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The state of VNs on Steam


BunnyAdvocate

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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*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~

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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.

Edited by BunnyAdvocate
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13 minutes ago, bakauchuujin said:

Did you remove outliers? For instance something like nekopara could likely have a huge impact on the average on its own, I think the interesting question is how a VN with average sales sell through the different years rather than also including the ones that sold way more or less than average.

The only outliers removed were DDLC and Emily is Away in one of the total review graphs. I was wary of removing any outliers without a clear definition of what is and isn't an outlier. It's a slippery slope once you start removing VNs, how far do you go? As it is, I think there are enough VNs in the dataset with moderate sales to balance out any outliers (there were around ~1000 VNs in there).

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New steam update is out.. it now has Explicit sexual content option under steam preferences..

New Steam Announcement

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So i guess now there is no need for companies to butcher VN releases and cut out content..

Adult only sexual content is disabled by default and you will have to manually enable it..  its explicit sexual content..and not like witcher 3.. btw witcher 3 comes under "Nudity or Sexual content" and not under "Adults only" and that explains it all... basically as far as sexual content goes they will allow everything unfiltered from now on.

Edited by Wildbreed
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9 minutes ago, bakauchuujin said:

Even if they open the gates I can't really imagine something like Euphoria, Maggot Baits or Starless end up on steam.

yea but the likes of Konozora, Sanoba Witch, Aokana can without the need for an external patch.. To be more specific.. Devs/Pubs can now avoid unnecessary issues/Bugs that arise when they edit out sex scenes, dialogues, nudity etc.... Now all this can be simply avoided..  

Edited by Wildbreed
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You're being way too optimistic. Steam may have added a checkbox on the consumer side, but that doesn't mean anything until they actually publish a policy so developers and publishers can know what's allowed and what's not allowed (they haven't done this), and actually start applying said policy (they also aren't doing this). This isn't done until we start seeing the games we expect there getting published back to the platform. Maidens of St. Michael will probably be a good bellwether, since you can bet MG wants to get it back on there ASAP and is just waiting on Steam. If you see it on Steam, maybe there's some progress. If not, then everybody's almost certainly still stuck in this same crappy situation we've been in for the past half a year or so.

Regardless, you certainly shouldn't get your hopes up for KonoSora or other Pulltop releases. I doubt they have any interest, on their own side, of releasing the full versions of their games, and even if they do, god only knows what quality we'll get with their translation agency roulette game.

Lastly... this is all kind of irrelevant to the OP's topic! At least, it is unless you think having the uncensored versions available on Steam will make a big difference in sales or revenue, which I honestly kind of doubt.

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I guess both topic could be quite similar in regard of VN at Steam, so it should be good. It's quite interesting that OELVN is growing, although perhaps it's inevitable because Steam was easier platform to access if one want to sell the VNs. As for mature contents thing, I believe that it would still needed to be reviewed by Steam and it could be even tighter, so I would say that some VN with nudity could be added with sexual content mark. So perhaps it could mean that there'll be more fanservice at Steam OELVN, if the research and the announcement was to believed.

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16 minutes ago, Hetzer123 said:

How do you define "outliers" VNs?

The ones with way more sales than is average or with roughly no sales at all. For instance if the average VN sells about 7000 copies and there is one that sells 300k copies it is an outlier, ofc the direct defined area might be a bit hard to figure out.

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53 minutes ago, bakauchuujin said:

The ones with way more sales than is average or with roughly no sales at all. For instance if the average VN sells about 7000 copies and there is one that sells 300k copies it is an outlier, ofc the direct defined area might be a bit hard to figure out.

The only VN that seemed totally out of proportion with everything else was DDLC, which had almost twice as many owners as the next most common VN. Fortunately DDLC was a free VN so didn't factor into the EVN and JVN trends, as those included only commercial releases. Another VN that slipped through the cracks as Dies Irae. As it had a rather unique strategy of making the common route free, and then selling the endings as DLC. As the DLC didn't count as a steam app in itself, there aren't any stats available on the DLC sales. I only had how many played the free portion.

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12 hours ago, Mr Poltroon said:

Transferred a lot of posts away from this thread. Please remain on topic. Posts about Adult Content being allowed on Steam, when unrelated to the topic at hand, are to go here.

Thanks Poltroon, I was a little confused by all the reply notifications I was getting on something unrelated to the analysis post.

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