happenstance. We should also remember that “Steam” is not synonymous with the VN market. There are plenty of competitors in the VN scene, namely Mangagamer and itch.io, who tend to cater to different tastes than Steam does. So we’re only getting a partial picture of the Western VN scene. Conclusion There’s data here to support both the optimistic and pessimistic commentary. On the positive side, there have never been more VNs being released as there are now. EVNs are improving with higher average ratings and a few have reached mainstream attention. On the pessimistic side, it seems like there are ever more VNs competing for a fanbase that isn’t significantly growing. While I’d be wary of claiming profits are falling, it seems highly likely they aren’t increasing, and a stagnant market is not a healthy one. Personally, I think the future is bright. While VNs might not be destined to become blockbuster successes, there is enough of sustainable fanbase to support lots of indie developers, who are the most prone to innovate and write interesting new stories. As a VN fan, I’m excited to see what comes next~ --- I hope you found the article interesting. I had wanted to include a section analysing the Steam users, how many VNs do JVN fans purchase compared to EVN fans etc. But I want to spend a little longer going into more depth on it, so I’ll have a post up next week on that. If you’re interested in more until then, check out my other tumblr analysis posts, look out for updates on my twitter, or give me a yell on Discord (Sunleaf_Willow ／(^ n ^=)＼#1616). Special thanks to /u/8cccc9 for collaborating on the analysis, and Part-time Storier for proof-reading. I just do these analyses for fun, but if you want to support my work with a tip, I accept small donations at ko-fi.

I just finished Fata Morgana this week and wrote up a little post on it if anyone is interested. (Beware lots of spoilers).

Oh sorry for being unclear. This is just a fan project. There won't be any ads or patreon or anything else generating revenue, we're just doing it for the fun of it, so it isn't a paid gig. The coding is generally pretty straightforward, it's just the visual style that I'd love to get some other's ideas on. You're still welcome to help out with the code if you like, but I totally get if you aren't interested in an unpaid gig.

The Fuwa VN recommendation list is progressing well (see post). In just under a week, we've gotten over 17 thousand votes and a pretty reliable ranking of newbie VNs. I won't be posting the results just yet as I'll leave the voting open for another week and I don't want to distort any votes by showing the current ranking, but it's a great mix of genres so far. We're currently experimenting with a few different sorting algorithms to get the best result. We're also working on the website that'll allow users to enter their genre preferences and display the best newbie VNs in those genres, and are looking for any web designers who might be interested in giving a hand. While I'm adequate for an amateur, I'm no expert, and I'd love to get the input of some more experienced designers. If you're interested, just reply here, or send me a DM on Discord (Sunleaf_Willow ／(^ n ^=)＼#1616).

I was sure I'd done an analysis post on this, but it turns out I never posted it publicly. This graph was an early draft and the data is a bit out of date, but it's still accurate. I analysed the kind of content people were reading in the VNs they rated each month, to see how the popularity of sexual content was changing over time. While some degree of sexual content has generally always been the norm (it still accounts for over 60% of read VNs), it's generally been dropping these past couple of years, likely due to the increasing popularity of EVNs where sexual content has historically been quite rare. There might also have been a Steam effect back then, as at the time, Steam didn't allow nudity in VNs, so all-age VNs were getting a popularity boost. That's been changing recently though, Steam allows nudity, and EVNs are beginning to embrace their more hedonistic side. I'll have to do another updated chart on this sometime.

I was the one who made that chart for /r/vns, so to answer your question, it was decided via a series of polls on the subreddit. First, we collected nominations for each genre. Then we put the list of nominations to the vote with the 5 most voted for VNs in each genre making it onto the chart (unless that VN had gotten more votes in another genre). Some of those genres ended up having a pretty small selection of nominations. Once we'd taken out VNs already allocated to more popular genres, some less popular genres barely had enough nominated VNs to fill the chart. Then once we had our list of recommended VNs for each genre, we put them all on another poll asking users to rate them on visuals/story/newbie friendliness. Those with a higher average newbie rating were placed to the left of the chart. Some of the less popular VNs (otome and yaoi stuff in particular) didn't even get any votes. So me and insanityy just set their ratings to whatever we thought best.

