Is there a decline in the adult game "industry"?

[Paranormal erection]

Last ~6-7 months I can't find any new game, that is engaging. I play mostly updates of old games, but some of them are already dumped and others went for even lower quality (story mostly, which make me quit them).
Everything looks the same (not like there was a lot of different stuff before) but people using stock Daz3d stuff (they don't even bother to customize them a bit) some blatant story about:
a) you fuck your family
b) you are world stupidest female, which answers on the question "Can I fuck you" with "No" (while undressing pics starts), only to put a "rape" tag on the game.
c) including a) + entire world female population, there aren't any males around (not even Erik, as known as the "Bin Laden" in the adult games)

I know making a good story is hard and a lot of people will skip the story, but how you can keep people in your game only with good renders? Is the "industry" going down?

 

[kimoo]

I know making a good story is hard and a lot of people will skip the story

- who told you that making a good story is hard ?? and you should know that most of us play for the story
but the problem is (most of the developer write the story themselves)

when you are horny and play adult game you can accept anything even if you saw a fetish you don't like
but when you aren't horny and play the game like me for the story and sex together you won't accept everything

 

[NandabaCanti]

Might be time to consider making your own. The best motivator for working on a project is having a scratch that isn't already being itched. There's no shortage of new games, that much is for sure. It's more of a personal issue that so few of them speak to your own tastes and interests. Maybe you'll even manage to inspire others if you do a good enough job, leading to others making games that follow in your footsteps.

 

[Paranormal erection]

Might be time to consider making your own. The best motivator for working on a project is having a scratch that isn't already being itched. There's no shortage of new games, that much is for sure. It's more of a personal issue that so few of them speak to your own tastes and interests. Maybe you'll even manage to inspire others if you do a good enough job, leading to others making games that follow in your footsteps.

My art skills are beyond zero, it is like everything that requests even a small amount of art skills - I will suck at it, so no way to create 300+ good renders. I think this might be the hardest part for me.
Also, lack of time. Not that much because of work, but because of exams. Working as QA isn't really stressful but after work and gym I have to study too. I might try someday I think my pc is good enough for rendering, just need may be 2-3 months non-stop to become at least average.

 

[Vanaduke]

No, but there always has been a shift in updates in every successful games. It's a casual cash-grab under the guise of betterment of the development; few however are blatantly just squeezing testicles until it bleeds patreon pledges.

 

[NandabaCanti]

@Mr12Inches - It sounded like you were mostly concerned over story; you could start there. Daz is far from the only option for the artistically impaired. Stuff like Illusion games (Honey Select and newer) or The Klub 17 all offer parameterized character designers and basic posing tools and sizeable modding communities providing additional assets and graphical improvements. Being games means you get pretty much instant renders as well - since they are basically just taking screenshots of the real-time rendering their game engines are doing.

If game development really isn't for you, your options basically boil down to testing the waters with games you normally wouldn't give a chance to and see if anything sticks. Or try finding some other hobbies/pursuits so you don't have enough time to play as many adult games as you've apparently been, so that you can be more picky and enjoy the ones that do truly connect with you when you find them, heh.

 

[User_51567]

Last ~6-7 months I can't find any new game, that is engaging. I play mostly updates of old games, but some of them are already dumped and others went for even lower quality (story mostly, which make me quit them).
Everything looks the same (not like there was a lot of different stuff before) but people using stock Daz3d stuff (they don't even bother to customize them a bit) some blatant story about:
a) you fuck your family
b) you are world stupidest female, which answers on the question "Can I fuck you" with "No" (while undressing pics starts), only to put a "rape" tag on the game.
c) including a) + entire world female population, there aren't any males around (not even Erik, as known as the "Bin Laden" in the adult games)

I know making a good story is hard and a lot of people will skip the story, but how you can keep people in your game only with good renders? Is the "industry" going down?

