Greetings Terrans! The results for our 2024, post-release survey are here!
To get answers, we posted the newsletter advertising our survey in the places players were most likely to have supported us: Steam, itchio, Kickstarter, Patreon and our Discord server. Unlike our 2022 survey, we did not advertise the survey on Twitter and other social media.
Survey results never 100% reflect reality. If you took the time to answer our survey, it's probably because you fit most of the following characteristics:
- You bought The Symbiant through Steam, itch, GOG or Kickstarter
- You BOUGHT the game. And PLAYED it.
- You read our newsletters
- You are curious and you know more about The Symbiant that the average player
- Because you are more knowledgable, you made sure to play The Symbiant's un-cut version
- Because you are more knowledgable, you did not buy The Symbiant through Google Play
- You are fluent in English or Simplified Chinese (we used machine translation)
- If the 200+ loving messages we received at the end of the survey are any indication, you really like us!
A lot, perhaps more than half of The Symbiant players do not fit this description at all and therefore never saw our survey, so they cannot share their insights with us. Nonetheless, we gathered a lot of useful information thanks to the 684 people who answered!
Where The Symbiant players come from
The most prominent players' countries were:
- United States (163)
- China (134)
- Germany (47)
- Russia (46)
- Taiwan (27)
- Canada (23)
- France (21)
- Korea (20)
The 3 largest groups of respondents are from East Asia, then North America, then Western Europe. This is consistent with the sales statistics we've found on Steam, but not other stores (itchio, GOG, Kickstarter) which are less popular among East Asian users.
Player demographics
1/3 of The Symbiant players are men, which is more than the ~20% I've seen in other BL demographics surveys we've observed. Without surprise, women remain the majority of our players. A player's gender and location will also affect how they discover and interact with the game, as you will see in further statistics.
More than 80% of The Symbiant players are between 18 and 34 years old. The East Asian group is a bit younger and leans more toward "18-24" while other players from other regions reported "25-34" more.
The best boy (or girl)
To the surprise of nobody, Brahve is officially the sexiest character of The Symbiant! Male respondents are more than twice more likely than women to vote Danya as the sexiest The Symbiant character, perhaps because his face and physique feels more familiar and "manly" than Brahve. Despite that however, men still voted Brahve more than Danya.
If we split the "sexiest character" votes by region, we notice that North Americans are 15% more likely than East Asians to find Brahve sexy. Oatith is also more popular in East Asia than anywhere else... maybe they liked the bad ending more?
Personality-wise, Danya is the most loved character across all regions. Juniper also received a lot of love, especially from East Asian and gender-nonconforming fans. Important and positive female characters aren't very common in Japanese BL, but you will see them a lot if you play Western BLs.
The most desired features for future games
When asked what features The Symbiant players wanted to see the most in future games, "A longer story with 15+ hours of playtime" and "3 or more romanceable characters" were the most common requests. Both requests could be boiled down to: "we want more content".
We expected "Fun gameplay mechanics" to be more popular, but perhaps it makes sense for visual novel enthusiasts to be satisfied by VNs the way they are without wishing for extra mechanics. As for "Both English and Japanese voice acting", we expected to see more votes from Asian players. In the end, only Japanese respondents (4 out of 12) voted this option more prominently. We can conclude that most people are fine with just English voice acting.
"Animated scenes" is probably the most expensive option if we want to do it properly, and finding an animator or animation studio willing to do BL won't be easy. "Gameplay" beyond simple point-and-click mechanics would be the most time-consuming endeavor, for we would need to learn new skills and fix more bugs than in a simple visual novel. Both options are nonetheless within the realm of possibility.
Many The Symbiant players praised the game's illustrations and voice acting. The only reason we could maintain this quality from the first to last scene was thanks to the games' short length. Everything has a price, and our budget, especially at the time, was limited. At the end of the day, we can't promise you anything. But because of The Symbiant and Re:Union's success, we will have more budget to keep making the kind of BL games we enjoy.
Preferred platforms
Because most survey respondents discovered The Symbiant through PC platforms, it is no surprise that 90% of respondents wish to still play our future games on PC. Had we been able to ask the 1800 players who purchased The Symbiant through Google Play, this number might have been different. Nevertheless, Android is the second largest requested platform, especially among East Asian players: 31% of votes versus 20% of votes from other regions.
Should we release The Symbiant on Nintendo Switch, Playstation of Xbox, we'll have to cut the tastiest scenes out. The same applies to Google Play, which is even more restrictive than other stores to an absurd degree. We are considering offering Android APKs as Steam DLCs but we wouldn't be able to provide support for every device.
How players came to know The Symbiant
More than half of respondents discovered The Symbiant through Steam! When combined with itchio, Kickstarter and the rare GOG users, almost 80% of survey respondents discoved the game from game stores. We suspect that the real number may be even higher.
Discovery through Steam is especially prevalent among East Asian players: 65% of them discovered the game there. Despite our heavy presence on Twitter and our 5000 followers, only 24 respondents (4%) reported coming from there. When combining Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, Bilibli, etc... together, a total of 12% of respondents discovered the game through social media.
Back in 2022, we launched a crowdfunding campaign through Kickstarter, where 748 individuals believed in our project and helped us fund the game. You may find it surprising, but the vast majority of Kickstarter backers discovered the game through ...Kickstarter itself. Today, Kickstarter backers are only a small portion of The Symbiant's fandom, but they are extra-motivated and more likely than average to read our news and answer our surveys, hence the 9% of responses coming from them.
"Pirated images" refer to image galleries where comic scans or illustrations are posted: MyReadingManga, E-Hentai/Sadpanda, Danbooru... While viewing a game's images doesn't necessarily mean you pirated the game, these are still "pirate" websites. Along with actual game piracy websites, these pirate sources are one way for a player to discover new games they may have never found otherwise.
Less than 9% of survey respondents had their BL games virginity taken by The Symbiant, with similar numbers across region, gender and age. For this small group, we are honoured to be your first BL game experience, and hope you will enjoyed many other BL games in the future!
Here are some random other facts we've learned from survey answers:
- 9% of respondents did NOT play the "mature" version of the game
- Players with no prior BL game experience were less likely to have played the "mature" version
- Most cited reasons were: "I couldn't find it" (38%) and "I didn't know it exists" (35%)
- More than 50% of these players nonetheless found "mature" CGs on the internet
- In reality, Steam statistics showed us that less than half of The Symbiant players installed the "mature" version.
- One person asked where she could find the "mature" version for Google Play. Google Play does not allow "mature" content.
- "Hong Kong" is listed as a top source of sales for us, but only 3 Hong Kongers answered the survey
- Several Korean respondents thanked us for adding a Korean translation to the game.
This concludes our survey results. We hope you found them interesting and we are looking forward to sharing more cool news and fun facts with you! :D