Drawn Anime/Hentai vs Digital Anime/Hentai (Question from a potential future developer friend)

[WhitePhantom]

Hello,

I've been asked to conduct some potential market research of adult game players, not for myself but by a fairly good friend of mine.
She's very bored during quarantine and after years of writing smutty fanfiction and drawing some really good (non-porn atm) anime style stuff is thinking of combining the two into a game.

It is very likely to be primarily text based and built using html, I told her ideally its going to need some lewd images because hey people like pictures and she's fine with drawing that type of thing. Now I don't have the time to be rendering images for her, got my own games, and she isn't really interested in using Daz/Honey Select as she can draw and was thinking of doing this for the art. However, she's never done anything on PC, the entirety of everything she does is colourless and hand-drawn on paper.

Would anybody play a game if the images were like this?
Or would she find a significantly bigger player base if she was to go down the lines of getting a Udemy Course or something and learning how to put the scans into photoshop, line art them and colour them to make them look like something from an actual hentai?
I'm guessing the answer is going to be coloured and finished on a PC.

I don't think she's planning on doing it for the cash as much as she's pretty well off, but she's the type of person who wants as many people as possible to play it if she made it and to sit soaking in praise for what she draws/writes.

So yeah, would you play something with hand drawn anime characters and scenes if it was very good quality, or would you want them to be digitally enhanced and coloured?

 

[kytee]

Well, if she wants to sit and soak in praise for the work she's done by a majority of players, she 100% has to learn how to digitalized her art. If she doesn't, her game thread will devolve into an endless pit of people bitching about grayscale. The people who don't mind that sort of thing will probably like it, but the normies who are used to DAZ/HoneySelect and colorized 2D art will tear her down. If she doesn't have thick skin, don't even bother especially when she, to me, sounds like she's not very into it anyways.

 

[baloneysammich]

I don't know anything about the technical aspect of 2D art. Are we talking doujinshi quality, or more like rough sketches? It might help if you could provide an example of her work. If she doesn't want her "vanilla" work associated with this kind of thing, then maybe convince her to provide a fresh example.

Either way, I enjoy text-only and text-heavy stuff so I'm probably not the best judge. All I can say is that something that's "primarily text based" should be able to stand alone without images IMO. That and, for me, artwork can sometimes be a detriment rather than an improvement for text-centric stuff. That comes down more to style and consistency than "quality" though.