I agree completely.
Until a year(or so) ago there still was a degree of originality in the games and most of them had their own story(bad or good).
But somewhere along the line there were a lot of people who thought...."Hey, this can actually be easy money".
So the flow of bad copies, bad games, 0.1 abandoned games and more began.
After a month or 2 of that i already decided that i am not going to try a new game out anymore until it at least had 5 updates and a trustworthy Developer, and that was a good decision because 75% of my watch list has been abandoned at this point.

And not only that but there is also a large group of people who think that 1 horny idea/scene makes an entire game.
They don't know shit about coding, designing, writing and creating but just because they have 1 horny idea they create a Patreon Page and deliver a 0.1 with that idea to only realize at that point that they lack the skills mentioned above so at that point there is another abandoned game.

And of course the group of people who can't write a decent story if there life depended on it so you get the generic.
-This is my mom, she is hot... I really want to touch/fuck her.
-This is my sister, she is always bitchy to me... But i have ideas on how to get back on her *wink*
-My father left us/died years ago so it always been us.
And after that the usual crappy writing that's being created in a horny mood.... So the crappy ones.

And lastly you have the group of Creators that are being pressured/bullied by people into making changes into a game because they don't like it and by doing that losing the motivation/fun that results into another abandoned game...

I still play the old games because at this point i 100% lost the mood to even try new games, i honestly can even think of a "new" game that i tried in the last 3 months.

And i agree that the industry has been declining the last year but that also because of Patreon/PayPal.
The industry has taken a beating by the new Patreon/PayPal rules but they have been working on a alternative (

You must be registered to see the links

) and i believe that they are close to a Beta at this point.
So when that site is going live at a point, i do believe that this industry is going to rise up again and the creators that are to scared to create their games right now because of Patreon/Paypal finally have their chance to try their luck.

I am actually one of them, the last year i have been working on my own game but because of Patreon's rules i haven't released it yet so i am just working at my game almost every day until Sponsorion goes live and i can release my game

(Sorry for the the long post )

 

[caLTD]

It's a gold rush.

First wave complete. Everything above surface was plundered with, stock models, bland stories, established genres (incest etc), ready to run systems (renpy+ daz).

And second wave was coming with More detailed stories, better characters, new genres, custom systems. (unity 3d, unreal).

And this wave needs skills and time to produce good results which many of creators haven't any.

If there is a money, new ones are will coming this way or that way.

We need successfull 2. gen game for further better games.

 

[j4yj4m]

As said by others, the most common, typical games have been done in a decent quality and current "clones" are often just less well done. What's needed now are either creative concepts or great quality (MilfCity being an example of a game that's rather common but excels when it comes to quality).

So I'd disagree that the industry is going down but it's probably gotten quite a bit harder to make money with "just some basic renders and a non story" as it was possible a year ago.

 

[User_920791]

(...)

And i agree that the industry has been declining the last year but that also because of Patreon/PayPal.
The industry has taken a beating by the new Patreon/PayPal rules but they have been working on a alternative (

You must be registered to see the links

) and i believe that they are close to a Beta at this point.
So when that site is going live at a point, i do believe that this industry is going to rise up again and the creators that are to scared to create their games right now because of Patreon/Paypal finally have their chance to try their luck.

I am actually one of them, the last year i have been working on my own game but because of Patreon's rules i haven't released it yet so i am just working at my game almost every day until Sponsorion goes live and i can release my game

(...)

Any other "Patreon clone" that accepts credit card payments will have rules similar to the ones Patreon has. The only way to get away from censorship is by using cryptocurrencies, either by donating directly to the developers or by using some service based on them.

 

[toolkitxx]

I dont think the problem is in 'lack' of quantity - so there is no decline in that to begin with. It just became a bit harder to find the gems in all the noise of bad stuff - that's all. A while back a few people basically held a monopoly on good games but most had bad stories too. I think the perception is simply wrong as there are more to choose from now and all the sudden it becomes obvious how shallow most of them are.

 

[dspeed]

It's a gold rush.

First wave complete. Everything above surface was plundered with, stock models, bland stories, established genres (incest etc), ready to run systems (renpy+ daz).

