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Demographics! (2025)
🕑 Added 2025-11-16 18:00:09 +0000 UTCAfter many years, it is time to talk about data again! Way back in 2017, I did a demographic survey of TLS players, and though I wanted to do it again, I've been waiting until I finished TLS. Keep reading for some crunchy numbers, fun insights, and graphics of the character popularity poll results.
First, I need to thank Grim8P for helping with the data and Lamsey for making the graphics. They both saved me immense amounts of time relative to the first survey... though this still look some unavoidable time. So last I need to thank all of you for indulging me in this distraction. ^-^
I'm going to divide this post into four sections: playerbase demographics, game data, character subcategories, and finally the big popularity polls. As I write this draft, I can only hope that the larger images can be expanded in the final post. =/ All are attached at the end just in case.
Playerbase Demographics
The first survey received 1256 responses and the new one received 1729 despite being open for less time. Though we can't guarantee the data is truly representative, I think we can take this as a fairly good sample. Regrettably, there's still no good data on players of NSFW games in general, so comparisons to the general population offer limited insight.
Unsurprisingly, TLS players remain mostly dudes, though the percentage declined from approaching 95% to approaching 90%. Trying to cut the data to analyze only the non-male responses mostly didn't get clear responses (other than unsurprising things like more bisexual women playing), and the numbers are small enough it would be easy to get distortions.
Likewise, orientation is unsurprising. I note that while all four of the smaller categories increased proportionally from the first time, they remain in exactly the same ranked order. In any case, I didn't notice any consistent category differences, likely because people play TLS for many reasons other than the sexual content.
The playerbase is a little older than in the first survey and I wonder how much of that is just the same people aging up. XD We have 32 players over 50 and 9 over 60!
So many different countries and languages represented! The common tendency is to focus on the top responses, which are what you'd expect (in ranked order on the right), but I was surprised by just how many different places were present. These were two open fields that I didn't clean up, so sadly I don't have data on exactly how many.
When it comes to relationship status and children, drawing conclusions would require both population-level data as well as specific information about NSFW gamers. These numbers barely changed at all from the previous poll, interestingly.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of TLS players are irreligious. This is another category I didn't try to clean up, due to the sheer diversity of different things people might fill in and the judgment calls that would be required to group them.
Another place where I wish I had data for comparison, but I'll indulge myself a little here, because it seems like TLS players are an educated bunch. Numbers vary, but approximately 40% of American adults have a college degree. Combining all higher degree categories, TLS players have 54%, with an additional 14.4% currently studying!
It's hard to know what to make of this data due to lack of points of comparison. How many people in the general gamer population would say they "frequently" play adult games? How many adult games have 10% of people who say they "rarely or never" do? Unknown!
These results seem unsurprising to me - I didn't expect Ouroboros to rate so high, because it's relatively old, but it's also by far my cheapest game and has been on many deep sales. This is a place where it's important not to forget selection bias, though: Crimson Gray is by far the most popular/sold game on this list, and even the mini-sequel sold more than most others. I think the real takeaway here is that people inclined to play that (and likely other visual novels) are not necessarily those who follow TLS enough to fill out a survey like this.
Finally, we can see that the players (or at least those who filled out the survey) are a loyal group, with many having followed the game for years. A surprising number of new players filling out the survey, though, despite the spoiler warning! Thank you all for your support. ^-^
Game Data
Now we move on to juicy details about what people prefer while playing, though I've separated out the character polls, as I suspect they'll be the most popular.
Just like the previous survey, the results are overwhelming when it comes to Varia and Altina. This doesn't surprise me at all compared to last time, as I have since done more demographic reading on general trends among gamers.
A new question, though another unsurprising result. Accepting succubi is a major theme of the game, and the most difficult outcome to achieve, though it's nice to see that other states do have their fans.
I've always had mixed feelings about this question, since "balance of all objectives" seems like too obvious of a choice. That said, unlike last time we added a "cheating" option to the question, which was interesting! For all that some enjoy the investing aspect of TLS, it looks like close to 21% of players choose to remove this element of the game altogether.
On the other hand, I think this question shows the sort of person that TLS appeals to: a little under 20% of players used a specific walkthrough, but a large majority used various resources. I know there are some who hate playing games this way, but I enjoy a game that's crunchy enough that I want to do some analysis instead of playing blind, and it seems clear that TLS caters to this type.
