That's a little tautological. Imagine saying "Mario would be a terrible game if not for the platforming."
However, you should check out
Portals of Phereon (D-List for some reason. I would love it if
AnAnnoyedFuckingUser would expand on the rating). It's a rare porn game in that the mechanics and strategies are compelling by themselves, but the porn is intractable from the gameplay. It has some very rough edges, but it could (eventually) be your 0.1% game.
A platformer that is bad at doing what its genre is based on is indeed a terrible example of that genre. So tautological? No. Erotic games are still games. Sometimes they do a great job at the erotic part, but almost all of them fail at the game part, which is weird, since it should typically be the opposite considering how great standard gaming has become.
Let's not forget Hollow Knight had a tiny team with a pathetic amount of funding originally. Meanwhile, there are still-in-development patreon games with known (slightly) larger teams, currently several times the funding, and in a few cases many times the development time, and yet the demo is maybe 1/100th of the game Hollow Knight is.
I just don't understand
why?
To be bluntly fair, I'm not including unfinished games. There are a few with a scattering of currently existing potential and a whole lot of dreams on the shelf, but, once again, someone of them are patreon cashcows that have showed very little progress for years. In some cases, half a decade or more... the development time of AAA games, lmao...
But yes, if games like Wildlife (which isn't even a game yet...), Breeders of the Nephelym, Carnal Instinct, along with many other 2d projects ever actually get fleshed out, completed, and polished, they might be a good mix of erotic and game. Maaaaybe.
Problem is, there are a lot of games like those. Most of the best rated games on here, even if I'd only call them 'good' because of the pron rather than the gameplay, are incomplete.
Portals of Phereon has to problem... decent game, lackluster pron.
I don't know. I think the problem is that I'm barking up the wrong tree. A lot of erotic game artists seemingly just wing the game development part or use 'lazy' engines like RPGM and Renpy exactly because they
don't know how to make games, which is imo what results in something barely beyond a fancy galley viewer.
So, probably, the only way we're going to get a good game that happens to also be sexy is if actual game developers dip down into raunchy. Carnal Instinct's devs are supposedly all former mainstream devs, and games like Baldur's Gate 3 have been increasingly less afraid to get raunchy, and as we all know with Skyrim, modders do the dark god's work.
Buy yeah, I guess I'm just kind of mildly surprised that the quality of erotic games remains so poor when indies are basically carrying gaming right now. I know it's not fair to compare but I mean... how are you going to have 10x the funding, twice the development team, and the development time of an AAA game and still throw out some jank, generic RPG maker where the only unique thing in it are the CGs slapped in and possibly the (lackluster) story itself...
Only for folk here to then call it a masterpiece, lol.
Look, I get porn is porn, but it still baffles me that porn games seem to be getting worse over time while indie games overall are surpassing what AAA games did only a few years ago. Just doesn't make sense to me.