And second wave was coming with More detailed stories, better characters, new genres, custom systems. (unity 3d, unreal).

And this wave needs skills and time to produce good results which many of creators haven't any.

If there is a money, new ones are will coming this way or that way.

We need successfull 2. gen game for further better games.

I have a similar but slightly different view.

Thanks to places like the F95 community, the adult gaming scene exploded fairly recently. We'd never seen the diversity of games or content that was being produced. There were many of us on the professional end of the development scale that have been keeping a close eye on how this sub-industry evolves and whether there's future profit potential in it or whether it's a flash in the pan.

Now we're at the conclusion of the first big wave. The major profitable genres have been established (incest, furry, etc) as have the general rules of the design space (non-linear vs linear stories seem preferred, long narratives are shunned) and the first problems starting to be addressed (how to fund, willing playerbase, how to market porn between gamers).

This will continue for a little while now and we'll see a variety of games do very well for themselves as the market shrinks in overall profitability but grows in content. We're essentially in the Wild West phase here where many a cowboy are seeking their fortune while the bigger players take a stand-offish attitude.

However this is running out. As Steam opened up adult gaming and Patreon is sort of settling on how comfortable it is with the model, we're about to see some of the professional guys start dipping their toes into the water to find how profitable it may be for them. The issue they currently have is that the major genres such as incest are things that no company really wants to associate themselves with - walking into a pitch meeting with investors and being known as "that company who made the game where you fuck your own mom" is not a good look. So we'll see games with these themes but slightly softened.

It beggars belief to me that Brazzers and others are not already funding AA level titles with exclusive clips in open world genre specific games. Genuinely, I cannot work that out. @Milftoon-Drama is WAY ahead of the game in that respect and has been for a while, although they have the plus point of not having the murky waters of incest be a drawback to their participation.

Longer term I think we'll see many more "real porn" games than artistic games and of a decent quality. LifeSelector is a poor realisation of the potential that is there. Indie game developers should approach the larger content library holders for usage/licencing rights of their content and start creating games with all of this. It's mutually beneficial in the same way that they share clips with streaming porn sites and obviously there's good money in it for the development team. This is the future of the industry in my reckoning.

 

[anne O'nymous]

I dont think the problem is in 'lack' of quantity - so there is no decline in that to begin with. It just became a bit harder to find the gems in all the noise of bad stuff - that's all.

True, there's games that worth it and that started this year, or in the last few months, like

You must be registered to see the links

by example, who's the best possible example, or, in another style,

You must be registered to see the links

. It just became more difficult to find them among the tens new games that come each month.

 

[redknight00]

No, patreon numbers have been steadily rising over the last year (except for that one fuck up in August) more and more games being made every day and developers getting better at their job.

There's a lot of perception, we always think today's [insert industry here] is crap and back in the good old days things were better, despite the fact that we still had a lot of trash games getting abandoned and that even the "good games" of last year would be roasted to hell and back by today's standards. If anything, none of the games I was following last year got abandoned or finished in addition to a few I discovered now, so if anything I would say there are more good games today than before.

I do agree with the sameness that fell upon the adult gaming industry, reason why I played 3 Ren'py+Daz3d games this year, they all just look and feel the same. Back in the day, I was actually looking forward to the Patreon ban on incest, I naively thought it would make creators move on to more creative water but sadly it was not true.

 

[DarthSeduction]

Last ~6-7 months I can't find any new game, that is engaging. I play mostly updates of old games, but some of them are already dumped and others went for even lower quality (story mostly, which make me quit them).
Everything looks the same (not like there was a lot of different stuff before) but people using stock Daz3d stuff (they don't even bother to customize them a bit) some blatant story about:
a) you fuck your family
b) you are world stupidest female, which answers on the question "Can I fuck you" with "No" (while undressing pics starts), only to put a "rape" tag on the game.
c) including a) + entire world female population, there aren't any males around (not even Erik, as known as the "Bin Laden" in the adult games)

I know making a good story is hard and a lot of people will skip the story, but how you can keep people in your game only with good renders? Is the "industry" going down?

