Hello everyone! The long-awaited results of the Gay Furry Visual Novel audience survey! This survey received a total of 556 responses! You can look at it all here and here. Here's also the assets for the survey which includes all the sketches for the body types and the descriptions for the character archetypes, both of which aren't visible in the results page. The link also contains a csv file for those who want to play around with the data. That's a lot of data, so this should be useful to some people. Thank you, everyone, for taking the survey and sharing it around, this will certainly help the community in small but impactful ways. Please look at the results while reading the blog, the blog is divided into the same sections the survey had to make things easier to follow along. In this blog, I'll be comparing the new results with both the original 2020 survey and the Bara audience survey I did in 2022. Please keep in mind that those two surveys had more respondents, with the original having over 1.7k respondents. As for the reason, I'm guessing it's due to social media having less reach nowadays plus some of the bigger members of the community not sharing the survey, but I'm not exactly sure why. 

This doesn't have anything to do with the survey but if you have been reading By Your Hands, I'm hosting a little Q&A session in celebration of Owen's route now being updated. Send your questions here. Anyway, let's get on with the results.

But before we get on with that, I wanted to mention that the description of the survey says that there are over 100 multiple-choice questions plus some free-form questions. This came as a suggestion from someone who said that the long length of the survey would be daunting for most people so it would be good to give a small heads up just so that people would either be more prepared or wouldn't get frustrated taking a survey they didn't know how long it would be. Maybe there were fewer respondents because of that, but I have no evidence of that. I do have a feeling I got more quality responses as a result of that.

General Information

Over 90% of people of respondents are male. This shouldn't be a surprise as it is the gay FVN audience survey, so of course the intended audience is gay men. However, the portion of non-binary respondents is greater than in the previous two surveys, which I find interesting. On the other hand, the portion of women who took this survey is the smallest it's ever been, with only 0.7% of respondents being female. That means only four women took this survey. I would be interested in seeing a survey that targeted furry women. A question that wasn't in the previous surveys asks the respondents if they're transgender, to which over 90% said they weren't. A good 3.3% did say yes though, although 2.4% put in "prefer not to say", which is fair. Still, there are trans people in this community and we must remember that.

The next question asks about sexuality and the results mirror the 2020 survey better than the Bara survey as while the majority of respondents are gay, there is a considerable amount of people who said they were bi or pan, which might make female love interests or just characters who are interested in women less risky than one would think in this community. At the very least they have a strong niche. There's also a good amount of people who are asexual, with 6.6% of respondents answering with that, so SFW modes would be considerate for them. Another question that wasn't in the previous surveys was what romantic orientation the respondent had. Again, most people said they were gay, but a good amount of people said they were bi, pan, or aro, although fewer people said they were aro than they were asexual.

The ages of respondents are what you'd normally expect, with most respondents being between 18-and 30. If you have noticed, the age grouping here is different from the previous surveys. This is due to me talking to someone and them saying that the age grouping of previous surveys was arbitrary and this was a more standard way of grouping ages. Of course, very few people over 35 ended up taking the survey. The Bara survey indicates that the ages within the 18-30 age range are equally spread out, although the 25-34 group has a higher range of ages and it's still smaller than the 18-24 group, so that probably indicates something. For some reason, the 2020 survey has a much larger percentage of people in the 18-21 range. My observation was that the FVN community boomed around 2020, gee I wonder why, and while it's still growing with new members, it's at a slower rate which means there are more older members of the community. As for the portion of respondents who said they were minors, don't fret. The survey takes you straight to the end of the survey if you put in that you're under 18. I just couldn't reveal that to the public lest I got minors lying about their age to take a survey that asks you what sexual preferences you like. 

Over half of the people taking the survey are from North America, with the second most common being Western Europe. After that, we got South America and South/Southeast Asia, two regions where a good amount of notable FVN creators are from. For the record, South Asia and Southeast Asia aren't similar regions demographically, those two regions are just usually two regions that don't typically have large demographics when it comes to English language fiction, so I just ended up smooshing them into one. Hopefully no one minded, although next time I will separate them. I was expecting East Asia to be more common, especially with the healthy community the Chinese audience has with FVNs but I guess it didn't reach them.

