Fetishes in a game that should be avoidable?

[Deleted member 4963437]

Apologies if wrong thread, and apologies if I have ALREADY posted this. If so, mods please delete. I have a terrible memory.

I'm nearing the end of my game and planning to release by January, but one thing is, I have no idea what fetishes should be avoidable.

Obviously stuff like NTR/Cheating/Sharing should obviously be avoidable, but I'm wondering what other kinds of fetishes should be avoidable too? (Like blowjobs, anal, foot stuff, etc.) but I simply have no idea where to start.

Is there a list of fetishes that should be at least avoidable or toggle-able (as in enable/disable) in a game?

 

[Synx]

There aren't any fetishes that needs to be avoided, but some of them should be very clearly mentioned beforehand on the first release if they are in it or not. Stuff like NTR, Furry, Bestiality are all acceptabele but will attract a different kind of audience than a more 'normal' game. Pick if your game will have one of those or not, and stick with that. Never ever go back on your choice or hell will most likely break lose in the comments.

Everything ells is fine to have, but make as much of it a choice. Just give the player an option to skip anal if that's not their thing, or even skip having sex altogether with a certain character. It doesn't impact the players that want to see everything, but might attract people that don't like a certain character or fetish.

 

[TranscendentThots]

That said, this unsatisfying "you do you" type of answer just begs the further question 'which kinks are too niche for a mainstream audience?'

The answer depends on who you ask:

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Be aware that if you google this yourself, many of the results will be made by companies selling something. For example, one sex toy retailer's list had "Popping Balloons During Sex" in their Top Ten, something I had never heard of before. Later, I realized they probably sell balloons.

The maintainers of F95Zone could, in theory, add the number of downloads each game has to a master counter of how many times a kink would appear in each game. So could VNDB, Patreon, or Steam, but good luck getting their cooperation. (And note, of course, that these would be four different audiences, albeit with some overlap.) But you could also probably just look at the top 10 games, and see which tags they used, and be within an order of magnitude of the same results.

Instead, I offer a simpler method of trawling the data that's publicly available here on F95Zone using the Search Tool. (And also

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and

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too) Simply check how many games have that tag.

For example, we can easily see that, as of the time of my post, here on F95Zone, Corruption has (91,) Creampie has (203,) and Lesbian has (127.)

Now, people who make ero games aren't necessarily your target audience. And elements which are harder to make will, naturally, appear in fewer games. But this might give you some idea of what's popular and what isn't.

(Be aware of kinks which are further stratified by nature of the tools used to make a game, though. For example, tentacles are a lot easier to implement in 2D than in 3D, while Combat is a lot more likely in an RPG Maker game than in Ren'Py, because RPG Maker includes a remedial combat engine by default.)

If you're actually asking "which kinks will a vocal minority of users on this site complain about," just look at the threads that already exist. If even one person complains about a kink in any thread, assume that person will also come to your thread, just to complain about it.

Next, assume you don't care what they think.

Problem solved.

Fun sidenote: Back when porn was only available on like DVD and VHS tape, the successful porn companies at the time had it down to a science how many seconds of runtime to make each position last. What percentage of the tape should be anal, what percentage oral, the length of scenes, how often to switch to a different actress, etc. This data is actually no longer useful now that porn is on-demand. People who want to watch buttsex can just watch a streamed video that's 100% buttsex. It turns out nobody actually wanted to watch a tape that's 10% buttsex, they wanted to watch the buttsex portion of that tape on a loop, and they put up with buying (or renting) the rest of the tape for that. They experimented and found the trade-off that pleased the most number of end-users with the fewest separate recording sessions. (It's possible some similar magic ratio exists for making these games, but it will probably depend as much on your art pipeline as consumer expectations.)

This underscores the importance of doing your own market research, because consumer behavior will always change as technology and culture continue to change.

 

[anne O'nymous]

For example, we can easily see that, as of the time of my post, here on F95Zone, Corruption has (91,) Creampie has (203,) and Lesbian has (127.)

What only tell you how many people decided to make a game having "this", therefore it tell you nothing.