Character Subcategories
Before we get into the big polls with fancy graphics, let's see how the various subcategories sorted out. I wonder if these had an influence on the general polls: certain characters polled very well in a given category but didn't get nearly as many votes in the open categories. While that might reflect that they're only popular within a subset, it could also have influenced people against voting for them in the general, if they'd just "cast a vote" for that character in a specific category.
There's a potential ambiguity in this question: people might not have been sure whether the question meant favorite character in this category, or favorite character specifically based on their combat role. The three standouts (Robin, Simon, Varia) take over 52% of the vote, and adding the four runners up (Aka, Nalili, Qum, Riala) gets us close to 80%, but everybody got at least 25 votes, surprisingly.
By contrast, the non-combat harem followed a more normal distribution: Megail in first place, Trin and Iris close together, and the other three each with a sizable minority of fans.
The packed leaders category went in a direction that may or may not surprise you, depending on how you approach the game. Sarai is the clear favorite, with Janine, Esthera, and Orilise coming in after. That said, 18% of the playerbase had one of the less popular characters as their favorite, which emphasizes for me the value of going in multiple directions.
I didn't expect Wendis to dominate this category so handily, though perhaps I should have, as early appearances are one of the best predictors of popularity, and Wendis is far more important to the main story than the other characters, who are relative latecomers. But when it comes to category dominance...
A statistician could argue that I biased this question by separating out Orcent, but I feel pretty confident that doing this got us more interesting results to the orc question. XD Speaking of, expect the orc-only results in the coming section.
I'm glad whenever less prominent characters get favorites, but in this case it actually surprises me! Of course Fuani is the most popular member of headquarters staff, and it's unremarkable that Sho, Sister Kara, Lucy, and Patty have their fans. I didn't expect some of the less important staff, who play very little role in the story, to get a few dozen votes apiece.
The villains question got a special graphic for it:
This is one of the categories I find interesting in relation to the general poll, because popular characters like the Anak, the Incubus Emperor, and Hester got hundreds more votes here than they did elsewhere. Perhaps it's the bias I mentioned earlier, or perhaps people are less likely to name villains as their favorites overall.
In any case, this correlates very strongly with importance and prominence in the story. After the big three, we have the Fucklord, the Lustlord, and Tanurak coming in basically in order of screen time. I feel like the four people who voted for the Skullpounder were having a laugh. >_>
Popularity Polls
Alright, time for the section I expect to be most entertaining to general readers! We asked not only about your favorite characters in general, but also various other components of the game. I'm going to build up to the big final category, the one that accumulated all the favorite votes.
These images are bigger and will need to be expanded to be properly read.
When I included this question, I was mostly wanting to know which tertiary minor characters caught people's attention, but I hadn't considered that characters like Tyna, Kalant, and Mestan weren't included in any previous categories, so they naturally got a large percentage of the votes.
Looking down the list, I think most of the favorites are unsurprising, though Commander Geoff is punching above his weight for a character who dies so early. We also see some popular joke characters make appearances, of course. ^-^ One of those that required the most compiling was the quest board guy, who many referred to as "Ralph" - this isn't his canon name, but Ralph is the name of the default RPG Maker hero using his assets.
With Orcent taken out of the running, we got a more interesting split amongst all the other orcs. I find the top results mostly expected, focusing on the prominent characters, but it was interesting to me to see which minor orcs stood out enough to get 4+ votes. There weren't many with two votes and even fewer with three.
These last three were a late addition to the survey, but I'm glad I included them because they got some interesting results. The Incubus Prison is overwhelmingly the most-voted dungeon, unsurprisingly. It was interesting to me to see an early dungeon like Deep Cache ranking so high. I wonder if Tower Depths ranked third due to its dungeon qualities or because it contains such an important part of the plot.
Beneath that, we see a wide variety of different dungeons get chosen, as well as some events that I think it's fair enough to lump into the category. These dungeons vary widely in my goals: some were designed to be short amusements, some grueling tests, others puzzles. Something for everyone, hopefully? I've said this before, but personally one of the reasons I love RPGs is that their gameplay loops vary throughout a game.
Next we have by far the most split category in the entire survey. Now, actually the most common results would be things along the lines of "all of them" or "none of them" but we're going to throw those out for these purposes, haha. Some people also decided to use this category to list a type of scene they like, which also wasn't included, or just to write an essay about what they want in NSFW content.