I don't think the way people found this survey needed but most people found this survey through Discord, Reddit, or itch.io. Discord was the platform I pushed the most on, with people on different servers sharing the survey and pinning it on channels. I think the big thing this question shows is that Twitter/X doesn't have a lot of reach compared to other platforms. 

Social media usage among respondents isn't too wild. The most used sites are YouTube, Discord, and Twitter in that order. People underestimate YouTube as even if videos don't give immediate attention, they can boost traffic to your stuff in the long term due to the algorithm recommending videos that are years old. Does that mean you should become a YouTuber? Probably not, but consider asking established FVN YouTubers to read your VN. Reddit is high but lower considering how many residents said they found the survey through the website, which is quite interesting. Bluesky and Telegram are lower down but still have considerable audiences. If you are a dev and you're trying to cultivate an audience, please pay attention to what social media FVN readers are using as that's where they'll find your work.

Body Types

There's a lot of discussion to be had on what kinds of bodies the GFVN audience enjoys that's not often discussed among the community. I don't think a lot of people, creators or readers alike, don't think too much about body types. It's usually just "This type of body makes me happy" or something. However, with the following results, we can gain a few interesting insights.

One thing to note is that the results are split between the main character and the love interest. It's implicit that "main character" just refers to the POV character, and I think most people filled out the questions thinking that, but it can also refer to any major character that a story revolves around. Because of this split, the results might look a bit different from previous surveys. There's no option for side characters because I don't think it's relevant or super necessary to know what body type a side character has.

Another thing to note is that each of the body types has their sketches associated with them. Those might have affected the results a little as there's a visual reference for what the body types look like. As mentioned, they are viewable in the assets link above.

The results are considerably different from previous surveys, with a few exceptions, probably due to the factors I just mentioned. Average, Twink, Femme, Chubby, and Fat aren't as disliked as they were in previous surveys while Ripped, Strongman, and Musclechub aren't as popular, making for overall more even results across the different types. The biggest change was that feral is universally disliked when compared to the 2020 survey in which it was more mixed. I think the MC/LI split caused the results for feral to drop so much due to the distaste for zoophilia, although the survey wasn't asking how attractive you find the body type.

Generally speaking, the results for the MC body types were more mixed, with answers leaning closer to the middle. I can see why this is, as the MCs are usually characters that are attractive but not meant to attract you, rather being more like stand inside for the reader even if they aren't a blank slate.

The most popular body types were bear, musclechub, chubby, and strongman, while the the least popular were feral, femme, and twink. I wouldn't recommend making the love interest of your VN, if there is one, into a body type you aren't into just because people like it because there's a fanbase for pretty much any body type out there. Still, if you want to give the people what they want, you have the answers here.

For species, we have the results split into three groups: main characters, love interests, and in general. Like with body types, MC results hover around the middle, LI results are stronger, and the general results are somewhere in the middle, being closer to the LI results.

I don't think the results are going to surprise anyone in the FVN community; canines, bears, and felines are the most popular; bovines, porcine, and mustelids aren't too far behind; primates, amphibians, and birds are a lot more mixed in comparison. A big thing to note here is that reptiles are pretty liked among the respondents, with almost half of them saying they love them. I did bunch together lizards, dragons, and dinosaurs into one category, which might explain the positive results, but overall they are more popular than what you'd believe if you look at the number of scalie characters in FVNs. 

Humans are a fickle bunch. There's a notable group of respondents who hate them in FVNs, but most are neutral about them, with a good amount not minding one being a love interest. Predictably though, humans were rated the highest as the main character.

Comparing this to the 2020 survey, there's not much to talk about, the results are pretty similar all things considered. The only two things I'll note are that bovines are less popular in these results and both porcines and mustelids are a tad more popular.