Yeah I expect the multiple copies purchased die-hard fans probably don't skew it too much as you'd find such fans among all the major titles. While it might cause you to misjudge the absolute total number of fans, you'd still get a semi-reliable ranking relative to its peers. Haha wow, I never heard about that. I knew publishers try to make reviewers happy with all expense paid trips to play their game etc, but I hadn't heard of that in-game kind of manipulation. That's pretty hilarious. So far, I've just heard of one incident like that on vndb, where the dev of Everlasting Summer linked vndb and asked their fans to get their VN into the top 50. Yorhel ended up wiping all the newbie accounts votes for that VN after a couple of weeks IIRC.

Oh that's fascinating, thanks for explaining. I wish I knew Japanese so I could follow these industry developments a little better.

That's good to hear you got some similar results. I agree with your assessment as to the reason why too. Despite the score change between translated and untranslated VNs, I was surprised at how well the untranslated and EGS scores matched up, as I'd been told the vndb ratings for untranslated VNs were entirely unreliable due to those voting based on the CGs. I suppose this might be the case with less widely read VNs, but it didn't seem to happen much in our dataset. Do EGS scores have much of an impact on the JVN industry? Much like how metacritic is immensely influential in the Western games market, with companies paying employee bonuses based on metacritic scores etc.

It isn't pretty, but if you want to look at a specific tag I have most of the results in spreadsheet format here. So you can pick a specific sexual activity column and go down all the choices seeing how it's impacted.

The male version of the quiz still factors in male with female sex, it's just all from the perspective of the male character. So in this case, it's saying you're "subjected to" as in you have a boob-job on you rather than you doing it for someone else.

Oh you haven't seen anything yet, No Thank You is relatively mild bondage porn compared to some stuff in VNs like Hadaka Shitsuji.

Ah it's probably because the homosexual and bisexual characters have so much sex, it raises the average above the poor hetero men. Clearly the solution is to grow a second penis, that'll improve your stats~

The male version of our sexual prediction quiz is now up here. Have fun~

I'm going to be adding this for the male version (and I'll update the female version too), so the results tell you which option most caused you to get those results. It should be quite interesting hopefully~

Yep, and not every character is going to play to the stereotypes associated with their appearance and personality. So like a Brocon character might be much more likely to engage in incest, but it doesn't always happen.

I'm so glad you guys have had fun with it~ @Templarseeker You probably got the incest result as you picked traits common among sister type characters. I'll be doing an updated version of this when the male one comes out next week, and each result will list which options had the biggest impact on generating that result, so you can see exactly which choice it was that caused those results~ One thing that's surprised me with a lot of these results is how common footjobs seem to be. What is it with VNs and footjobs? I didn't think it was a common fetish IRL, so I'm a little surprised to see how common it is in VNs (it's the 5th most common sexual act for males to be subjected to).

Thanks guys! I'm glad you're having fun with it! Haha yeah I learned a few new things through making this too. Like I'd never heard of a "belly job" before. Vndb certainly makes sure to catalogue even the rarest of activities, although I can't help but wonder whether anyone is really picking which VN to read based on whether the heroine does a one handed or two handed peace sign during the sex scene.

I've been analysing the sexual content of VNs, what's become more common, what gets the best ratings, and what content tends to come together; and thought I'd present some of my results in a slightly different way: in a quiz! Using the extensive character database on vndb, I tracked which appearance and personality traits were more or less likely to engage in types of sexual activity, and put the results in a quiz format so you can enter the tropes and it'll tell you how the percentages diverge from the average. This is a slightly silly way to present the results, but I thought you guys might enjoy it. You can try the quiz here.

