Over the past decade the Western VN scene has changed dramatically. From being the realm of a few die-hard fans enviously eyeing those who could read Japanese, it’s become a small but profitable niche of the Western game industry. With both home-grown talent and official localisations starting to target the expanding fan-base, we can expect to see changes in the kind of content being produced. This series of posts will try to track those changes and perhaps offer a glimpse into where the medium is going.

Tracking Trends



Trying to put a number on trends is hard. Most companies are secretive with their sales data, and rampant piracy (built up from an era when legal means to purchase VNs were limited) means the popularity of Japanese VNs in the Western fanbase can be underestimated. So rather than rely on sales data, we looked for something both customers and pirates do alike: rate VNs. The pre-eminent site for VN information and user ratings is the Visual Novel Database (vndb.org). The creator, Yorhel, graciously provided access to the site’s user data.



Using the date that someone entered a VN rating, we can approximate when they read it and so track the rise and fall of each VN’s popularity. We can then use the tags on each VN, which denote the type of content the VN has, to gauge the changing popularity of different types of content.



There will be some inaccuracies in this approach. New VNDB users will want to rate VNs they’ve read long ago, so the date they set the rating won’t always match when they read it. VNDB users may also not be a fair representation of the fandom as a whole, as VNDB tends to attract more dedicated VN fans. However such biases should be relatively consistent over time, so changes in tastes should still be visible.



VNDB has grown substantially since its birth in 2007, with a steady increase in the number of ratings being cast each month, reflecting the healthy growth of the VN fanbase. However the number of new active users has dipped slightly as Steam has embraced the VN medium.

The Rise of the West

While the increasing activity on VNDB implies more VNs are being read in the West than ever before, it doesn’t tell us much about the industry as a whole. Using the release data on VNDB, we can plot how many new VNs are being created. To ensure some quality control in the VNs we’re tracking, we’ll only be analysing the VNs that have at least 5 user ratings on VNDB.



While there’s been a slump in the Japanese market, the West is still showing healthy growth with ever more translations coming out as Japanese devs feel the squeeze in their home markets. The number of VNs developed in the West (OELVNs) may seem to be dipping, but this is misleading as not all VNs are created equal. A 5 minute joke VN is not the peer of a 10+ hour commercial VN. If we look at the lengths of the OELVNs being produced (see below), it’s clear the slump only applies to the shortest VNs. OELVNs are climbing up the value chain as they deliver more content per VN. Long considered the baby sibling of the Japanese industry, OELVNs are growing up and are starting to stand toe-to-toe with their older sibling.

We can also track the increased popularity of OELVNs in the proportion of ratings they’re getting on VNDB (see below). While they’re still a niche, it’s a consistently growing niche. One surprise result from this graph is the ratio of ratings for translated vs untranslated VNs hasn’t grown as more translations are released. It seems the lure of learning Japanese is still as strong as ever among the hard-core fans.

Please note that we only track Japanese and English language releases, hence why it doesn’t add up to 100%.

The Changing Face (and Genitals) of VNs

You might wonder why anyone would care about where a VN is developed; what difference does it make? Well, it tends to make a difference in the type of content it contains. If we compare how common some tags are OELVNs vs Japanese VNs, we can see how different they tend to be. Below is a list of the top 10 most frequent tags in rated OELVNs.

Due to the immense popularity of Katawa Shoujo (consisting of 17% of all votes for OELVNs), its votes have been removed. See here for a longer list.



The most common tag for OELVNs is “no sexual content.” A massive 76% of all ratings for OELVNs go to VNs with this tag, whereas it only applies to 23% of Japanese VNs. Another substantial change is with the protagonist’s gender, with male protagonists dominating Japanese VNs with 82% of their ratings going to such VNs, but for OELVNs it’s almost even between make and female protagonists, at 45% to 42%. Other common staples of JVNs are also thrown aside, with school settings falling from 30% in JVNs to 13% in OELVNs.



While some long-term VN fans may be aghast at these changes, it’s an exciting time for those of us who appreciate VNs for their stories as original stories are born in variety. OELVNs are shaping up to be substantially different than their Japanese forebears, and that means new types of stories.



But it’s not just the OELVN scene that’s changing, we can see some changes in the Japanese market too. The old expectation on how long a VN should be, with most lying between 10 and 30 hours, is no longer true.



This change is even more pronounced when tracking the fandom’s preferences. VN fans are reading far fewer medium length VNs, splitting themselves between those who prefer longer content and those going for shorter experiences.

We’ll delve into this more in future posts, but to give a teaser of what’s to come, we can also use the user ratings data to track the fandom’s change in genre preferences. The graph below groups the tags associated with a genre together to see how popular they are. While drama seems to be falling out of style, science fiction is becoming much more popular.

In the next post of this series (due in couple of weeks), we’ll be delving into trends with protagonists. Male vs female protagonists, and what type of content tends to be associated with each. If you have any suggestions or would like to know more about this analysis, please get in touch via the ask me anything button or via my reddit account, /u/the_bunny_advocate.

This analysis has been a team effort, a huge thank you goes out to /u/8cccc9, Part-time Storier, and /u/tauros113 for their help and advice.

More raw data, tag lists and a list of the Western VNs used in this analysis, is available in the accompanying reddit post here.