Character Archetypes

For archetypes, there is no MC/LI split because most of these aren't going to be the main POV character, and the ones that can be the MC aren't going to have a significant response between whether they're the protagonist or the LI. Another thing is that all of these have their own sample of dialogue below them, to give people an idea of what type of character this is. You can see what they were in the link for the assets. I have no idea what effect they had on the results.

A few interesting things I noticed comparing these results to the previous surveys: a lot of the results in this survey are similar to results of previous surveys just slightly less one-sided. One funny exception I noticed is that the closeted bigots have more favorable results than in the Bara survey, although it's still pretty mixed.

The most popular archetypes are masculine, daddy, himbo, and papa wolf. So if you want the ultimate husbando, you have to have a masculine, himbo, daddy who cares a lot about his children. The least popular are smokers and vanilla protagonists. Most of the other ones are fairly mixed, but one character type I'll mention is the red flags boyfriend. I included that mostly as a joke so it's really funny seeing the results being evenly spread. The only way this could have been a more accurate representation of the FVN community is if there were very few 3s and a lot of 1s and 5s.

Wrapping this section up, very few people see the protagonist of an FVN to be simply a surrogate character. Roughly 60% of respondents see them as a mix of a surrogate for the reader and their character. Making the MC their unique character with their character arc can be well worth the payoff, but you do have to keep in mind that it's their perspective the player is following, doubly so if the game is written in first person. They must be relatable or at least in sync with the player in terms of what they know of the setting and how they react to events within the story.

Tropes and Plotlines

There's not a lot to say here. The results are similar to the results from the Bara survey, the main exception being the tragic romance being only mixed versus having universal hate in the other survey. The most popular ones are enemies to lovers and age/power gap romances while people dislike homewrecking.

The world building is also important for a lot of people, although there are more 4s than 5s, so it's not too overwhelmingly important overall.

Then we get to content warnings and oh boy is this a spicy meatball. This was an optional question and as you can see, only 394 respondents put anything down on this question. This means that around 145 respondents, or roughly 26.9% of all respondents wouldn't avoid any VNs specifically because of content that makes them uncomfortable, which I'd say is a good thing. Violence and Mental Illness got very few responses while Incest and Child Abuse got picked by a lot more respondents. All the other default options got around a similar amount of responses. Mental Illness might sound weird as a content warning but it's more so that people might be uncomfortable dealing with trauma relating to mental illness when it's depicted in a dramatic way in fiction. Incest being the second most common response is funny considering something a little later in the survey, but we'll get to that soon enough.

Now I was told I shouldn't have so many free-form questions and I thought they just meant questions without multiple choices, but this question allowed you to put in any response you want and there were a lot of custom answers put in. I think I'll skim down the amount of questions with optional free-form answers in future surveys. Some people put in stuff that's less "This upsets me" and more "I hate this and I don't want to see this anymore". So I got gems like "Isekai story with Human main character with Wolf love interest", "flat main characters and only twink love interests", "Incontinence", "SFW", "skibidi toilet", and "A bland 'I wish Disco Elysium was about a little witch in the alps trying to find her cat uwu' cuteness." More serious free form answers usually say they don't like gore, politics, and extreme fetishes like scat or vore. But a lot of them say that they're fine with any content as long as the work doesn't glorify anything immoral and it's handled with tact, which is perfectly reasonable. 

Going into the next question, most respondents value content warnings  Devs, don't be afraid of writing more "intense" content, but do remember to handle certain topics with care and make sure to put a proper content warning for your VN.

On a much brighter note, the endings respondents liked are pretty interesting. People had a positive response to making the world a better place, going on more adventures similar to the story, and especially getting to marry the love interest. People are pretty mixed about being rich and famous. My insight says that people like endings that make the most sense for finishing the character's arc as a lot of more positively rated ones fit being the end for a strong character arc (except for having lots of sex but I can understand why people liked that one).

