Seeing as downloads equals purchases here, we can infer that means that indeed Sakura Spirit was the bestselling English Visual Novel on Steam released in 2014. The first deals with a title I have beaten into a bloody mass of broken bones for nearly a year now: Sakura Spirit. Now, to a certain degree a lot on this list is surprising.
Go! Go! Nippon! My First Trip to Japan – 95,007.With that said, here are the visual novels in Ars Technica’s data listed by the numbers of estimated owners: There were also games including on Ars Technica’s list that I am not including here because their status as a ‘visual novel’ is more grey than black and white and I wanted as narrow of a focus here as possible. Ars Technica ranked their list by the most players, so please keep that in mind in reading both of our lists. Although, we will analyze the disparity between ownership and actual popularity in another forum. The larger picture is, if Ars Technica is in a comfortable margin of error, what does their data say about the visual novel genre? (Well, at least on Steam anyway.)įor the benefit of this discussion, I am only listing the games and the number of ‘owners’ since it refers to an actual transaction while ‘players’ in the data is a statistic to a particular game’s popularity. This type of work always as an error percentage attached to it, but the larger picture isn’t whether or not they are exactly right. I encourage everyone to read both the introduction to Ars Technica’s algorithm here as well as the full article on their four hundred game list and methodology here to better understand their report. On that list were several visual novels and this brings us here today. Using this algorithm, Ars Technica developed a list of the four-hundred most downloaded games on Steam of 2014. Their solution was an algorithm that creates a sample of several hundred thousand members of Steam to estimate game downloads, hours played, etc.
To the best of my knowledge, Steam doesn’t give the data to anyone but the publishers of the games and where other sales platforms such as Desura, Micro BMT, Itch.io and Gumroad stand on it all is currently unknown at this time. So, for us, the question becomes how? How do you study hidden data? Luckily for us, at least when it comes to Steam, the website Ars Technica asked themselves the same questions. To date, only Winter Wolves and Moacube have been willing to share that particular data. The entire discussion revolved around our opinion on the quality of the games released, when the question we should have both asked at the time dealt in hard numbers. My friend and the Queen’s Favorite Son Chris Tenarium had long discussion last year on whether or not 2014 was a bad year for visual novels.
And, whether people like it or not, visual novels are now a market in the West just the same as their independent and AAA siblings. While this is a great measure of personal and collective growth, it is a poor indicator for a market. This year, I will be broadening that particular area as well as we try to pierce the heaviest veil surrounding this particular corner of gaming: sales and downloads.įor most of its existence as a genre, the health of the EVN community had been judged by two things: whether or not groups or individuals completed a project and the quality of said project on release. I’ve spent several months last year trying to bring more transparency to the EVNs that have been put on public crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo. I’ll cover my experiences with it in a future post.Moving forward, VNs Now will be taking the business side of this particular genre/medium a bit more seriously. Feel free to check out the step by step manual here. Now I have found 2 possible options that still work in 2020 and would like to share them with you all □ĮDIT: After I published this post, I found that there have been improvements to the Cheat Engine workaround and it can be considered a valid alternative to ITHVNR/Textractor for tricky games. Back in 2014 the closest thing I had found was this awseome person’s blog where they made a custom text hooker exclusively for Daiya no Kuni no Alice and a more general workaround using Cheat Engine. I have been looking for VNR alternatives for a long time even when VNR was alive because of how resource intensive it was. Eventually there was a new server, but the software is still outdated and buggy, and windows 10 updates broke the program for me and many others. Until a few years back ,a lot of people including myself used VNR for this purpose, but after some time VNR support for PPSSPP came to a halt, and eventually the its server died (the offline program was partially dependent on it). Extracting JP text from PSP games running on PPSSPP emulator was considered to be only a pipedream until the amazing Jiichi added PPSSPP support to his text hooker program Visual Novel Reader (VNR) back in July 2014.