Low quality game rant

[Advent Games]

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I do kind of agree with you, especially the platforms making game dev life very difficult. AICG is a tricky one. I've seen some amazing results in good games by talented dev teams (certainly better coders than I am), but granted, those are all in the tech demo state as of now. The games with AICG I saw released are generally not that good.

 

[ChronicPasswordForgettor]

I'm willing to put up with amateurish art and technical jank, but when I start up a popular game, a VN no less, and the writing is dry and riddled with typos, I really have to wonder about peoples' taste.

Amateurish art can honestly add flavor. SovL, if you will. I don't mind a typo here or there either, I know how hard it is to re-read a wall of text for errors, when you have only one pair of eyes at it. But when you make a VISUAL NOVEL which is meant to sell on the basis of writing - what are you doing when the writing is just poor? Devs need to take a step back and ask themselves if their games actually contribute something, other than noise.

why dont you just try to make a game yourself... see how "low effort" it actually is

Way ahead of you, albeit it's not smut and I'd sooner die under torture than let my game be associated with gooning enthusiasts such as myself. Sorry, but I'm not going to pretend some DAZ renders are "high effort". I don't have a high bar, I just want to see more than Illusion game screenshots or ugly 3D goblins.

And I'm going to leave one more controversial point, one that may quite potentially cause a stir but I mean it 100% honestly:
Are you really going to let your financial security hinge on money of strangers for a pornographic game, really?
Games are meant to be art. Art is not meant to be profitable, in principle. Now, I'm not going to say I want to bukkake the video game equivalent of Mona Lisa, but surely there's more to creating something than chasing rapidly depreciating and ultimately worthless paper with some ink on it, right?

I believe that in their chase for money, a lot of people forgot what generates money to begin with: labor of love and effort. This is a smut game free love forum, let's not pretend that most people here will pay for games. But what's more likely to generate money: A game with a dev that tries to wrestle you and apply various little patreon bullshit armlocks to try and goad you into paying for the premium version, or a dev that just fucking works, slaving away at his game, and when it's finished, everyone can just agree "man, that was a fuckin' good game"?

Porn game development never was, and never will be a lucrative business, unless you're in the 3rd world where $100 is a life-changing sum. I genuinely believe people are more likely to reward a dev with their hard-earned McDonald's money for a game that is simply good and not engineered to squeeze that money out of them, rather than a development gacha/slot machine, that proceeds at a snail's pace despite earning $1k a month on patreon for what essentially is just a renpy VN with mediocre art, powered by the tasteless masses.

Good way to grind? Yeah. Yeah, it is. Imagine you have 4-5 of "projects" like that under your wing, under different dev names. All proceeding at an engineered snail's pace. Easy money, at a low, low cost of flooding the internet with yet another one.
I'm not going to point fingers or name any game. You know who you are. The moment I point you out, your rabid fans will come to rip me apart, so I'll spare myself.

 

[Story Teller]

I'm willing to put up with amateurish art and technical jank

Here, have one of my jank amateurish art✌

 

[Ass prefer]

View attachment 3719589
Here, have one of my jank amateurish art✌

Ugly

 

[lolzorzs]

View attachment 3719589
Here, have one of my jank amateurish art✌

Now run it through an AI.

 

[Semetrika]

Is anyone else not a little frustrated by the sheer amount of shit that uses DAZ, renpy, fucking Illusion game screenshots, AI art?

Nobody? At all? Anyone?

I'm tired of these low-quality, low-effort RPGM gallery games too. What happened to game devs making fun games? I am exaggerating, but it really feels like you can count those on all your fingers, toes, and your dong.

No. These tools are for creating image. Most of time depends on people how they use it. So it's not fault of DAZ, Illusion or AI. Same for Ren'py or RPGM. If you want quality, pay for it and don't support artist/developers who don't meet your "standard". I understand your frustration, but this rant is useless as many of them on internet.

 

[DuniX]

5. AI CG - pornography is largely about seeing something new.

I have seen something "new" with AI CG today.
God help us all.

 

[tretch95]

I do kind of agree with you, especially the platforms making game dev life very difficult. AICG is a tricky one. I've seen some amazing results in good games by talented dev teams (certainly better coders than I am), but granted, those are all in the tech demo state as of now. The games with AICG I saw released are generally not that good.

I was more thinking about people using AI tools to generate their own erotica and porn.
Effectively replacing the demand to download games and mainstream porn.


For artwork in games, no it is not good enough. Not yet.
Results are way too inconsistent.