Sexual and Adult Content

Elvira knows what's up (Source: Elvira: Mistress of the Dark)

Most people like protagonists that are verse. It's the "porque no los dos" approach to sex in gay VNs. That said, the bottom only is slightly more popular than the top and the sub-bottom is the most popular out of the subs and doms. Knowing this, it shouldn't be a surprise that Top Only and Dom Top LI are the most popular alongside Verse LI. Closet Sub and Closet Dom are fairly liked, with Closet Sub edging out a little. People are pretty fond of non-penetrative sex. The Yaoi style is very much hated while most people like bara.

This one's fascinating: most people want a balance between length and frequency when it comes to sex scenes but more people want longer, infrequent sex scenes than there are who want a lot of short sex scenes. I think there's a lot of importance placed on sex that feels impactful as cheesy as that sounds. The next question is pretty similar with most wanting a balance between lustful and affectionate with more people wanting more affectionate, romantic scenes.

Surprisingly, people enjoy playing as a character who has a different sexual position they are. There's a lot of drama that goes on with love interests being the top/bottom when they want them to be exclusively a bottom/top, so this is good to see.

In this next question, the most popular pick is the penis, with the face and pecs being distant second and third respectively. Also a lot of love for the belly. I don't get why the ass is so low. Is it because I split it into cheeks and holes? Anyway, there were a bunch of free-form answers but I don't find them particularly note-worthy so moving on.

As for when people want erotic scenes to start happening, most people are fine with them taking a while to get to that point, but there are a considerable portion of respondents who want them a lot sooner.

For kinks, you might not like the answers lmao. The most popular kinks are size difference, intense orgasms, and, of course, musk. Out of the defined options, fisting, cross-dressing, and macros are the least popular. A couple of things I wanted to point out. Non-consent is more popular than spanking and feet, which I found enlightening. Also, remember when I said there was something funny about incest being a common thing people avoid? Well, more people say that incest is their fetish than there are people who get the ick by it. That also means that incest turns roughly a third of respondents off, and another third on, which I find pretty hilarious. Feet being low despite being a rather common kink in the world reminds me of an off-hand comment I've seen once about how furries are much more likely to admit they're into incest, musk, and watersports before being into feet.

There were also a lot of free-form answers. Of them, male pregnancy, hypnosis, and vore were mentioned. A lot of different kinks have their audiences in the furry fandom so don't be afraid of showing off your freaky side.

Diversity (Women and Minorities in FVNs)

I think I can summarize this section aptly by saying that while there are a group of people who are against it, most respondents, as long as it's done well, encourage diversity even if they don't prioritize it as much as some other things. There was a lot less ambiguity with the one question that didn't ask if a visual novel was advertised with diversity and instead just included it.

General Preferences

There were a bunch of different ways respondents got into FVNs. The most common answer I got was that they saw fan content of an FVN and got into them that way. Other common responses included that an FVN came up during a search for games to play, an FVN came up while looking stuff up, and they saw a CG/screenshot of the game. Not a lot of people mentioned being recommended an FVN, which I guess is par for the course with them. There are also a lot of free-form answers and I won't be going through any of them but it is nice reading about how people got into FVNs.

For genres, none of them got any more than 50% of respondents, so there's a lot of variety within genre preferences. Not surprisingly, romance is the most popular genre followed by medieval fantasy and action/adventure. Historical fiction is the least popular (hard to put furries in a historical setting), followed by comedy and drama. If you look at FVNs right now, a lot of them have a good amount of both drama and comedy, but there are very few I would describe as pure drama or pure comedy. That's what my intuition is telling me. I've seen a few people who say there are too many horror FVNs, but only just a bit over a quarter of people who have horror as their top 3 genres, so don't feel pressured to make a horror VN.

For outside media, the majority of respondents said they play non-VN video games, which makes sense. Animation is a lot more popular than live action with comics being in the middle. Non-furry VNs don't have a lot of popularity it seems. I didn't include Music because it's one of those things that can be listened to while doing other stuff so I thought that would be a given that most people would listen to music.

