Somebody, somewhere in Japan must have had way too much free time on his sticky hands, when he decided to scorn through these numbers (via Canned Dogs). It's an interesting, but otherwise simplistic statistic, showing the total number of eroge released each year, for the past 25 years. And I'm obviously not that busy, either, since I went through the trouble of re-formatting the chart below:


As you can see, there's been a pretty huge boom starting from 1997, and Zepy attributes this mainly to the release of the first visual novels - Shizuku, Kizuato, and To Heart - just before that, followed by several other big releases in 1998 (ONE), 1999 (Kana: Littul Sistur), and 2000 (Kanon). Lately, however, the numbers seem to be stalling below 600 eroge titles per year - which, oddly enough, is almost twice the number of "normal" console games released in 2007 (around 360 titles). So... yeah, there's a lot of sick people in this world. And we couldn't be happier about it.