Greetings Terrans!

We finally finished processing the data of The Symbiant survey, which a whopping 817 of you took part of! That is much, much more than we expected to say the least. The winner of the giveaway has already been contacted and received both a The Symbiant and SL key in their mail.

Where players come from

We had a big surge of respondents from Taiwan thanks to our lovely Traditional Chinese translators, JackO and Yuni, posting a link to the survey on their Youtube channel ad well as streaming the demo. It comes at no surprise that the USA, Australia, Canada and United Kingdom come out on top: after all, this survey was written in English! We are a bit more surprised by the amount of Filipinx, Vietnamese other peeps from Southeast Asia who turned up despite the game not being available in their native language.

The Symbiant fans' gender and age

The gender split is surprisingly balanced, with 45% women, 39% men and 16% of gender non-conforming (nonbinary, agender, genderfluid...) players. If we remove Taiwanese players, we actually end-up with a handful more men than women! The Symbiant has an equal appeal to both genders, which is pretty cool.

It comes at no surprise that the bulk of our players come from the 18-24 range. Taiwanese players are overall younger and bring everyone's age down by around 2%, though the amount of 40+ players stays the same. Both the gender and ages split will come up later in the survey for other answers.

Where players first found about The Symbiant VS where they found the survey

In order to visualize where players migrate between discovering The Symbiant and finding the survey, we made a Sankey diagram! Itchio is clearly the biggest place of discovery of the game and where people are most likely find the survey: 38% of all respondents found this survey either from looking at the SMB page or through our multiple progress updates where it was advertised! Additionally, itchio seems to "eat" other networks the most, particularly Kickstarter and pirate users.

Nearly every Youtube respondent comes from Taiwan due to reasons we mentioned earlier.

We're only half-surprised by how many players found the game on Steam and migrated to itchio. After all, the current demo on Steam is censored and thus, if a Steam user is feeling thirsty is even a little bit curious, they will seek the itchio demo to unlock the 2 lewd scenes they missed!

You must be intrigued by the 48 pirates mentioned above. As it turns out, a few players felt brave enough to cite the pirate website they found us in, and such websites include "online galleries" like MyReadingManga which we counted as piracy because, well, for all service these website has provided to BL enthusiast all over the world, they are still pirate websites.

What surprised us the most however is the sheer amount of Terrans who discovered The Symbiant on Kickstarter...! As it turns out, if you've ever backed another BL game on Kickstarter before, Kickstarter will recommend you other BL games to back through their emails or at the bottom of each Kickstarter page! Some of our most loyal fans also discovered us through a cross-promo with Y Press Games' Dear Monster.

The sexiest character according to players

Brahve is by a decent margin considered the sexiest character by respondents. However, comparing players' gender with the character of their choice tells us that men actually have a slight preference for Danya. GNC players on the other hand would rather bang anything that's not Terran: they voted Juniper and Oatith more than women and men, but Brahve truly takes the lion's share with 62% of votes!

Synthetic who?

When asked whether they are familiar with our previous game Synthetic Lover, we were pleasantly surprised to find that almost 70% of you know about it! The biggest factor that apparently weighted in whether or not you knew about it was not country or gender, but age! The older you are, the more likely you are to have played it. One possible reason is that Synthetic Lover's western art and older characters may have resonated more with players who are over 24, the other one may be that the older you are, the more experienced you are with BL games in general.

Speaking of experience, we also asked what was the last BL game respondents played. Quite a few players must have misread this question because more than a hundred of you cited 2, 3, 4 or even all the games they played! Nevertheless, we cleaned the answers to find out which other titles you recently got ahold of. 

The most popular answers were:

1. None / "The Symbiant is my first BL game" (21.2%)
2. DRAMAtical Murder (9.9%)
3. Nu: Carnival (9.7%)
4. Camp Buddy (7.4%)
5. The Divine Speaker (6.1%)

You read it right: more than 1 player out of 5 has never played any other BL or gay game before! In particular, people discovering us through a Youtube let's play are some of the least likely to have played any other game of the same genre before, while Twitter and Steam users proved to be more seasoned. Like for the previous question, the older you are, the more experienced you are with BL games.

Curiously though, 14 people reported having played Synthetic Lover before, then answered "No" or "None" to this question. Did they not think Synthetic Lover was a BL game or did they simply lie about playing it? That will forever stay an unsolved mystery.

Who -financially- supported the game

So far, the only way to financially support The Symbiant has been through Kickstarter, itchio and Patreon, all of which do not support regional pricing like Steam will once the game is out. Money is not the only way to support us either! Word-of-mouth is an amazing way to discover new games and help indie devs make their games known. 

As we mentioned in previous progress updates, that extra income outside of Kickstarter helped us translate the game in 11 more languages as well as pay for more (and better) art and more music. 

It comes at no surprise that the older you are, the more income you dispose of. Players over 24 are our biggest supporters at the moment. We were amazed by the amount of people who not only backed the game on Kickstarter, but also pre-ordered it (again?) on itchio or send us extra dollars on Patreon! 

If you found the game on Kickstarter, chances are you were already looking for projects to financially support in the first place. What you might find more surprising however is that players from pirate websites were just as likely as anyone else to give support, mostly through itchio.

For shits and giggle we also looked at the "support conversion" by gender and found out that while the difference isn't that big, gender non-conforming players are the most likely players to have financially backed us, while men are the least likely to do so. In another survey I ran a few months back, I found that cis men had a significantly higher chance of having to hide their interest in BL from their family, friends and peers while trans men and GNCs hid their BL interest the least. We highly suspect that similar dynamics are at play here: it's harder to financially support games you love when your surrounding is not supportive of LGBT+ of adult games.

Final words

Lastly, a big thank you to everyone who took the time to write an answer to the last question! We've reach each one of them and we found a lot of interesting insights this way. Some of us made us laugh too. We can't cite everyone, but below are a few answers we received from alien lovers all over the world:

Thanks for reading this far and see you later for a progress update! <3