As an optional question, I asked what genres of video games people played. Skimming through, some notable observations are that both action and turn-based RPGs are the most popular among respondents. Generally speaking, these results differ from what the typical PC gamer and console gamer plays. RPG and adventure are common for both console and PC gamers but genres popular with PC gamers (like 4X, RTS, and Builder) as well as genres popular with console gamers (Fighting, Battle Royale) aren't big hits here, so these results are very helpful for anyone interested in making a furry game aimed at the FVN audience. Fair warning though, just because a genre is popular doesn't mean that any game within that genre is going to do well. Action RPGs might be popular, but they're not going to play your small game when they only play AAA (maybe AA) games.

Most people are split on whether they'd play an FVN with no romance or sex, with over a third of people saying it's unlikely, while most people are very likely to play an FVN with either of them. This might be discouraging for some people, but remember that just because the results for some questions are unfavorable, doesn't mean you can't find a suitable audience. Related, but contrary to what the neighsayers believe, humanxfurry is generally well-liked among respondents. You might have a vocal minority hating on you if you do such a VN, but don't let them get to you.

For the types of VNs people enjoy, choices matter VNs are the most popular but linear and kinetic VNs aren't too far behind. A lot of people enjoy additional gameplay mechanics to VNs although fewer people enjoy more mechanically involved games. They also like their VNs mature and gay. On the flip side, most respondents prefer VNs with a quality over quantity approach to routes, with less than 4% of people saying they wanted as many options as possible. This is similar to the 2020 results, however, here they skew even more towards as few routes as possible whereas the middle-of-the-road approach was more popular in the previous survey.

The ideal length of a VN varies a lot among respondents. A lot of people picked 150k-200k words and 200k-300k words but there's also a way too large group of goblins who want to spend over 80 hours in a single VN. On the one hand, it's great that a lot of readers have such patience with a VN, but this also brings the question that some people *expect* VNs to be this long, which is concerning.

The amount of VNs people have read is also telling as over 30% of respondents have read more than 30 VNs, which is wild. Compare that to the 2020 survey and only roughly 10% answered that. There have been a lot more FVNs that have been released since then. Suffice it to say, the FVN community is a hungry bunch who are willing to try out a lot of FVNs.

Going off the results from a previous question, respondents are split on whether they would read a non-furry visual novel or not. Seems like the biggest appeal of FVNs for most people is the F part, as weird as it is to say.

Most people are okay with major changes during development, with only a small minority saying otherwise. The community generally understands that a lot of FVNs are WIPs and so as long as the writing is good, people will accept a lot of things that wouldn't fly in bigger-scale projects.

For art style, people like a balance between stylization and realism. With results leaning more towards stylized. I've noticed that FVN projects usually aren't more stylized than Adastra while also not more realistic than Pervader. I can't describe it but I can tell there's a distinct style when it comes to Western FVNs. Went through the answers for the free response question and some FVNs were mentioned but a lot of animations were mentioned as well. A couple of general aesthetics were put in response. Some people were confused at the question and a couple just liked whatever.

A lot of respondents don't have a preference between wholesomeness and edginess, which is probably for the better. There is a slight edge towards wholesome stories which further enforces that horror isn't as popular in the FVN community as some people think.

For queer content, fan works were the least popular defined answer. The most popular choice was "media that doesn't necessarily focus on queer content, but prominent characters are gay/queer". The other options were evenly spread, hovering around the 50%s. My take is that FVN readers aren't too particularly concerned with how queer a work of fiction is as long as the story is so good and it has gay characters. Some of the free-form responses say as much. Also, shout out to the one guy who put in "Devil's Gambit".

As for thoughts on romance and sex in queer media, each of the defined answers got a considerable amount of responses, but the one that got the most was "I don't mind that so much of gay/queer media focuses on them." I think this is a topic a lot of people have varying opinions on. I've certainly seen someone complain once in a blue moon about the abundance of sex and romance in FVNs, however, I think most people don't care, which is a good thing. Most respondents have also said that they take NSFW stories seriously and that they want more stuff like that. I don't think that's a shock to anyone in the community, just good to see it as a nice pie chart.

