Could we use amounts of steam reviews to roughly find out the success VNs on steams compared to each other?

[bakauchuujin]

I think it would be interesting to have some idea of how successfull different VNs on steam are compared to each other and wonder if comparing amount of reviews on steam would be a way to do this. There are for instance some interesting patterns I have seen just looking at it quickly, like MG generally having low amount of reviews on their titles compared to the popularity on vndb. By this I mean low amount of reviews compared to many other VNs of that usually have lower amounts of vndb votes. Nekonyan seems to have done pretty well so far in terms of amount of reviews, at least compared to many other VNs and SP seem to have a large variation. I of course know that directly equating number of reviews to sale is not really accurate since things like length will determine how quickly they read it, controversial titles might get more reviews compared to readerbase etc. However I wonder if it is still accurate enough to give a decent understanding of sales regarding large differences in reviews, like 300 reviews vs 100 reviews. Unless I hear a good argument against it, I think I might want to try to look into amount of reviews for many titles on steam to look for general patterns. By doing this I think we might get a better picture of the steam VN readerbase and I think it would then be interesting to think if there is a chance for us who are more knowledgable about VNs to inform them about good companies and titles that are generally overlooked on steam.

Edited November 23, 2018 by bakauchuujin

[onorub]

Are you sure @bunnyadvocate hasn't done something like this already?

[bakauchuujin]

17 minutes ago, onorub said:

Are you sure @bunnyadvocate hasn't done something like this already?

Nope not sure, it might have been done before. Didn't know about it though.

Edit: If you mean (see link under)

 

my idea would be quite different. That mainly focuses on the different types if VNs, while I would like to focus on differences between companies as well as individual titles. Also I would list the individual amount of reviews for each title rather than making an overall sales trend. 

Edited November 23, 2018 by bakauchuujin

[Nandemonai]

This is an easily-gamed metric.  It's decently useful, but definitely not perfect, because of review bombing and other such shenanigans.  (For example, there was that one game Sekai Project had to kill stone cold dead because they caught the dev hiring paid reviewers.)

[LemiusK]

I think it's more practical to rely on sales numbers rather than reviews, specifically because of what Nandemonai stated: reviews aren't reliable, especially on Steam. They're the equivalence of YouTube comments.

[bakauchuujin]

1 hour ago, LemiusK said:

I think it's more practical to rely on sales numbers rather than reviews, specifically because of what Nandemonai stated: reviews aren't reliable, especially on Steam. They're the equivalence of YouTube comments.

The problem with this is that sales numbers are not really available, well there are some leaks that has happened before but this data will not really include the VNs released after the leak and it also only counts achievements which not all VNs have.

[Decay]

Reviews are not a good measure of success, no. I would not waste your time combing through the reviews counts for all the VNs.

[Freestyle80]

Steam Reviews for VNs are horrible, look at KonoSora ones and you'll see why

[tahu157]

Versus looking at Steamspy?

[bakauchuujin]

1 hour ago, tahu157 said:

Versus looking at Steamspy?

Isn't steamspy broken now though?

[tahu157]

7 hours ago, bakauchuujin said:

Isn't steamspy broken now though?

Just looked. Guess you have to support them on patreon for specific numbers now. That's lame.

[Hetzer123]

.

Edited October 2, 2019 by Hetzer123

[Nandemonai]

No, they really couldn't, for the same reason you can't use them to gauge popularity.