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March 25 Update + Country Demographics (Patreon)

Published:
2017-03-25 18:45:39
Edited:
2017-03-31 21:49:28
Imported:
2021-07

Content

Early update to maximize schedule productivity!

I've made some good progress on 0.26.0. My notes came together well and I actually got a decent number of maps made - that's more than I would normally have done a week after the public release. Just because I was inspired, though, I'm also going to take some time for fun things, starting now:

It's time to talk about the demographics survey I mentioned last week. I wanted to get people's thoughts here. Is anybody opposed to the idea of a survey? It'd all be anonymous, just to get aggregate data. I was thinking of using SurveyMonkey, unless someone has objections to that platform.

Basically, I'd just like to know more about the kind of people who support me (and I'd also do a second copy of the survey for non-patron fans). Not for marketing or anything, this sort of thing is just kind of interesting. For example, here are the top countries for TLS blog traffic:

1) USA

2) Germany

3) Canada

4) UK

5) France

6) Russia

7) Australia

8) Brazil

9) Netherlands

10) Sweden


Isn't that fun? =D For example, I'm intrigued by the fact that Germany is higher than both Canada and the UK. It's more populous and I know English is taught in schools, but that's still curious for such an English-heavy game. Perhaps it's the fact that there's a strong RPG Maker market in Germany? That's also true for Brazil and Russia, so I'm not surprised to see them in the top ten. I have no theory for why France is so high. And while Australia, Sweden, and the Netherlands are not surprising, it's neat to see they made it into the top ten. Hi, everybody!

But that's only one piece of data, and I'd like to know more. Let me know if I'm missing anything or if some of this feels invasive. It'd be choosing a multiple choice option on an anonymous survey with all questions optional; I'm just curious what the trends would be in the data. But seriously, I welcome thoughts on what should/shouldn't be asked.

[old notes]

That's what I'm thinking about right now, anyway. I think it'll be fun, feel free to provide feedback if you have strong feelings.

Comments

Morningfrost

Hey there Sierra. Of the potential questions, the only ones I'm unsure of are race and political leanings, and that's mainly because I don't know how that would help you going forward. The income question I don't have a problem with whatsoever, particularly if it's geared towards Patrons...it could be useful, for instance, to see where your various Patrons break down in terms of income vs. pledge amount. For example, you may find that Patrons over a certain income level are twice as likely to donate $10/mo as opposed to $5/mo or something like that. Not 100% sure how that would help, but very few data points are completely useless, after all. As for the rest, I imagine most of the questions would be useful to you in some way. ~Morningfrost

Anonymous

If you do conduct a survey, will you make the results public? It should be an interesting metric for others who want to get into lewdgame dev.

Wildeyes

I definitely dig the likely questions. I'm also curious to see how many people with relationships play/support this game, or games like it.

Grimwauld

Important: You need to include a way for folks to mention how/who they share the game with. My wife does not play. But she loves reading over my shoulder and sharing the game with me. I also share it with certain coworkers as an excellent example of gaming done right.

StalkerRoguen

I personally like the idea of a survey. I just think that, if possible, you should/could give the opportunity to jump certain types of questions, for example, "political leanings". While I wouldn't have a problem talking about that, there may be some people that would. PS: Perhaps you should add "religion"?

sierralee
>>4411857

I should clarify, for you and anyone reading: when I wrote "less likely" that was an indirect way of stating "very unlikely." Basically, those questions aren't going on the survey unless someone makes an argument for their inclusion, or (as in the case of the income question) a decent number of people say they're fine with it. Honestly, I'm not sure if a lot of this will be useful, I just like data. ^-^

sierralee
>>4412022

At minimum, I'd do a post on any interesting results! If I get enough respondents for the data to be worth anything, I might make it public. I also considered trying to do a general demographics survey on all the big h-game forums for use by developers in general.

sierralee
>>4412032

I'm curious too! What we really need, though, is some kind of general demographic data so you can compare the players of a given game to the larger pool of players. Hence my desire to maybe do a larger survey like I said above... but I'll do this one step at a time, not get ahead of myself.

