I think, there is a general problem with comparing "adult games" to "normal games" beyond the fact, that adult game devs have much less money for production and are in general rather single persons than groups.I know you know there is a thriving indie game scene in just about every sub-genre on Steam. Please don't pretend all non-porn games are massively funded. And while some people would argue that indie games are held to a lower standard than AAA games just as many would call bullshit on that. Tons of game reviewers will flat out tell you a game being AAA is far from a guarantee it will be good, or even playable in general. Sometimes a AAA game is routinely panned before it's even out just because the publisher is known to be shitty.
These days the indie devs are more or less held to the same standards as so-called AAA games. I see no reason to expect less from a solo porn game dev than I would a solo indie game dev. But that's where we're at because naturally a game is going to be judged in part by the metric set by it's competitors. Which is a very low bar when it comes to porn games.
Well, to be fair I was speaking about Steam there. Usually there's a bit more involved on those store pages than 5 screenshots and 3 sentences. But I digress.
In the "adult gaming industry", most games are "visual novels", which have in my opinion more in common with comics than with the most games, I use to play and may be held rather to those standards. The demand for this games might be actually quite high here, higher than for actual gameplay-heavy games. I think, most of the players are here rather to see their sexual fantasy outlived in a series of 2D or 3D-images than having complex gamedesign or a complex story and that's what drives the scene.
For me, my interest in finding interesting visual told lewd stories was the thing, that brought me into the "lewd game scene". Something, that I totally miss in porn. Engrish is not really a deal breaker, as long as I can enjoy the visual told story. So I really like e.g. Coming of Age despite there were quite some spelling mistakes when I started to play. I liked the overall idea that was presented. I find the lewd ideas presented quite creative. The writing is simple, but very lighthearted and somehow very appealing. In my own exploration of "writing adult fiction", I once even started to rip the game files, read the pure text, corrected the errors and sent the corrections to the dev, who implemented them.
But actually I also think there is a big amout of not that good games, especially from the early days of the forum which got lots of praise and revenue, but which I would today not try for long, as they may come around e.g. as too grindy. But I think, it is not the big amount of bad games/VNs, that lets the mediocre games shine, but rather the low amount of very good games/VNs from that time, that let those mediocre games shine. You can see this e.g. in the development of "Big Brother", which was a Top game in 2017 but which successor got abandoned only one year ago because is was not profitable anymore, while less grindy but better told games like "Being a DIK" or "The headmaster" can still drag the masses.