Well, I am making an incest game, with The things we do for love, but it's not like any of the cookie cutter incest games out there, and I am also creating a female protagonist game, however:

- I love Eve's assertiveness, especially with the housing adviser, v early on. I didn't realize how much passivity in women there is in the genre of games (I don't know how) until I was so surprised and refreshed by Eve's personality.

You'll find it completely subverts your trope here as well.

Furthermore, there are games like The DeLuca Family, Project SAGE, and High Life, all of which show a lot more promise than 90% of the games that get released.

DeLuca, in particular, has some of the best writing so far that I've seen in adult games, HopesGaming is rivaling my two other favorite porn game writers in BurtReynold'sMustache, and PhillyGames

Project SAGE is one of very few female protag games that allows you, the player, to shape the character's interactions with the world as you see fit. She can be dumb, if you want her to be, or she can pretend to be dumb if you want her to be that kind of "coy" slut. Or you can make her domineering and assertive.

High Life has probably the most interesting start of any game I've ever played, and the MC reminds me of a girl who I know and love but can never have, so it's a huge plus on that front.

To be honest, that's 3 games I'm excited about because they are above my expectations. Before these 3 the only games that were above my expectations were Coceter Chronicles and Depraved Awakening. Most others ride that "it's a porn game and so porn logic occurs" mentality all the way to the bank, even titles I love like Babysitter, Parental Love, and Sisterly Lust.

So, no, the industry isn't in decline, in fact, I'd say we are just starting a new wave of really great games, you just have to wade through a lot of crap to find them.

 

[DarthSeduction]

Any other "Patreon clone" that accepts credit card payments will have rules similar to the ones Patreon has. The only way to get away from censorship is by using cryptocurrencies, either by donating directly to the developers or by using some service based on them.

That's not true.

Anonymous asked:

What types of adult content will, and will not, be allowed on Sponsorion?

ADULT CONTENT WE’RE NOT ALLOWING:

> We won’t be allowing real life porn. The legal overhead is far beyond the capabilities of a start-up. The crux of the matter is that the relevant US laws for real life porn are a great deal more restrictive than other fields, and don’t seem to separate platform provider and creator, at least not for crowdfunding purposes. We’d be under the same obligations as a porn studio, including the requirements for paperwork and ID verification. This would be on a site that has users all over the world! Also, a bit of an oddity for business law, messing up or even getting fooled by a fake ID (!!) could land us in prison. Literal prison. If you can’t 100% handle every file in triplicate (or operating out of a country with very loose laws) you shouldn’t even think of doing this. We can’t do that, so we can’t allow real life porn.

> We won’t be allowing Loli/Shota. L/S is treated differently from every other form of hentai under US law. Yes, we know it’s a grey area. But if you get dragged into court the case would be unwinnable – being in a grey area isn’t enough, when peddling something that unpopular you either need to be firmly in the right or have an arbitrarily large vault full of lawyers. US free speech protection is strong, and for basically everything *except* loli/shota being firmly in the right is exactly what we’d be. It’s also a legal lighting rod in a way no other fetish art is – it’s unlikely we’d end up in court in the first place over anything else.

> Do individuals get away with these things? Yes, they do. But.. if a spider crawls through a lion’s den, it does not mean a mouse can do the same. A big online platform cannot get away with things an individual creator can. If we are hugely successful, well, it’d be like a whole antelope trying to sneak through that den.

—-

ADULT CONTENT WE ARE ALLOWING:

> Aside from the above, we plan on allowing fetish hentai content of all kinds. Yes, including stuff like vore / incest / etc. Depicting such things is legal under US law, and that’s the basis of what adult content we do and do not allow - “Is it legal?” and “Can we handle the regulatory overhead of allowing this?”.


—-


THINGS UNRELATED TO ADULT CONTENT WE’RE CONSIDERING NOT / NOT ALLOWING:

> One thing we’re debating, that has nothing to do with adult content, is whether or not to just blanket ban all political movements from using our platform. That would make things easier on our ToS, and really has nothing to do with adult content creators or even most SFW content creators.