Ripe

I think survey might be interesting. But I'm not sure how much some of those "Less likely questions" would be useful. I mean, like you said, Race is difficult to break down in multiple choice since going with Caucasoids, Negroids and Mogoloids (with possible inclusion of Australoids as 4th option) is hardly useful, but breaking it down even further is just as useless since most people probably don't have a clue what sub-group they belong to. Political leanings are another tricky one since, as we saw from last year's US elections surveys of that kind are no longer reliable. Either because people refuse to answer or even worse, because they lie and give answer they "think" surveyor want to hear. Income might be useful, but only if you have a way to tie it with pledge amount but you can't reliably do that on anonymous survey.

sierralee
>>4412267

I did give this some thought. Right now, I'm thinking that the survey should be filled out once for each individual who has an ongoing interest in the game. So your wife could fill out a survey too, which I think would be easier than trying to capture who all the game is shared with efficiently.

sierralee
>>4412897

Oh, all questions will be optional! Should probably have mentioned that in the post...

sierralee
>>4413929

See the new comment I just added: by "less likely" I meant "very unlikely." I gave my reasons why I didn't intend to include them in the post, but listed them in case there were reasons to reconsider. Regarding income: looking at SurveyMonkey, I think I can actually get useful data even on an anonymous survey. I can filter the results by one question: that is, see results only for women, only for younger players, etc. If I add a question about pledge level, that will let me compare pledges and income, assuming people are honest... but the whole survey is kind of predicated on that anyway.

AJ_Dragon

I don't mind doing a survey.

Decanter

I don't think awkwardness is a good reason not to ask about income. Giving most <i>any</i> data about oneself as a patron of pornography is going to be potentially awkward, without the guarantee of anonymity. Plus, it might be interesting to see how strong the relation is with pledge level. Also, not only do I think sexual orientation might be interesting to know, you might even break it down a little further. For example, I have straight male friends who don't really care for lesbian action at all, but they play, and I know you have a few gay males playing it for the plot. And just in general, not asking questions because you assume the answer seems like a way to miss data that might surprise you.

Lord Forte

I definitely find this stuff pretty interesting as well, so I look forward to seeing what kind of results might come of this. The questions on the likely list sound interesting... I'm particularly interested in gender spread, and maybe religion. I don't really think income/socioeconomic status is terribly awkward, though, personally, and anonymous data does predispose people toward being more candid. I have some degree of background in quantitative analysis--not sure if you do as well, but if not, I'd be happy to help to whatever degree I could in determining how much power the sample size provides and stuff like that!

Lamsey

As others have stated, if there are questions such as income levels which you'd like to include but you're not sure people will want to answer, it's common polling practice to include these kinds of questions with a "Prefer not to answer" option, so I can't imagine people would object; I certainly wouldn't. The tricky bit is currency - even if all the answers are converted into their USD equivalent, that doesn't necessarily mean much, since $10 (or local equivalent) is worth a lot more to someone in, say, India than in the States. The popular "salary in Big Macs" approach can help with this in some ways, but comes with its own problems. Also, even if you already have data from other sources, like for nationality, it'd probably still be worth including all demographic questions in a single survey, so that you can correlate all the data with all the other answers. Correlation is the thing that tends to throw up the most interesting results in survey data. For me at least, sexual orientation might actually be potentially interesting; there's a lot of lesbian and bisexual action in TLS, and yet the only person I know personally who plays TLS is a heterosexual woman, which strikes me as remarkably open-minded. I'd be stunned if the majority of straight men would be so open-minded about a game involving non-optional story scenes with bisexual or gay men. Similarly, I'd be surprised if gay men had much interest in TLS, but then again, there's a lot more to TLS than just the sex, so maybe I'm just making assumptions. Regardless, I'd be interested to know if there's a lot of straight women who nonetheless enjoy TLS, or if my friend is just an outlier. With regards to your comments on Germany and France, I think there are two factors. Firstly, the standard of English fluency in continental Europe is extremely good, chasteningly so for Britons; when I've visited France, Belgium and Germany in the past, it's been surprisingly rare for me to meet people who don't speak at least decent English, which is a lot more than can be said for my rusty high-school French (and, depressingly, the fact that I even make an effort elevates me above most Britons). I think the fact that English is the de facto lingua franca of the Western parts of the internet means that it has particularly broad reach, despite the comparatively low number of countries who speak it natively. Secondly, at the risk of making sweeping generalisations, continental Europe seems to me to be more sexually open-minded than most other regions, to the extent where prostitution is legal in a number of countries (Amsterdam in the Netherlands being the most famous example, but not the only one - brothels are also legal in Germany, and apparently in Turkey they're actually state-run). In that regard, I suspect adult games are less likely to be seen as taboo there, at least compared to the UK, where most people would have to trust someone very highly to talk openly with them about playing adult games. If you did want to include political leanings, I'd probably suggest "strongly (left/right)-wing", "(left/right)-leaning", "centrist", and maybe "not interested in politics" as the options. Ideally, you'd get people to evaluate themselves on the Political Compass (<a href="https://www.politicalcompass.org/)," rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.politicalcompass.org/),</a> but that's not realistic; most people can, however, identify themselves as sitting somewhere on the traditional left-right spectrum. This has the added benefit of inherently adjusting for differences between countries and people's ages (e.g. a US party regarded as left-wing today might be regarded as right-wing if it took the same positions fifty years ago in the US, or today in most of Western/Northern Europe). I realise that you're mainly interested in demographics here, but it would perhaps be a missed opportunity if you didn't gather some data about the game in the same survey. The real value of demographic data is when you can directly correlate it to domain-specific data, after all. At the very least, it might be valuable to include a simple question to gauge respondents' level of engagement with the game, perhaps by asking how long they've been following it, or how many playthroughs they've done; that might help you adjust for the inevitable skew of respondents towards your most enthusiastic followers. You could even include a "never played TLS" option, so as not to preclude the possibility of getting wider engagement from the adult gaming world. The thing I'd be most interested in would be breakdowns and correlations for some of the important choices in TLS, e.g. domination/reshaping of Altina and Varia, approach to the Battle Of Yhilin (maximise victory, or minimise collateral damage), priorities in investments (financial gain versus soft power versus altruism, or balance across all three), and so on. I realise a lot of these are covered by polls on the wiki, but these tend to have small sample sizes, and they can't be correlated with each other or with demographic data. For example, I wonder if there are correlations of decisions in TLS with things like gender or political persuasion (e.g. do women and/or left-wing supporters tend to have more empathetic views and make more altruistic decisions? That seems to me to be the case in YouGov Daily polls, which provide breakdowns by gender and political alignment). Another aspect that might be useful would be to ask if people feel uncomfortable with any controversial content, such as recent developments with Robin.