If you use the latest game page and filter it, you find that there's 449 games with "bestiality", and only 81 (18%) are abandoned. This while there's 1996 games with "corruption", and 616 (30%) of them have been abandoned. Therefore, one could believe that bestiality is more acceptable, since there's less games that are abandoned (generally due to a lack of support). And obviously, this would be a wrong conclusion.


As to answering OP, strictly speaking, all fetishes should be avoidable, because you'll always found someone who don't like it. But practically speaking, it's only NTR, Cheating, Swinging, Water Sport, Scat and Guro, that are to handle with care. The first three because there's people who hate them by principle, the last three because they are too extremes.

 

[TranscendentThots]

What only tell you how many people decided to make a game having "this", therefore it tell you nothing.

If you use the latest game page and filter it, you find that there's 449 games with "bestiality", and only 81 (18%) are abandoned. This while there's 1996 games with "corruption", and 616 (30%) of them have been abandoned. Therefore, one could believe that bestiality is more acceptable, since there's less games that are abandoned (generally due to a lack of support). And obviously, this would be a wrong conclusion.


As to answering OP, strictly speaking, all fetishes should be avoidable, because you'll always found someone who don't like it. But practically speaking, it's only NTR, Cheating, Swinging, Water Sport, Scat and Guro, that are to handle with care. The first three because there's people who hate them by principle, the last three because they are too extremes.

I'm not talking about what percentage were abandoned. That's silly. Games get abandoned due to lack of money, lack of skill, lack of time, or lack of (developer) interest.

I'm talking about how many games with a given tag were attempted. Include incomplete and abandoned games when doing market research. Always! In any context! If you ignore the failures, you're only seeing half the picture.

The goal of this search isn't to find out "what tags increase the chances that I'll see it through to release?" Rather, it's to see "what tags did some dev decide were interesting enough to build a game around?" It's not a perfect measure of the tag's popularity in this community, since players might have different tastes than devs, and it's certainly somewhat removed from the tastes of Patreon patrons and Steam buyers. But it's the least-bad metric I can think of that we all have easy access to.

At worst, it proves there is a group of people that either wanted that content to be in their game, or else thought that content was easy to add to their game. And it's a group of people that use this site.

What I'm describing is quantitative research. What you're describing (by flatly stating NTR, Cheating, Swinging, Water Sport, Scat and Guro, which I'm reading between the lines and assuming you've heard other people saying over the years and it's not just your opinion,) is the end result of qualitative research.

Ideally, OP should do both, themselves. Because only they know what potentially off-putting tags they were thinking about maybe including.

Check tag prevalence in raw numbers to see which tags are an easy win. Then Search threads for tags that OP really wanted to include even though they're unpopular, to read a few examples of why some people don't like those tags, or how intense the backlash is, or any number of other insights that could be gleaned from it. Basically, these are case studies.

(If you see the same thing being said over and over again, you've spotted the opinion of a vocal minority. Then you can run a Poll or something to find out if the silent majority agrees with them.)

Games-per-tag tells you, in aggregate, what is off-putting. Reading random forum threads tells you why. Then your Authentic Voice tells you to do it anyway, so you weigh your options and look at your long-term plans and decide how many straight cishet harem games about women with big tits behaving in a vaguely mascdom way but avoiding most paraphillias you're going to crank out to fund your self-indulgent passion project. (And whether or not you ought to release it under a different label.)

Maybe someday, you'll be the absolute leader in the field of that unpopular kink, and can afford to build your own website and community around it. But you can't bank on that as a business plan before you even test the waters.

Check tag count. Do a few searches. Maybe run a poll or two.

It's cheaper than hiring a marketing firm to do it all for you.

In fact, it's free.

 

[anne O'nymous]

Have you even read what I wrote ? Then have you stopped few seconds to think about it ?

I'm talking about how many games with a given tag were attempted. Include incomplete and abandoned games when doing market research. Always! In any context! If you ignore the failures, you're only seeing half the picture.

