The fact of the matter is that you're comparing Subverse with a version of another game that nobody wants to play. The localized versions of these games all have censorship (removed content) and no modding support to them. For this reason, the western player base does not buy OR pirate that version of the game. It's like comparing Team Fortress 2's Xbox sales to Overwatch's consoles sales, when Team Fortress 2 was only ever alive and popular on it's PC version. it's a skewed comparison that lends convenience to Subverse. If we were to compare Subverse's discord and ONE of Honey Select's unofficial English speaking discords, and assume that both user counts only represent about 30% of the actual player base, you'd see how drastically Subverse still falls behind. This is only the English speaking users For AI and Honey Select btw. The AI Steam link you posted showed a cap of under 600 users played
that version game at it's peak, while there are over 3 million on this Discord server alone.
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Honey Select, AI, and Koikatsu are scene creators though. The "main mode" that comes with these games are usually just a menu that allows you to select a girl you created and fuck her, that's it. The bulk of it's content comes from a highly advanced (one of the best on the market) scene creators, where people endlessly create scenes. When people point to Illusion Game story modes as being trash, that's usually an indicator for anyone with even a little knowledge of these games that this person doesn't know a thing about them.
Illusion game's scene creator and Subverse's Pandora and "Gallery" aren't the same kind of sandbox.
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