The survey results are in! First off, we’d like to thank everyone for participating in the survey again this year. Your input is invaluable to us and our staff truly appreciate all the kind words you had for us too. Now onto the results:

We received just under 8,000 responses again this time, but we saw an increase in women among respondents this year, up to almost 30% now. As we noticed in our previous surveys, women as a group skewed a bit younger with about 10% of women falling into the 13-17 age group, compared to only 2% of men. Women were also much more likely to be Mac users, nearly 60% of Mac users were women in contrast to Linux users who were over 85% men, and similarly women had a stronger preference for handheld platforms with over 70% of those with a preference for handhelds being women.

Ownership of visual novels seems to be up among respondents, with about 70% of respondents having purchased three or more VNs in the past year and only 7.5% having purchased none (down from 11% last year) and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to tell that Steam is growing as the preferred platform for buying visual novels.

Notably, factors influencing purchase remain pretty steady compared to previous years with a small but noticeable bump in translation quality as a concern with 18% of respondents marking it as a deciding factor (up from 16% last year)—perhaps our efforts for quality haven’t gone unnoticed! Story and art remain the overwhelmingly important factors though. Digital remains the dominant format of choice, being the primary preference for over 70% of respondents.

Crazy as it might sound, genre-wise, romance remains the top choice followed by science fiction and fantasy—good thing we have quite a few games in those categories to announce this year! Otome and BL gained some points (22% -> 30% and 14% -> 16% respectively compared to last year), while yuri and nukige oddly enough lost some traction (38% -> 30% and 37% -> 34% respectively). Interestingly, we noticed a trend among respondent comments asking for yuri alongside BL and/or otome as well.

And now onto the part most of you are probably interested in, the most requested titles! This year we thought we’d do the top 20 to cover more of the otome and BL titles requested, several of which just narrowly missed the top 10:

Rance Series Diabolik Lovers Series ↑10 White Album 2 ↑6 Aiyoku no Eustia ↑9 A Kiss For The Petals Series ↓3 Fate/Stay Night ↓5 Majikoi Series ↑8 Mahoutsukai no Yoru NEW! Evenicle NEW! Funbag Series NEW! Uta no Prince-Sama Series NEW! Black Wolves Saga NEW! Sakura no Uta NEW! Ken ga Kimi NEW! Soukou Akki Muramasa NEW! Ao no Kanata no Four Rhythm NEW! Shin Koihime Musou ↓7 Room No. 9 NEW! Daiteitoku NEW! DRAMAtical Murder ↓11 TIE Kamigami no Asobi NEW!

Again, nothing too shocking this time, aside perhaps from the big push for Diabolik Lovers rocketing it up to the #2 request. We have a lot to look forward to this year, from more entries in popular series, a title with a bit of a historical bent, something old, something new, something borrowed, and something BLue…?

On that note, check out our updated convention schedule and announcements page for our preliminary convention schedule for 2017!

Also! Check your email to see if you’re one of the three winners of a copy of DC3R and let us know if you’d like the Steam version or X-rated!