A majority of people don't like AI-generated assets in FVNs with the majority discouraging the use of them, especially in writing and character art. The main exceptions are backgrounds and coding in which people are more split, but that's still a third of respondents who will refuse to play a VN if it has such assets. I'm glad to be in a community where I don't have to be worried about being replaced by AI. With that in mind, it's no surprise that the majority of respondents say it's very important creators disclose they use AI, which is kinda funny. "You have to say upfront that you use AI even though I'm never going to play your VN because you use AI." But completely understandable. My recommendation is to just not use it in your VNs, it's simply not worth the hate and ire from the community simply for something that looks slightly better than royalty-free assets at most.

The final question of this section asks if you would encourage a creator to make a living out of FVNs and respondents were mixed, with more people leaning towards no. This is understandable as it can be incredibly stressful trying to make good and consistent money off your work and it might stifle your creative energy. Keep this in mind if you ever have to decide this.

Buying Habits

More than half of respondents have bought at least one FVN, with a third saying they have bought none but would be willing to buy one if there was one that caught their interest. Weirdly enough, the results to this question are very similar to the 2020 survey despite several paid FVNs having been released after that survey had ended. I don't know what's up with that. But this is good, it tells creators that over half the community would be willing to pay for an FVN outside of Patreon. 

The vast majority of respondents prioritize good writing when it comes to what makes an FVN worth buying, with art being a close second. Romance also had a lot of responses. This is why a demo is important if you have paid VN because you need readers to know if your writing is up to par. Eye-catching art is also very important to have a successful VN. Romance seems to help a lot in terms of success.

The average price range people would be willing to pay for a VN is $5-$10, which is fair considering that's a common price for Steam games at an indie level. The average price for what they'd pay for an FVN they absolutely love is either $15-$20 or $20-$30, so around $20. There are some FVNs out there that I would price more than $20, and there are non-furry VNs that cost more than that, but I guess that is a safe price for VNs that have a lot of content and are of high quality.

Now I need to tell you guys something. Surveys might seem neutral at first but they usually have an agenda. Whatever questions that are asked in a survey tend to be there to fulfill an itch for knowledge the creator of that survey needs scratching. Or they need proof their beliefs are supported by a large group of people so they word it in a way that would cause a lot of people to pick what they want. So with this question, this was added by an acquaintance of mine for selfish reasons as he's an animator working on his own VN. Without beating around the bush, the average amount people would pay more for animations in a VN is +$10, which I'd say is fair.

The pie chart for the results here looks like a carnival lollipop. There's not an agreed-upon ideal length of a paid VN. The median seems to be 200k words, however, there are around 16% who would pay for an FVN of any length. Keep in mind though, that this is a required question for everyone (who's not a minor) and so even the people who have never bought a VN answered this question. Still, you might want to consider only making adequately beefy VNs paid to be safe.

Here's something that surprised me: almost half of respondents said their preferred monetization method was a single purchase, a stark contrast to most FVNs using the Patreon model. You might think the people who picked this option wouldn't pay for a VN at all. However, there is an option for people who would never pay for an FVN and that is around 13%. The vast majority of FVNs are either free or use Patreon as a form of monetization and only under a quarter of respondents said they had Patreon as their preferred monetization method. Now what does this mean? My take is that people want finished VNs that they can pay once and be done with instead of essentially putting their finances on a pseudo-subscription service on a novel that they aren't 100% certain will even be finished. It's more valuable for the audience and it's less stressful for developers as they don't have to constantly try to please a small but devoted audience financially supporting them. 

Now should developers stop making free games and drop Patreon so they can work on paid games? I don't think so. This is a completely personal opinion so feel free to disregard this but a lot of the FVN community is composed of low-class people, especially from developing countries, who don't have the finances to casually buy dozens of games and might not even have home computers. The Patreon model is flawed but it allows devs to make their games free to everyone with access to itch.io while having financial support from people who do have the money and want to support the projects they love. Free games can also be whatever quality the creator wants to be while paid games have a certain threshold for devs to meet. Raising the budgets of FVNs and forcing people to pay for the full game is bound to make a lot of people unhappy. That being said, a gentrification of the FVN community will only happen if paid VNs become the norm. A couple of paid VNs aren't going to be a big deal. I think once FVN developers find their footing within the community, they can make paid FVNs and while they're not going to appeal to the entire community, you will find at least a good amount of people who will buy your game.

