The metrics on porn sites are irrelevant to what would work for AVNs because AVNs aren’t porn. What you’re saying is like someone going, “Romance novels are the best selling books, so romance movies should be the best preforming movies and do way better than a superhero or action flicks.” But that isn’t the case because movies and books are different things. Using porn as a metric for anything related to AVNs (let alone the content and story as many devs do) will inevitably lead to failures, which we see over and over again on this site. Just my two cents from reading the first page of the thread. Might comment on some other stuff, we’ll see.
Both the original poster, and your reply are flawed approaches.
Porn is still a useful metric for determining general trends and interests. The biggest example of crossover is incest. Back around 2017, incest was THE tag. If a game didn't have it, it was destined for mediocrity. It was basically the reverse NTR, where instead of everyone bitching that it exists, they were complaining that it didn't exist. At that same time, the incest genre in porn had grown dramatically in that industry. It was before algorithms became as sophisticated as they are today, and any site you went to would blast you with the most popular videos rather than recommended feeds, and it was always incest that absolutely dominated the industry. It was also that period that spawned the 'step-bro' memes.
However, porn isn't the only useful metric. Adult games have always had a close connection with Japan, hentai, anime and H-games. That connection isn't as strong today, but the crossover is still there. Several years ago, there was a very brief period where NTR was starting to come up, some became popular, and a couple even randomly added it into their games to follow that trend. It was this same period which sparked the NTR-hate trend. Yet, at the same time, the 'old bastard' genre also has a short popularity spike. Similar to adult games, both were a fad that shortly fizzled out.
If we use both Japan and Western porn as our benchmarks to rate the popularity of lesbian content, there is a contradiction. While lesbian is popular in the west, it's never been so in Japan. While I'm sure Yuri has some popularity in the West, I've never seen anything to suggest that it's substantial.
With all that said, this community has matured. We no longer need to rely on either of those industries, but it would be stupid to assume there is no correlation at all. However, as a community we have created our own culture, and established our own trends. If you want to be successful as a developer in this community, the trends we set should take priority, but it shouldn't be the only factor. After all, the next game released could be the one to create the next new trend.
But, I do agree with the fact that it's only a vocal minority whose against lesbian. However, there has never been a vocal group in support of lesbian. Therefore, we can assume that the majority of people are moderate. If it exists, that's fine, if it doesn't, that's also fine. What's more, I can't think of a single lesbian-focused game that has gained any significant amount of popularity, but there are plenty of examples of games with lesbian content that has. This further suggests that there isn't a huge demand for lesbian content, but instead it's just treated as 'fine'. Basically, it's largely treated as just another generic tag like 'anal' for the majority.
Therefore, I do believe that the phrase 'make the game you want to make' still holds credibility for this issue. While there is a vocal minority opposed to it, myself included, it should come down to the developer rather or not they want it included. In some sense, it makes sense to placate us since we're the only ones asking for something. However, since the majority don't care, a developer could decide to ignore us in order to have more variety of scenes.