The short lifespan of an erogamer
No, I’m not saying we’ll die soon, but apparently, some statistics seem to say that on average, the length of time that someone who starts playing visual novels/eroge, until they stop purchasing, is roughly 5 years. On average, blahblah, and it’s not like they fall off the face of the planet, they just slowly distance themselves, probably from being busy etc. That’s life.
Where am I pulling these numbers? Well, not from any fact book, but from hearsay. That is, the Oct 1st post of NekonekoSoft’s MMR blog. The entry was written by Kataoka Tomo, the original scenario writer/director of Nekonekosoft, so he has the industry connections and interest to know these numbers.
In the post, he looks back thinking that the original works that made NekoNekoSoft famous, Gin’iro, Mizuiro, are now over 5 years old, meaning that they’ve slipped out of the collective memories of the population, as old people move on, and new ones come in.
What’s this mean to us? Well, we of the VN translation community work on a long timeframe, in that a project can easily take 2-3 years to complete (if not more). We’re riding on the outer edge of the collective memory of games.
Although that’s not much of a problem in that the English side of the world doesn’t have such a collective memory, there’s no doubt that the impact of what we do diminishes as everyone slowly forgets the game we’ve spent so long on fades away.
That said… I’m entering … my 6th year playing these games… And while it’s true that I’ve gotten busier and have less time to play, I’ve no intention of disappearing… So here’s to contributing to the other end of the average!