sierralee
>>4416203

Those are fair points. Given that other people are making arguments for those two, I think I'll add them to the list. Data data data.

sierralee
>>4416218

No real background in it, just amateur interest. Maybe we can talk again about quantitative analysis once the data is gathered! I'm not entirely certain about the religion question, myself. The draft I've written is mostly focused on varieties of irreligion (ie, atheist, agnostic, don't define), since I don't know if we'll have enough religious people to divide them into different categories. And if I DO list religions, then I feel obligated to list a whole bunch... though actually, I think I can make a question conditional on a previous answer, so maybe that would be fine.

Censuur

Seems interesting, I'd definitely suggest leaving a spot for people to maybe divulge what draws them to your game (or where they first heard about it) or maybe something like who a favorite character is. This is interesting to me at least because a lot of your characters are fairly well defined, and seeing demographics relating to certain character types more than others might be interesting, or perhaps there's no correlation at all. Regardless, it might be an interesting ask to know if what draws people to the story has any connection to which characters they like. (For example do my fellow min-maxers like similar characters, or completely different ones)

sierralee
>>4416457

I plan to mention up front that all questions are optional, so hopefully that will cover it. For income, I recognize the limitations of this, but I'm probably going to stick with USD. I think using anything different risks some degree of confusion or miscalculation, whereas I assume everyone has at least some familiarity with their income in USD because that's what they use on Patreon. On nationality, I suppose it doesn't hurt, but it does make for an unwieldy multiple choice question. I want to limit write-in options, because they'll reduce my ability to get aggregate data automatically, but I suppose I could put the top countries as multiple choice and then have an Other option. Regarding country speculation: That's all reasonable. I didn't include this in the post because I can't find the exact info, but I've seen two other NSFW devs give their statistics, and I recall Germany being far lower and France not being in the top ten at all. However, I would need more robust data on other games to know whether those countries are actually disproportionately represented. The idea of asking more TLS-specific questions is alluring, but I hesitated when considering that. Part of this is my fear that the longer the survey is, the fewer people will complete it. Then again, TLS patronage probably selects for people willing to do a lot of reading, so maybe it won't skew anything. I will give some thought as to whether to include questions along these lines.

sierralee
>>4416875

Though I do wonder if we can get a large enough sample size to do correlations of that kind, I'd be pretty pleased if we could. I remain a little uncertain about extending the survey with a lot of questions, but I'm at least considering it because it could produce fun answers.

The Biddz

Yesh, go for it! I love seeing the results of stuff like this

Anonymous

Sure, I'd be down

Darthjake

Sounds good, I'll participate, as far as politics, I'm in the US, and I feel that every political entity should serve 2 terms, 1 in office and the next in jail. :D

Markus S.

Germany is always one of those at the top when it comes to international internet participation. I'd be more surprised about France been at top 5, since the French tend to be less English affine, even though they have similar standards in wealth and education compared to other top countries in the world.

Anonymous

If you want to play a good rpg game in France, you have 2 options : you play japan rpg game with a translator tool or you play an english rpg game . So you learn to read and understand English ;) . To speak english it's another question lol.

Antonio

How the hell my Brazil is in the top ten? I know, we are populous country, but you would be surprized how so few people are actually fluent in english (despite being teached in schools, which serves for no porpouse, I learned playing video games).

Erwin

That was fun. Had to skip a few of the last questions though. Since they revolve around the game, and I'm not that far in.