Other things unrelated to adult content we definitely won’t be allowing:

> No gambling. REASON: Regulatory quagmire.
> No Multi-Level Marketing, Financial Instruments, etc. REASON: Also a regulatory quagmire.
> This list is not exhaustive – when it comes to high risk industries, we want to support adult content providers.

- The Sponsorion Team

You must be registered to see the links

You must be registered to see the links

 

[toolkitxx]

Hate to do this but the mentioning of Sponsorion is one of the things that are so wrong with the adult games. Sponsorion lacks the most basic thing that sites like Patreon etc have - a clear statement who is behind and what they stand for.

There is and has never been anything wrong with lewd or porn stuff. But most or at least many sites always skimmed along the legal borders and the good old system of 'subscription' never worked out for any of them. Those systems have always created tension between the subscriber and the provider as it is always difficult to balance the cost of actual content with serious subscribers. Patreon was one of the first good sites because it was about supporting the artist - not a specific project. Crowd funding projects had a peek and also died out quickly when too many felt that receivers of the funds wouldnt or couldnt deliver what they claimed to deliver. Almost every single project being funded via Patreon has the exact same problem.

So its not about which site but about the system. Funding projects requires very much transparency of the receiver in all aspects and i personally (and i know many others who think the exact same way) will never fund someone anonymous via any site - that's like sending money to Al Kai-da directly via Western Union for me. As long as developers have to hide behind virtual identities this will not change and thus there wont be any real industry for those.

 

[DarthSeduction]

Hate to do this but the mentioning of Sponsorion is one of the things that are so wrong with the adult games. Sponsorion lacks the most basic thing that sites like Patreon etc have - a clear statement who is behind and what they stand for.

There is and has never been anything wrong with lewd or porn stuff. But most or at least many sites always skimmed along the legal borders and the good old system of 'subscription' never worked out for any of them. Those systems have always created tension between the subscriber and the provider as it is always difficult to balance the cost of actual content with serious subscribers. Patreon was one of the first good sites because it was about supporting the artist - not a specific project. Crowd funding projects had a peek and also died out quickly when too many felt that receivers of the funds wouldnt or couldnt deliver what they claimed to deliver. Almost every single project being funded via Patreon has the exact same problem.

So its not about which site but about the system. Funding projects requires very much transparency of the receiver in all aspects and i personally (and i know many others who think the exact same way) will never fund someone anonymous via any site - that's like sending money to Al Kai-da directly via Western Union for me. As long as developers have to hide behind virtual identities this will not change and thus there wont be any real industry for those.

Sorry, this is just pure personal opinion. Sponsorion is far more clear than Patreon. Patreon claims to be about the artist, but they're just about their bottom Line, Sponsorion is literally created in response to this issue.

What is Sponsorion?
Sponsorion will be a platform for fans to directly fund creators through a tiered, subscription-based pledge system.


What sets us apart from the others is that we will be the first crowdfunding platform built from the ground up to welcome all creators without the field discrimination plaguing the mainstream financial industry.

All types of creators?
Yes! We are designing this operation to handle both casual and adult content creators equally, without pressure from ad companies or financial institutions.


Honest adult content creators are continuously driven out the industry, leaving only the big names and shady dealers. When the best advice for processing payments is "lie about your industry", it's not a surprise the folk we should be supporting the most are the ones being supported the least.

But what if I'm not interested in seeing -that- kind of content? No worries! You'll be able to hide or show the more sensitive content with ease, and use our filter system to browse only the content that appeals to you! What features are planned?

• Intuitive and rapid content navigation using galleries and tags.
• Ability to have mutliple goal and reward tier levels.
• Ability to post images/video/polls/text (Of course).
• Transparent billing process.
• The low 5% + (payment processor cost) fee that's the gold standard in crowdfunding.
• A payment processor fee of 3.95% + 0.45c, comparable to the 2.90%+0.35c charged by paypal
• Batch pledging & fees paid creator-side, not sponsor-side (as is standard for subscription crowdfunding)
• Chargeback protection.
• And much more!

