[...] The viewer can pick what happens next, in any order and choosing to repeat or skip any scene they like. It's not a VN style "choose your own adventure"... in so much as the structure means there can't be any cohesive story [...]
Pretty much what it was at this time.
One I more or less remember was following the day of a salesman. You had a road with houses, and you could choose which one visit next. With an actor (badly) playing the transition parts with thinks like "oh, I think I will visit this house now, it's a beautiful house, they are surely rich, I'll sell many thing and my boss will be happy". It's a made up quote, but his really lines were really not better than this
And they were inventive too, it wasn't always the said salesman fucking the poor woman living here. Sometimes no one answered when he rang the bell, and he could looks through a window to see what they were doing ; then you would see things like solo scenes, couple scenes or lesbians ones.
And this was one of the most imaginative.
I imagine the difficulty is the transitions. Any interruption (even if it's just picking the next scene) could so easily break the immersion.
I don't know for the website, but back in time they didn't bothered much with this. I don't remind them saying it out loud, but it was clear that the only goal was to sell more sex. As long as the "player" was still hard, nothing else mattered.
Anyway, it clearly has a market - albeit difficult to structure the scenes.
But is it really the same than for games available here ? I guess it's more for people who aren't aware that there's "real" +18 games and just search a bit more variety in their porn.