 

[tretch95]

I have seen something "new" with AI CG today.
God help us all.

Oh but that looks harmless. And it is halfway decent 2d manga style.

Guess you haven't seen this game yet?

(Serious warning... disturbing images)

 

[bethrezen0]

Oh but that looks harmless. And it is halfway decent 2d manga style.

Guess you haven't this this game yet?

(Serious warning... disturbing images)

I guess this is just a reality check for me on how far gone i am. Since even this doesn't phase me, and i already seen shit like this occasionally. Looks like ur typical TF fetish stuff, but an AI attempt at replicating something done in DAZ.

 

[♍VoidTraveler]

Oh but that looks harmless. And it is halfway decent 2d manga style.

Guess you haven't this this game yet?

(Serious warning... disturbing images)

I've seen people draw far worse than this, AI has nothing to do with what people want from it.
Other than having no choice but to spit out the next ridiculous perversion human mind conceived of lol.

 

[DuniX]

I've seen people draw far worse than this, AI has nothing to do with what people want from it.
Other than having no choice but to spit out the next ridiculous perversion human mind conceived of lol.

You have failed to realize the true horror.
All your Anime Waifus are going to be "Super-Sized" by AIs.
Someone is going to fap to your anime waifu getting fucked in their belly flabs.

 

[Insomnimaniac Games]

Someone is going to fap to your anime waifu getting fucked in their belly flabs.

You know, this "being able to read" thing suddenly isn't all it's cracked up to be.

 

[unfreezer]

You know, this "being able to read" thing suddenly isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Neither is being a developer.

 

[Girm Ork]

Games have to be cost-effective. Especially if the developer lives in the USA or any other first world country.
In my opinion, based on my experience, Unity/Unreal games are not cost-effective. Game engines are not constructors, they require a lot of code for basic game functions like save/load, AI behavior, camera behavior, etc. Also, game engines are too universal, they require a lot of custom tools to make the development process effective. I've written many tools for text localization, level design and game balancing.
Game constructors like RPG Maker, RenPy and others already include almost everything. You don't have to waste your time writing code, you can make a game right away.

 

[kytee]

I was more thinking about people using AI tools to generate their own erotica and porn.
Effectively replacing the demand to download games and mainstream porn.

I already tried this and am still continuing to try this only to see how it develops. Unless you get easily turned on by seeing naughty words chained to one another, AI erotica pales in comparison to what any humans can do. I'd rather take the average human-written erotica by some amateur hobbyist than have to fight tooth and nail for an AI to write a comprehensive story longer than a few thousand words, especially if it's completely without human guidance to steer it away from dumb ideas. Sure, AI sound groundbreaking and cool to someone has no idea what AI is capable of and only dreams about the possibilities. But when you've pushed the absolute limits of AI (GPT4 in my case) and start to see all the flaws and the repetitive patterns and the gibberish word salad it starts spewing when you hit the memory limit, that's when the illusion of grandeur fades. I think AI, especially in the erotica space, is over hyped. If you don't think it is, try it out for at least a couple of hours, preferably in one chat thread.

 

[desmosome]

Good way to grind? Yeah. Yeah, it is. Imagine you have 4-5 of "projects" like that under your wing, under different dev names. All proceeding at an engineered snail's pace. Easy money, at a low, low cost of flooding the internet with yet another one.
I'm not going to point fingers or name any game. You know who you are. The moment I point you out, your rabid fans will come to rip me apart, so I'll spare myself.

There is only one that comes to mind. The dude making those NTR shovelware, yeah? CaptainKitty and all the alts that use the same assets and game design lol.

I agree with the general premise that the vast majority of porn games are shit, but I don't really vibe with your generalization that it's due to the engine/assets they use. Unless you are completely a visual fapper, the assets just need to be pleasing enough to look at. And you can't make blanket statements that DAZ, illusion, koikasu, or even sims are ugly looking garbage. There is personal preferences involved. What makes a game shit is just the fact that most of these devs are random dudes on the internet with no qualifications to be making a game in the first place. They can't write for shit. They lack ideas and it's questionable whether they even storyboard the thing. And that's only talking about VNs. Actual gameplay is like reaching for the moon for these people. Of course it will be like this in an amateur scene with no professional standards. What are you expecting? Actual good games to pop out regularly from a bunch of coomers' efforts?

 

[ChronicPasswordForgettor]

What are you expecting? Actual good games to pop out regularly from a bunch of coomers' efforts?

