Yes — Vania is a side project by two brothers who work in tech and video games. While we focus on our other projects and build Vania, we’re committed to the platform being a free tool for other indie developers. You can support us on Patreon, however!

Firstly, because we work in games marketing and needed a tool in our daily life that could do the things Vania does, and existing—even paid—tools aren’t very good at manipulating data to prove assumptions or deliver narratives to actual real people in real game studios. Secondly, because one of the biggest problems the games industry faces is a lack of transparency about both failure and success, and we want to make things better.

We are not data scientists, but we do our best to ensure our data is as reliable as possible and give users many options to tweak settings and assumptions. Where our data points are based on assumptions - for example, game wishlists and owners - we’re constantly testing those assumptions and gathering evidence to provide what we believe is a consistent and logical estimate. Or to put it another way: All platforms that display owners and wishlists of games are guessing, but we think we’re guessing pretty well. If you see an error or have any suggestions on ways to improve, we’d love to know, please jump on our Discord!

We’re Patreon-supported, and running the platform costs a fair amount due to the costs involved with servers and data sets of our size, so even a few dollars of Patreon support makes a big difference. Beyond that, join us on Discord, where we’d love to hear feedback about the platform or just chat about gamedev in general!