And so, you are talking about the sole thoughts of the game creator. You are saying that X persons believed that making a game with "this fetish" can potentially be interesting, accordingly to their own personal thoughts. But what is the interest to know this ? It tell you absolutely nothing regarding what the players want, while what the players want is the subject here.

At least, as silly it can be, and I was the first to said that it's stupid, looking at the percentage of abandon tell you how often a game with "this fetish" will fail. And it happen that those failure are generally deeply linked by the lack of support. Therefore, it tell you something about the players attempts...

Maybe someday, you'll be the absolute leader in the field of that unpopular kink, and can afford to build your own website and community around it, but you can't bank on that as a business plan before you even test the waters.

What the fucking fuck is this fucking fuck I just read ?

 

[c3p0]

To the all not really helpfull, helpfull answer none and all fetish should be avoidable. Or it depends on your game and your targeted audience. If your targeted audience is the NTR crowd, then even if it will cast some shitstorm in the game thread regarding NTR from the none NTR crowd, it would be fine.

As Synx written, state your fetish and don't change them because the not targeted audience ask for that. Also some fetish can be avoided/optional with little impact in the complexity of the game, some may not, because they either make none sense for the story or otherwise.
Yet, it all depends on your game. As simple fuckfest game can easily satisfy different fetish with simple "char x is around fetish y", so either go for her because of look and fetish or not. In a story game, where a rape or cheating scene may be a major part of the story, this is most difficulty if even possible at all.

 

[The Rogue Trader]

Apologies if wrong thread, and apologies if I have ALREADY posted this. If so, mods please delete. I have a terrible memory.

I'm nearing the end of my game and planning to release by January, but one thing is, I have no idea what fetishes should be avoidable.

Obviously, stuff like NTR/Cheating/Sharing should obviously be avoidable, but I'm wondering what other kinds of fetishes should be avoidable too? (Like blowjobs, anal, foot stuff, etc.) but I simply have no idea where to start.

Is there a list of fetishes that should be at least avoidable or toggle-able (as in enable/disable) in a game?

In general, all sex scenes should be avoidable, as many players will bitch otherwise. And while surprises are fun in fiction, they aren't in lewd videogames, so have the narrative be upfront with the player about what he should expect from a sex partner (i.e. the shy, nerdy introvert girl shouldn't turn in a BDSM queen once you get in her bedroom).
But for toggleable in the preferences? That's a very complex matter: as many already said, it depends on the audience. You'd have a different answer on itch.io and on f95. The only well-researched market is porn and that has a completely different audience from lewd video games.

Sex stuff like "Anal", "Footjob", "Deepthroat" can be the object of choice. "Fuck her ass", "Fuck her pussy", "Fuck her throat".
Not everybody likes anal and, while there's a trend ongoing that unavoidable, unskippable feet content can be added without anybody complaining. As feet turn me off, I strongly disagree.
This is probably the list you want, but there's not a definitive, catch-all answer: everyone would answer differently (my answer basically stops at the three ones I listed, although the more choices are there, the better it is).
I'd say that I'd go with the "if I hooked a hot stranger woman that I don't know, would I try to do this with her?" test. Anything that doesn't pass the test is better put behind a player's choice. Obviously, everyone's mileage will vary.

NTR (intended as "sex between other male characters and any female character present in the game, be she romanceable, laidable or a totally random passerby) should be either something you embrace or you completely leave out of your game. Making it togglable won't help you with either audience. It's been tried, but usually with little to no success, it's mostly a matter of having to split your resources too thin: something that impacts the story can't be left to a preference parameter.

A common practice is to make futa/trans togglable, as in "Alice should be a trans woman or a cis woman?". You'd "only" have to do 2x renders of that particular character, but it doesn't impact the story (if it does impact the story, I'd advise against it).

Incest and Underage are two things that are commonly left to the player's discretion, via "relationship screens" and "age selection screens".

The more niche fetishes are best used to make a game specific to them. Don't sprinkle them in an otherwise generic game, or people that like them will find the game has too little of their kink to be interesting, the people that hate them will be put off and might even avoid your game because the tag is present, and people indifferent won't care anyway.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

You should be even more submissive. Every turn. Imagine what ppl could say.