A few months ago foleso and I were sitting around as usual trying to answer the 2930809384 questions we have about marketing and target audience and whatnot. We were talking about boys love / yaoi media—namely, who the target audience for all ages games were. Most of the boys love games we see are 18+, while both of us would rather make all ages games.
As marketers, we come up with assumptions and then try to prove them wrong. Marketing ≠ advertising. Marketing is about trying to find who can benefit from your product/service and how to better build it for them. We had a lot of assumptions about yaoi fans and what they enjoy, so the only next step was to test those. I started a survey.
Some terms, before we get started:
- Yaoi: a term in ENG fandoms typically to mean boy x boy gay content, though not used often in JP fandoms
- Boys love (BL): a term meant for boy x boy gay content
- Boy x boy (BxB): two gay guys. Guys who like each other romantically. Don’t know how else to phrase this.
- Male/male or Men loving men (MLM): this doesn’t mean multi-level marketing scheme. It’s basically the same as BxB except some people use this term to refer to character who are older.
As I mentioned before, foleso and I are both fans of boys love media, but we know our tastes don’t represent the majority. Our assumptions at the beginning were:
- People who use the term “yaoi” want 18+ content and are typically younger
- People who use the term “boys love” are fans who have liked BL content for years, are more into gay content in general, and are typically older
- A majority of BL fans want fandom content and got into BL media through fandom
- A majority of BL fans identify as women
The survey we conducted ended with 222 responses and was posted on Discord, Twitter, Amino, deviantArt, Facebook, and more. We asked people to share it around, especially other BL game developers, since our reach is only so big.
Click page 2 to get started! (Warning: very long)
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