people treat them like porn with some annoying gameplay attached to it
I don’t think this is true. It’s just that the vast majority of games have terrible gameplay—RPGM games especially.
Default RPGM combat is terrible; and even when devs try to expand on it to make it a little more interesting, it still falls miles behind even very old games like
Final Fantasy VI in terms of spell variety, equipment variety, character choice, enemy variety, bosses, etc., while also usually lacking any sort of long-term progression systems like weapon upgrades or the
FF6 Eidolin’s/
FF7 materia/
FF9 item magic that would make it just a little more engaging. (And RPGM games that try to do anything other than turnbased combat, such as real-time combat, minigames, etc., just fail completely, as, as far as I’ve seen, the engine is just not capable of handling that.)
Beyond engine limitations, there’s the issue that most NSFW devs are not game designers. They’re programmers, or animators, or modellers, etc., who picked up game design as a hobby. This leads to a plethora of issues, but gameplay and level design especially tend to suffer. It also means that most devs are much more interested in the porn aspect than the gameplay. The result is that, in most games, the gameplay receives only enough attention as to make it functional, but not engaging. Worse case, the dev will themselves come to see gameplay as just an obstacle to hide the porn behind, which is when you start to get really tedious, grindy gameplay. (And example of this would be
Breeders of the Nephelym. Or all the potion making in
Peasant’s Quest.)
In light of this, I don’t think it’s surprising that a lot of players come to also view gameplay as just an obstacle for the porn. My guess is, if the gameplay in your porn game were as engaging as
Dark Souls or
Call of Duty, or at the very least one of the
Final Fantasy titles, the question of whether people want more porn or more gameplay wouldn’t be so obvious.
I will say, there are a few games on this site the gameplay whereof I genuinely enjoyed. They’re not perfect, of course,—they lack a lot of the polish of a “proper game”,—but they were overall quite fun, even without the porn element. These were:
Carnal Instinct,
Iris in the Labyrinth of Demons, and
Flying Princess: Inter-Breed.