After that long-ass response, here's a question I have less to say about lmao. More people prefer buying FVNs on itch.io than on Steam. Also, I put in "both" as a joke, but for some reason, almost 15% of respondents picked that. Maybe they meant they'd buy one on either storefront depending on the situation but it's still funny to me. Anyway, I think the reason why itch is more popular is because more FVNs are on there, there's (usually) no DRM (short for Digital Rights Management), and some people don't want their friends to know they're playing a gay furry game. That's really about it.

The deluxe version of free VNs is pretty uncommon, but they do exist at least outside of the furry space. The more common responses say that the deluxe version shouldn't include any content that ought to be in the base game, but they would buy it either if the extra content was interesting enough or if they wanted to show support to the devs, which I think is completely fair. Options that are against the idea are a lot less common.

Remember what I said about surveys being a product of the creator's dirty little intentions to get the results they want? This question was to reinforce how important a demo for a paid VN is. Go back and read why it's important to keep having free games and you'll understand why I strongly encourage demos of VNs. If you don't have any way to offer your potential audience a free sample of your VN then how is anyone supposed to know how good your writing is? Just do it so my very biased brain will be happy.

Third of people have never pirated a VN. Another third might pirate a VN in the future if there's a VN they're unsure about paying for. And then the remaining third for various reasons, with the most common being a lack of money. Discourage people from pirating your VN but don't worry too much about people pirating it. Some people turn to unsavory means of obtaining media for various reasons and there's not much you can do to stop them without hurting the people who pay fairly for your work. That being said, readers should avoid piracy whenever they can. If there's a paid game you want to play but you don't have the money or buying adult media is difficult for you, watch a playthrough or ask a friend if you can watch them play through the game. If you do have the money and nothing's stopping you, then either buy it or just don't bother with the VN at all, you dummy.

For merch, most people just want plushies. The others are not as popular but they still have a bunch of popularity. Some of the free-form answers are interesting. I liked the people who mentioned dildo merch.

Patreon Habits

Around 47.9% of respondents are a patron supporter of at least one FVN so the rest of this section is only going to contain them. These questions that ask the respondent to put in an amount are hard to parse so I'm just going to say that a third are supporting 2-3 projects, almost a quarter are supporting just 1, while over a quarter are supporting 4-6 projects. Limiting to just FVNs, the majority of people only support 1-3 projects. This is one reason why Patreon monetization can be risky: there's so much competition but most people can only support 3 at most at a time. Almost half of respondents (at least the ones who answered this question) don't pay anymore than $10 per month, with 30% only paying around $10-$20. This isn't surprising considering how much that can get out of control.

Over half of people said that $4-$5 is a fair amount to be charged for early access to Patreon builds, while almost a third said it should be $1-$3. It's surprising to me that most people found the $4-$5 range to be a fair price considering most people I've seen are hesitant about becoming a patron for an FVN so it's good that the higher price range is considered fair by a lot of people. If you are planning to do a Patreon for your game, don't be afraid of having a $5 tier be the cheapest tier that gets you the early access build.

Most respondents are patrons because they want to support a project and get early access builds. Honestly, you should hone in on these two things to get people to support you as you'll figure out naturally what your patrons would pay more money for throughout development.

Most people are understanding when creators take an unpaid break for a month to recharge. I don't have much to say. Unless you are relying on Patreon money for income, take a break when you need to.

Conclusion

Most people are optimistic about the future of FVNs, which is great! Always great to see people being open-minded about the future.

