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How big is Doki Doki Literature Club!?

Estimated owners
≈ 7.8M–12.7M
from 227k reviews (Overwhelmingly Positive)

A labeled estimate from the public review count (adjusted for release year), not exact sales. Owner data cross-checked with SteamSpy.

Does this actually work?

We left Doki Doki Literature Club! out and predicted the genre from its 8 similar games. Every figure here, including Doki Doki Literature Club!'s, is estimated from Steam reviews, not self-reported sales.

Copies, estimated from reviews

typical (middle half) 1.9M–2.9M
best case 4.2M (Helltaker)
Games like Doki Doki Literature Club!

The middle of these games

≈ 1.9M–2.9M copies

≈ $8.0M–$15.5M after Steam's cut

from ~58k reviews

Only the top fifth of 2019’s Steam releases earned about $34k gross, so plan for that or less.

All 8 of your similar games are hits.

No genre covers most of your similar games. The closest is Anime (4 of 8), so the genre you lead with is still undecided.

Of the 416 indie games that passed 1,000 reviews in 2022, 11.8% were novel genre mixes and 88.2% stuck to an established genre. Published indie market research.

Best case: Helltaker at ≈ 3.2M–5.2M copies. A breakout hit, far above a typical game.

What it took to get here
About half the games that made it here had over 11k reviews in their first month; the spread ran 7k to 21k.
The genre you'd be entering
Your set
Your set clusters on Anime (4 of 8) and Story Rich (4 of 8).
The winners
Winners here lead with Demons + Puzzle. The breakout hits carry Demons + Puzzle + Indie; a typical game here doesn't.
The era
The games you compared span 2014 to 2024, and 1 of your 8 shipped in the last two years.
How these numbers were worked out

A hit here: 1,000+ reviews, roughly $150k+ before Steam's cut (a standard indie benchmark).

Copies come from each game's reviews times a sales-per-review rate that falls with release age, from about 31 for the most recent game here to about 70 for the oldest, then widened into a range; revenue rides on that estimate times price. Source: GameDiscoverCo (2020) and VG Insights (2021).

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Visual NovelHistorical

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