What do you mean by 'building from the ground up'? What are you doing that others have not? The main reason this niche has been left open for so long is because a great deal of mainstream finance won't work with adult content. Things that non-adult businesses completely taken for granted, like payment processor availability, become major hurdles if any of your clients make sexy pictures. Creating a platform that works with adult content creators requires one work only with investors and other partners that won't demand such content be purged. You won't end up with those partners by chance - it has to a priority, and it has to be a priory from the very beginning. Individual creators try and sometimes succeed at passing below the radar of more prudish entities, but you can't run a crowdfunding platform that way.

They are quite transparent in their own business standards, goals, and mission. Any statement to the contrary is just naysaying.

As to my anonymity, to be honest it's not because of the fact that it's porn, I could give 0 fucks about that. I just prefer to maintain my anonymity online in general. However, unless you do exhaustive research into all the companies you buy shit from, that statement is meaningless. Do you trust Nestle? They aren't "anonymous". They also support child slavery on the cocoa farms they purchase from, create massive campaigns in shit countries to convince mothers that their powdered formula is healthier than breast milk, causing them to use it with the dirty local water and giving their children all sorts of health problems, killing many of them, and for what? Money? And that doesn't even begin to talk about how much they are working on turning water into a commodity and what a nightmare scenario that is.

Anonymity may be scary, but transparency doesn't mean shit.

 

[toolkitxx]

@DarthSeduction Not sure why you felt personally attacked because it wasnt pointed at you but a general statement about the topic.

As of Nestle etc - you clearly hit the spot there. I can find Nestle, money streams are visible if i want to look at them etc. Same goes for a company like Brazzers and others like them. I dont distinguish between porn or not - i distinguish between necessary anonymity and payments. That has and will always be a difficult topic like religion or politics thus no real truth can ever be found when we discuss anonymity. But it becomes an issue when payments are involved of any kind.

 

[Volta]

There will always be peaks and troughs in game production, both long and short term. At the moment patreon has a monopoly, simple as that, they can do what they want, ban what they want and raise prices whenever they want, this is having a stunting effect on indie devs, particularly in the adult sector. I'm not saying we'd be better off without patreon but we need a rival to it to get competition going. This is also meaning that devs are less willing to put time into new or innovative games, instead stick to the tried and true profitable stuff like incest(patched of course) since they may get branded as incest, non-consensual or otherwise undesirable and have the page and therefore the income stream frozen.

Then there is the wider progression of the industry to think about and this is where we have to thank patreon. When patreon came onto the market it gave devs a platform to develop and fund themselves with at a negligible cost to themselves beyond time spent, meaning people who wouldn't otherwise have been able to become full or part time devs now could, and get funded where they otherwise wouldn't or couldn't, this produced a boom and all booms eventually bust or at least taper off, IMO we are seeing a tapering off to some degree right now, in part due to the above point. (note i'm not talking about patrons per patreon here but variety and quality of content)

Finally and perhaps most importantly a lot of devs that tried their hands in the early boom are now finishing a project or have for one reason or another stopped developing, some promising games like ethan's legacy are unlikely ever to be finished, whereas other great devs like LewdLab are in pre-release for their second projects, like i said natural peaks and troughs.

IMO we are unlikely to see another burst of new games and growth like we had only a couple of years ago, at least not till something changes like a viable patreon or Daz alternative(s). In short a little change could bring innovation and the spice back into the industry, there are simply too few genuinely interesting game in production right now and certainly a lot of the new ones feel a little cannon fodder to me, but i guess that is always the case, the good ones will go the distance and the rest won't.

standout games at the moment:
Acting lessons : story and emotional weight/execution of emotional stuff
Superpowered: longevity, content volume and general stalwart attitude of dev
Milf City : currently the best renders in the industry IMO
Wicked choices: engaging story
The DeLuca family : unconventional premise, though still early on in development