Good? No. New and unique? Yes.
Off the top of my head I can bring up Corrupted Saviors. It's an interesting example, because the visual element is very lacking (read: there's none), but the gameplay is pretty unique. Sure, it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but it wouldn't hurt to try something new once in a while, would it?

Once again, my bar isn't high. I just want something that goes beyond an art gallery or a renpy slideshow involving DAZ goblins and Koikatsu/HS2 screenshots. Please. If I wanted that, I'd just play Illusion games.

I am also 100% convinced that good games are grown like a plant in a garden - through effort and love, and also a lot of shoveled bullshit.

I am not saying "grr this shit sucks! get it off the site!", rather, let people who enjoy that flaming trashpile continue enjoying it unimpeded. I am simply saying "let me enjoy the good stuff" by helping me (and other users) filter out shit like western games. Simple combinational filters (ie. filter if tag1+tag2 present) would do the trick.

 

[Glib_Gentleman]

Is anyone else not a little frustrated by the sheer amount of shit that uses DAZ, renpy, fucking Illusion game screenshots, AI art?

Nobody? At all? Anyone?

I think you need to remember Sturgeon's Law:
Sturgeon's law is the adage that “ninety percent of everything is crap”. This suggests that, in general, the vast majority of the works that are produced in any given field are likely to be of low quality.

It's not just porn games. It's ALL games. Books. Youtube content, etc.

Nah it's not just you. Games are mostly just objectively garbage compared to what's been there five or more years ago.

When i could download at least some "0.0.2 update" about every day back in ~2018, i can now go weeks without seeing anything worthwhile. Most authors used to update perhaps every 4 to 8 weeks, now we're talking about 4 to 8 months, and that are the faster ones. And then the update is perhaps 10 minutes of story / gameplay.



There is a number of things which happened over the past years, which i believe have eroded the creator scene:

You make some really good points that I hadn't thought of.

The AI thing is interesting, because I guess if players were using porn games exclusively to fap to the pictures, this could potentially make a big impact, especially for more niche fetishes. In generally though, I think a lot of porn game players gravitate to porn games for the GAME aspect of it, or at least the story, because if you want to masturbate, images on the internet have always been equally as close to hand.

And I'm going to leave one more controversial point, one that may quite potentially cause a stir but I mean it 100% honestly:
Are you really going to let your financial security hinge on money of strangers for a pornographic game, really?
Games are meant to be art. Art is not meant to be profitable, in principle. Now, I'm not going to say I want to bukkake the video game equivalent of Mona Lisa, but surely there's more to creating something than chasing rapidly depreciating and ultimately worthless paper with some ink on it, right?

I believe that in their chase for money, a lot of people forgot what generates money to begin with: labor of love and effort. This is a smut game free love forum, let's not pretend that most people here will pay for games. But what's more likely to generate money: A game with a dev that tries to wrestle you and apply various little patreon bullshit armlocks to try and goad you into paying for the premium version, or a dev that just fucking works, slaving away at his game, and when it's finished, everyone can just agree "man, that was a fuckin' good game"?

There are also a LOT of game devs that slave away on labors of love, passion, and effort for years and then release it to absolute crickets and zero return on investment.

There are horror stories of indie game development where a person spends 2-3 years working on game only to release in on Steam or Itch.io only get 5 sales or less.

Patreon or crowdfunded game dev does at least tell you if you have an audience, and provides feedback during development allowing the dev to (theoretically) make the game better. I agree Patreon dev's trying to get you to pay extra for a "premium" version of the game are bullshit.

 

[marcel8107]

Is anyone else not a little frustrated by the sheer amount of shit that uses DAZ, renpy, fucking Illusion game screenshots, AI art?

Nobody? At all? Anyone?

I'm tired of these low-quality, low-effort RPGM gallery games too. What happened to game devs making fun games? I am exaggerating, but it really feels like you can count those on all your fingers, toes, and your dong.

Seriously.

I feel a little tired that every time I want to see what's new, I must add "AI art", "real porn" to excluded tags, and outright trash any game made with renpy or any game tagged as a VN.
I really, really want to filter out Unity/UE games too, because grand majority of them are pure garbage, but there are a couple that aren't, so I can't. My options?
a) dig through the western DAZ trash
b) miss out on a gem or two
Cursed. Cursed. Cursed.

Baseed on how many game threads are here there are more and more devs couse its more easier to create game today, and user do not want to pay for games couse so many are there and thus even nice games abandon couse of lack of cash. Few of trending games get good cash and devs want to add moree and more contetn.