Yep that sounds reasonable. I just wish there were more data points so we could be more confident either way. Using a similar method, I've been thinking of trying to do a translator ranking table. If we look at the average score change after a translation is released, we might be able to gauge how good the translations they produce are. The results would be pretty unreliable, like if you're trying to rate Mangagamer vs JAST, it's difficult because both companies have hired different translators for different projects. But still, it might be fun (and pretty controversial) to see what it turns up.

I've been changing around how some of that code worked as I was experimenting with it, trying to explain the drop etc, so this list might not perfectly match the animation, but this should be a list of VNs and their change in score over those 60 days.

Yeah I agree, Japanese speakers are spoilt for choice. That theory also aligns well with the popularity chart, where even fairly unpopular EGS VNs can still attract large audiences on VNDB, probably because our selection is quite limited so we'll read everything.

The Western VN fandom has long idolised the Japanese VN market. Before the recent growth of the EVN scene and official localisations, Western VN fans had to subsist only on the occasional fan-translations of Japanese VNs while being told how much better the untranslated VNs were. However this faith in untranslated VNs rested on an unspoken assumption: that Western and Japanese VN fans enjoy the same content. But is it true? Through comparing the largest VN fandom site in Japan (erogamescape) against the largest VN fandom site in the West (VNDB), we sought to find out. Do we love the same VNs? While the ability of a numerical rating to summarise a subjective experience (like reading a VN) is debatable, the average score a community assigns a VN provides a useful approximation of how highly esteemed that VN is within the community. Both EGS and VNDB allow users to rate VNs they’ve read, so comparing how the same VN scores on both sites gives us an impression of how much the communities agree on which VNs are best. We can see there’s a strong correlation between the score a VN gets on each site, especially for higher rated VNs, showing that both communities tend to agree on which VNs are considered “the best” (despite the ferocious arguments within each fandom over that same question). But as the score drops, so does the agreement over the VN score. So while both communities tend to agree on what’s good, we disagree on what’s bad. There’s also another trend that’s a little less noticeable, but becomes more apparent if we remove the untranslated VNs... While the untranslated VNs in the last graph seemed to fairly evenly straddle the equal score line, the translated VNs are frequently below it (meaning these VNs score higher on EGS than VNDB). But is the translation a cause or an effect of the lower score on VNDB (i.e. does the release of a translation lower the score on VNDB, or are only low-scoring VNs being translated)? To answer this, we tracked how the VNDB score of a VN changes immediately after a translation is released. We tracked 117 of the most popular Japanese VNs that had an English translation released in the past 5 years. In the first 60 days after their translation was released, their score dropped an average of 0.146 on VNDB, with Fata Morgana being the blip on the far right that significantly bucked the trend and increased in score. There also seems to be slight correlation with lower-rated VNs on EGS dropping more than higher-rated ones. So it seems confirmed that the translations are the cause rather than an effect. But why does this happen? This remains the subject of fierce debate among my friends, but we came up with a few theories: Japanese VNs are made for Japanese tastes, so Western fans might not enjoy them to the same extent. Western fans who learn Japanese and use VNDB might align more with the taste of Japanese fans rather than with their fellow Western fans. Japanese VNs are made for Japanese tastes, so Western fans might not enjoy them to the same extent. Western fans who learn Japanese and use VNDB might align more with the taste of Japanese fans rather than with their fellow Western fans. The high barrier of entry for a Westerner to read an untranslated VN (they have to know Japanese) filters out those who have only a casual interest in the VN. So the pre-translation score is dominated by hard-core fans who are more likely to rate it higher. The experience of reading a translation can be inferior to reading prose in its original language, so VNDB users rating a VN based on that translation might assign lower scores than those reading the original text. The larger drop in score for lower-rated VNs might be because they don’t attract the same care and attention by their translators, with any official localisation likely done on a lower-budget. VN popularity It isn’t just through scores that we can measure a communities’ tastes, we can also estimate a VN’s popularity through the number of votes it gets. In comparing the number of votes the same VN gets on EGS and VNDB, we can see whether the same VNs are popular in both Japan and the West. Note that this chart is using a log scale. The most obvious trend is the clear split between translated and untranslated VNs. Unsurprisingly, translated VNs and EVNs do significantly better on VNDB than untranslated VNs. But we Western fans aren’t especially choosey, even fairly unpopular VNs on EGS can attract large fanbases on VNDB if they’re translated. Given that translations aren’t random, they require either dedicated fan-translators or a localiser willing to invest in them, it’s surprising that the translated VNs span the entire width of popularity on EGS. So we might have expected it to skew more to the right, with unpopular EGS VNs being much less likely to get a translation. While the ratio of translated-untranslated VNs is higher for more popular EGS VNs, no VN seems to be beyond the prospect of being translated, no matter how unpopular it is. Overall, while there remains a correlation in popularity between EGS and VNDB, it’s far weaker than the score correlation. This mismatch might partially be down to the age of the communities. VNs have been a popular niche of the Japanese market for decades, but were virtually unknown in the West before the 2010s. So there’s quite a number of 80s-00s era JVNs that have hundreds of votes on EGS, but are practically unheard of on VNDB. Differences in taste So far we’ve been looking at each VN as a whole, but can we delve deeper? A VN can be seen as a package of tropes: childhood-friend heroine, tsundere heroine, dumb male protagonist that’s inexplicably beloved by all (these 3 criteria should narrow us down to approximately 90% of all VNs ever made /s). Through comparing the scores of VNs that have a trope against those who don’t, we can get an impression of how popular that trope is. Fortunately we don’t have to determine these tropes ourselves, both EGS and VNDB allow users to apply tags to a VN which denote the type of content it has. So let’s start simple and see which tags are correlated with a higher average score on EGS. This world cloud ranks the EGS tags by the average score of the VNs they appear in, with higher scores being placed higher on the chart, so we can see what type of content is most lauded on EGS. The text size is proportional to the number of VNs that tag appears in, so we can see what’s a common trope and what’s rare. A full size version of this image is available here, and a spreadsheet version is available here. Note that this is mostly using google translate for the EGS tags, so the labels are… imaginative. Generally, it seems like complex VNs (with tags such as “intelligent,” “to solve a mystery” and “difficult to get”) are the most highly rated, while more sexual oriented tags seem to be linked with lower average scores (which is probably due to nukige/porn VNs). It also seems Japanese fans value the *novel* over the *visual* element in their VNs, with “CG is beautiful” being rated quite poorly. Towards the bottom are tags mostly related to being old or low-budget (with tags such as “Low price” and “XP supported”). This has only shown us what Japanese fans like, but we’re more focused on how Japanese and Western fans compare. So instead, let’s try comparing which VNDB tags are correlated with a VN scoring higher on VNDB or EGS. A full size version of this image is available here, and a spreadsheet version is available here. It seems like Western fans value romance and slice of life type stories more than Japanese fans do, whereas Japanese fans are more generous with their nukige/porn ratings. Perhaps we’re more judgemental in our view of sexual content here in the West? Japanese settings also seem to be more favoured among the Western fandom than the Japanese, the weeabooism is real /s. Slightly disappointing is how poorly female protagonists do in the Western fandom. While otomes are widespread in the EVN market, they remain a relatively unpopular niche on VNDB. Differences in the marketplace We’ve compared the taste between the Japanese and Western fandoms, but we haven’t looked at the differing availability of VNs in the markets. Are certain types of content more likely to be translated than others? How does the the home-grown Western VN industry differ from the Japanese one? A full size version of this image is available here, and a spreadsheet version is available here. It seems that action/violent type content -whether in the form of police investigations or wars- are especially popular subjects for translated VNs. Female protagonists are also surprisingly high, especially since otomes don’t seem to be translated that often, but that might be because an even smaller proportion of nukige/porn type VNs are translated, and they overwhelmingly have male protagonists. Lastly, let’s look at the EVNs. With a negligible presence in Japan (there