Study: In 2024, 930 visual novels were released with Russian localization
Each year, there is an increasing number of visual novels that offer partial or full support for the Russian language. It was noted online that last year nearly a thousand such titles reached release.
“Endless Summer”
This was reported by the group "LD | Visual Novel News" on VKontakte, which noticed a study. The analysis utilized data from The Visual Novel Database (VNDB). Initially, games with machine translation and games that are in the VNDB database but have not yet been released were excluded from the sample.
For comparison: in 2023, there were 579 visual novels with Russian localization released; in 2020, there were 325 new titles; and in 2015, there were 109.
Visual novels began to be released more frequently in Russian after 2013. It is suggested that a pivotal moment was the release of the game "Endless Summer" in December 2013 and the launch of the now-closed Anivisual website in June 2014, which regularly held game jams for visual novels.
According to rough estimates, a total of 4,162 visual novels with the Russian language were released worldwide from 2001 to 2024. Of these, 700 projects were by Japanese teams.
Number of visual novels with Russian localization released from 2001 to 2024