A few scenes did get more attention than others, though not disproportionally like the other categories. They tend to be first times and the big orgies, though really, doesn't have cover a ton of TLS scenes overall?
I cut off the list at scenes that got 10+ votes, but there were so many others... it's hard to be sure due to some ambiguous votes, but well over 200 scenes got mentioned! Honestly, it felt like every single scene in the game was at least one person's favorite, including some that made me think "Really?" while reading the responses.
Focusing on individual scenes obscures some trends I noticed while compiling results. For example, Fheliel's fans were very split among her scenes: if you combined the votes for those, she would be third or fourth on the big list. I think she might actually have comparable total votes to Carina's total, but Carina has one scene that's much more popular than her others.
Then we have the locations list, which is 100% unsurprising: of course players like the locations where they spend the most time and have the most impact. Ari-Yhilina is the home base for most of the game and transforms throughout, so of course it has a dominant position.
I did some compiling with this list: the Orgasmic Empire benefitted most, as players mentioned a wide variety of different sub-locations within it. By contrast, almost everyone that voted for Eustrin just wrote "Eustrin" because it's a more unified location. Within the Chalice States, it was interesting to me that Gasm Falls got 50% of the total votes, with Helvanna and votes for the general region each taking another quarter.
At the bottom of the list we start to get more events than locations, which perhaps could have been another question. Some people suggested a "Favorite war?" question, which is a regrettable missed opportunity.
And now, the moment you have been waiting (or scrolling down) for...
The first page is every character who received more than 100 votes; the top set of the second page (through Balia) is everyone who received more than 1% of the total votes. Then the lower categories have listed vote counts, with the characters within a category ranked left to right, and the honorable mentions are everyone who received five or more votes.
I think there's not much point comparing this to the past results, for two primary reasons: many of the characters had barely appeared back then, and the two surveys use different methodology. Characters like Yarra and Orcent seemed to benefit from this, often being not a person's first pick but within their top three.
Otherwise, it's mostly what you would expect based on prominence... though it's interesting to note that Hester gets more votes than Xerces, whereas they were opposite in the villains list. A reminder not to overinterpret the results, perhaps.
Alright, that brings us to the end of this monster post! I hope that you have enjoyed it some fraction as much as I have. ^-^ Thanks again to everyone who filled out the surveys, Grim8P and Lamsey for their help, and everyone for supporting my career this far!
Comments
Suikin
It hurts my soul how low Janine is in this pool T_T To me she is the one who better get's Simon (Tied with Robin and Wendis). Glads to see Yarra and Robin High, tho!
Sierra Lee
It does seem disproportionate, though that's again a gut feeling. One issue that came up while putting together the survey was how many countries don't seem to use that system; for example, more patrons actually found the term "Bachelors" baffling than I expected. So this is simplified, but I hope it made it easy for all respondents to choose the right category. Thank you for your support over the years! I'll keep working on things for whenever you have time to return to them. ^-^
DuckTogo
The number of people with graduate degrees has to be very disproportionate, right? Next time you should split out doctorate from masters. In many European countries these two are not as tightly tied. For example, there are separate Bachelors, Masters, and doctoral programs in Germany. Anyway, very fun! I haven't really been active in the community for years and have gradually decreased my donations due to not actually playing any of the games at the moment. But I am still glad your long-term experiment is going well! Maybe one day I can take a two week vacation to actually do a full playthrough of TLS.
Lamsey
Fancy Walk Orc made the honorable mentions list for the main vote, 13th in the minor NPCs vote, and 5th in the non-Orcent orc list.
Nathan Phoenix
As a son of a preacher man Sarai remains my favorite. Though I'm sad to see the lack of Fancy Walk Orc in the ranks.
Ark Tolei
Very interesting demographics. I think an interesting thing to look at the overlap of blind playthroughs and cheating with investment. I can easily imagine a world where a person doesn't want to get spoiled narratively, but also wants things to go well for the characters on their first (potentially only) playthrough. I think it's pretty cool that such a large number of people are playing the game open book. I didn't imagine that would be a common playstyle compared to blind or following a more explicit guide, but the game definitely feels best to me with spreadsheets in hand. There's a lot of subjective choice in what a given player will desire in terms of outcomes in TLS and I imagine that's why playing with a reference rather than a guide is so popular, but I could be fully misreading that.
