Target audience for adult games?

[miklus]

Let's say you want to run a facebook ads campaign on your game and narrow down the target audience as much as possible.
1st things what comes to mind:
age 18-45, single, men, pc/android, rpg players, visual novel, hentai....VR(?)
What else?

 

[Avaron1974]

No one trying to run an ad campaign would run the list you are.

Not a single dev would put "men" in the ad. Not going SJW but there are a hell of a lot of women play adult games and they also spend money, no dev trying make a living is going to alienate a paying crowd, that's shit business.

You're also missing Mac which is the second biggest platform behind PC.

RPG players and VN players tend to be separate. It's not often you'll find a VN with RPG elements and when you do it's rare they are any good. VN players tend to prefer story based games and choices in dialogue while RPG players tend to prefer free movement, combat, looting etc...

There is no way to catch all for a game, it's always going to come down to what kind of game it is.

For instance you have A Wife and a Mother that's an incredibly slow burn story based game with a female protag and running a catch all buzzword campaign for adult games will also bring in the crowd that likes more hardcore stuff and they will be pissed you tried to sell them on something they hated.

Dog Days of Summer is a lesbian based game which won't go down well with male dom players.

 

[miklus]

I'm thinking about something like milfy city or treasures of Nadia with a male protag., something that combines both rpg and vn, with mini games ect.
But the question stays the same. It was about narrowing down, about making the list of keywords as effective as possible, about finding things what all players have in common. For example, ofcourse where are players let's say at their 60s or 70s who are playing this kind of games, but is it worth it to include this age group to ads campaign? Or let's say at what degree women play adult games as male protag compared to men? (just narrowing down, not alienating).
Long story short, you have a branch of the tree, you cut the small branches off and left with the fat part, what's the fat part?

 

[Droid Productions]

First question... is your target audience there? Do they *click* on the ads, knowing facebook is inherently dedicated to tracking, profiling and reshaping society to it's NoCal dream? I sure as fuck would not click a facebook advert for porn; I know the next 5,000 adverts I'm shown would be shaped by that.

Last year I advertised a game for (normie) gamers on Facebook and Reddit; spending ~1-2k on each, so not massive amounts of cash. Both have failed to prove a positive ROI, despite constant tinkering with creatives and messaging. The mobile industry has turned this into an art-form, but you usually don't have the attribution tracking to duplicate it... and even if you did, just how did we as an industry manage to move from being a scalable one (where the up-front cost is fixed), to a commoditized one (where we pay Facebook $5 to get a user that hopefully will make back $5.10, and has no loyalty to us). It seems to be a *really* great business for Facebook... not so much for us.

 

[freedom.call]

I'd make the demo/first release...first. I worry when devs worry about catchment groups initially before the game. I'm not on facebook anyway but good luck nonetheless.

 

[miklus]

That's what I'm trying to find out, whos my target audience and where. Talking about fb ads, I'm not going straight forward with a blowjob scenes in the ads, no word about adult content either, maybe something with attractive characters with a link to patreon/kickstarter where they get a msg of 18+.
So in your opinion what would be the best means of promo?

 

[miklus]

I'd make the demo/first release...first. I worry when devs worry about catchment groups initially before the game. I'm not on facebook anyway but good luck nonetheless.

demo/1st release needs promo as well

 

[freedom.call]

demo/1st release needs promo as well

Of course. You get a lot of promo releasing a demo here tbf, then you can see how the actual game is welcomed (or not).

 

[rk-47]

literally anyone of any age (over 16 atleast)
adult games are no different than a typical game like fallout certain people will be in certain things, hell i even saw a game with disabled girls and a disabled mc in a wheelchair which would certainly be targeted to disabled pervs!