I've read every free-form response and there are a bunch of common responses. Some people want more player choice in VNs, some people want fewer human MCs, some people want more active MCs, some people want more top MCs, some people want fewer wolves and more reptiles, and some people want more consistent scheduling. But the biggest thing I took from the responses is that people want creators to write what they want and not change their VNs to appeal to other people. They also don't want the VNs to prioritize on stuff like visuals over the writing. But most importantly, they don't want VNs to get abandoned. They want to trust that a creator is going to finish their VN eventually and not be blindsighted by a work they love ceasing production. We must take steps to prevent projects from entering development hell. A good way to do this is by cutting the scope of projects and making shorter VNs. Read the responses, they're pretty insightful. I've only shown you a couple before.

Lastly, we have the list of FVNs. Here you can see which VNs are the most read among respondents. I'm not going to say much about the results themselves as they're pretty self-explanatory. What I am going to say is that if you're going to look at individual responses, it might be worth it to look at what VNs they have read as that can majorly majorly impact how they see FVNs as a whole and what their tastes. This is also helpful if you are making a VN that's similar to another popular FVN and you want to see what fans of that FVN are saying. Now I did a few oopsies with this question. A few VNs were added later after people started already putting in responses. The majority of VNs were taken from itch.io where I filtered out the games that had all three following tags: "gay", "furry", and "visual novel". Then I ordered them from the most rated to least rated and picked roughly the top 190 and then added some FVNs I knew weren't on itch.io like Knights College and Chardonnay Romantica. Some VNs didn't show up because of that. Rusty Punk wasn't put into the list until after like 50 responses because it didn't show up in the top 200. Cleaved and When The Stars Fall were combined as one choice until I fixed around 200 responses. Remember the Flowers and Northern Lights didn't have the gay tag so I didn't add them to the list until 200 responses for RTF and roughly 300 for NL. RTF is notable because if I only included the responses the VN was included in the list, 54.1% of them have read RTF, which would put it in the top five, and that's an underestimate. I am greatly sorry for this mistake, I'll make sure not to repeat this in future surveys.

Holy Hell Was This Long Can You Just Give Me The TLDR?

What did we learn from this survey? A lot, but to keep things brief, here's a few important things to keep in mind:

1. GFVN audience tastes haven't changed much from two or four years ago. What has changed is that they have read and seen more FVNs which means there's a wider variety of stuff they're willing to accept.
2. You cannot get everyone to like your VN, even within the FVN community. The community has a lot of niches within it, all of them with their sub-communities. While there are several things the majority of people can agree on, a good amount of questions respondents were overall split on. There is no one FVN community, but rather a web of several FVN communities. Find your niche and stick to it.
3. What people want more than anything from FVNs is to see the creator make what they're passionate about. They have their preferences, sure, but they want creators to express themselves and create art that shows who they are. Not everyone is going to like it, but it's better than trying to play it safe and only making FVNs that appeal to a large audience.
4. Many people have zero tolerance for VNs AI-generated assets regardless of how little they are present within the game.
5. Around half of FVN readers are willing to pay for games, but there's also almost half of readers who simply cannot pay for FVNs and paid games would exclude them, so it's good to make free VNs to attract an audience before making paid games.
6. People like NSFW and romance, so VNs that lack either are going to have a harder time appealing to the FVN community.
7. Writing is by far the most important thing for readers and is often the determining factor on whether a VN is good or not for them. Prioritize that before anything else. After that, art is the next most important thing.
8. Finish projects. VNs with bloated scope are much more likely to cause burnout so make sure you're able to tackle a project that's within your capabilities of completing.
9. Most people like bear bodies, daddies, himbos, canines, felines, bears, and dom tops, but that doesn't mean those are the only things FVN players will read about. Don't feel like you have to write your VN a certain way in order for it to find success, as there FVN fans who are passionate about less loved, but still popular, subjects. Himbo dom daddy wolves are great but that doesn't mean the intellectual verse chubby mouse should be ignored. 
10. Most of the community supports what you're doing, so just have fun.

I'd like to finish things off by putting in a few comments some respondents put in. Some of these are encouraging, some a bit critical, some funny, but a lot of them are trying to support devs in what they do. There's a lot here so I put some of the more interesting ones in a collapsable section right below:

That took a while to get done but I'm glad you read it anyways! I hope this data is useful for you guys. Have a good day and see you later!