were only 4 EVNs on EGS with at least 4 votes), we can’t really compare what the fans prefer, but we can see how the markets differ in the kind of content they produce. This next chart tracks which VNDB tags are more common in EVNs vs JVNs. A full size version of this image is available here, and a spreadsheet version that includes more tags is available here. The sexual content tags were removed because there’s so little sexual content in EVNs that it seemed a waste of space, and it gave room to include rarer content type tags. The clearest difference between the markets is in the amount of porn, there’s exceedingly little in EVNs. This is likely due to the smaller budget for EVNs which would preclude h-scene artwork, and restrictions on adult content on Steam discouraging such content. EVNs encompass a broader range of protagonists than JVNs with LGBTQ+ related content being much more common, and female protagonists being as common as males (unlike JVNs where female protagonists make up only a small proportion of VNs). But JVNs can be inclusive in other ways, like being the sole representation of protagonists who can turn into panties. Stories relating to personal difficulties, especially regarding depression, seem much more common in EVNs too. They also seem more willing to break from the usual high-school settings of JVNs, having more university aged and above characters. Criticisms Before we get carried away with forming any stereotypes of Japanese and Western fanbases from this data, let’s consider a few issues with the data. The VNDB and EGS userbase might not be representative of the wider Western/Japanese fandom. As per some of our earlier analysis posts, VNDB significantly undercounts the popularity of EVNs for example. So some caution should be taken in extrapolating what the wider fanbase likes based on this data. The VNDB and EGS userbase might not be representative of the wider Western/Japanese fandom. As per some of our earlier analysis posts, VNDB significantly undercounts the popularity of EVNs for example. So some caution should be taken in extrapolating what the wider fanbase likes based on this data. It’s easy to mix up cause and effect. Are sci-fi stories better than other stories and that’s why they’re associated with higher scores? Or is it that VNs that care about their story are just more likely to have a sci-fi setting? Some trends, like what type of content is more likely to be translated, might just be tracking the changing tastes of the era. With older VNs being less likely to be translated than newer VNs, the charts might just be picking up on what kind of content has become more popular in recent years. The dataset has some errors. EGS and VNDB catalogue VNs differently and that can cause some mismatches in the data. We’ve done our best to account for that, but with the dataset being so large, some mistakes will have slipped through. Acknowledgements A big thank you to /u/8cccc9, Part-Time Storier, and Cibelle for helping with this analysis. I hope you enjoyed reading through this, and if so, you should check out my tumblr and twitter for more VN analysis posts. If you have any feedback, questions, or suggestions for further analyses then you can reply here, on twitter, or DM me on Discord (Sunleaf_Willow ／(^ n ^=)＼#1616). Our next analysis post is likely to be on h-scenes. What type of content is most highly regarded by the fandom? How has the popularity in the fandom of certain sexual acts risen erect and fallen limp over time? How is the EVN market handling sexual content in contrast to Japan? Hopefully we’ll have lots of answers (and some painful puns) next time~

Lol I love the scale labels, "it was very useful." But more seriously Ange, are you trying to trigger us stats nerds? What on earth is going on here, mixing numbers with words? I am triggered. /s Thanks for sharing the stats, that was pretty interesting. I was surprised to see Eurphoria so high, but similar extreme content in Saya no Uta so low. But I guess perhaps nukige VNs are more likely to attract fans who are specifically interested in the h-scenes, whereas people try Saya no Uta for the story. I wish I could do an analysis erogamescape but it's so hard to collect data from there.

It wasn't just a redditor, it was one of the mods. You can see why the tone of the sub became so memey when a one-word answer is the example the mods set. You can tell which mod hasn't gone to college yet in that thread with their impression that only the greatest works of literature could ever be discussed in those delicate ivory towers, when in fact there's a lot of diversity in most courses with lecturers mostly able to choose whatever they like. Sometimes they choose to analyse something popular, sometimes it's a famous classic, sometimes it's some obscure story the professor really liked. The point of the lesson is not about memorising the source material, but learning how to analyse a work. So yes, VNs could be (and already are) discussed in some classrooms.