The Results of Manga Gamer’s Visual Novel Licensing Survey

Manga Gamer have finished parsing the more than 8,000 responses they got to their survey, and have shared some interesting statistics with us.

As is to be expected, men of college age are the primary market for visual novels. 73% of the respondents were male, and 23.5% were female. 86% were between the ages of 18-30, and of those, 62.5% were 18-24 years old. (Female fans skewed younger: 13% were between 13 and 17 years old, compared to just 3.8% of male respondents.)

Manga Gamer found that, the older the customer, the more purchases they were likely to make. People 13-17 years old bought one or fewer titles per year, while those in the 18-24 age range were most likely to buy two per year. Consumers over 30 were significantly more likely to buy six or more titles per year, according to Manga Gamer.

Asked if there were any barriers to buying Manga Gamer’s products, people’s primary response was that they simply hadn’t known about the company before the survey. Particularly for women, a secondary barrier was the lack of appealing titles. (No, Thank You!! and the upcoming Ozmafia localization will help to alleviate that shortage.) A tertiary barrier was a desire for Steam keys, especially among men, which Manga Gamer are looking to fix.

The survey also asked where those surveyed got their VN news. Interestingly, Tumblr ranked highly as a news source for women, more than any other site, medium, or forum (confirming this author’s and Sekai Project’s suspicions). In contrast, men slightly preferred 4chan (no surprise there).

Of the factors most influencing purchasing decisions, respondents considered “story” and “art” most important, with art being more important to women than men. After those two criteria, men considered the third most significant factor to be “erotic content”, whereas women chose “characters” and “relationship options” (male/male, female/male, etc.); followed by “characters”, “gameplay”, and “length” for men, and “genre”, “voice actors”, and “erotic content” for women.

The teenage bracket was more concerned with lower prices, but erotic content became more important with age, to both genders. Women preferred otome and BL, while men “strongly preferred” nukige and slice-of-life (with nukige gaining importance with age). Across all demographics, romance games were the most strongly preferred, and yuri was liked equally by all groups, although it was one of the less favored genres.

Contrary to popular wisdom, 63% of respondents preferred digital downloads over hardcopies; that was more true of “the younger crowd”, while “older fans” were more likely to prefer physical copies.

Of those who answered the survey, 44% prefer adult versions of a visual novel, and 30% simply want whichever is the original, unedited version. Just 4% of respondents preferred the all-ages options.

And finally …