"what do people want?"
I just read crazy dad's 'comic' series "mother - desire forbidden", and was once again amazed how little these quality aspects that people keep asking for matter. It literally fails at everything from engrish to incredibly uninspired and cliche mom-son setting, it's really hard to imagine how it could be done any worse.
and still, I kept clicking through the 8 part 'story' 70-100 pages each. I couldn't stop. it had a tall thicc mom that doesn't look under 35yo, and a dumbass 18yo-ish son trying to fuck her. that's it.
and when I got through with it, I kinda felt like I want to see more of that shit show. in a completely unironic way.
so I've been trying to wrap my head around why it still works with so little done right. and the things it doesn't have are:
-deep characters, no arc whatsoever.
-no original story.
-no fetish bloat. it's about one thing and one thing only, getting the mom to fuck you.
-no grammar whatsoever, I honestly think the writer must've had a stroke while writing, and not the good kind.
-great models.
-good graphics. (it's not awful, but what's good about it comes from the daz models as default.)
other things it didn NOT have, things that would ruin it instantly:
-shota mc.
-early sex. it's a long very badly done waiting game, yet it keeps tension because no early sex.
-pedo-bait little sister.
-NTR. (I know it has its audience, but that's a tiny niche and adding it instantly cuts out 80-90% of audience.)
things I think it did right:
-subject matter, and focusing on it without distractions. with this I don't mean that it's good because it's mom-son incest, but that he chose a hugely popular genre, and didn't start cutting out subsets of that audience by adding niche fetishes that would each lose a segment of readers. he kept his main audience intact. very few games here do that, hence very few people like them. even when a game begins well and everybody loves it, 9/10 the dev loses them right after setting up the world by taking a huge wrong turn. it's almost always something like adding NTR, futanari, or adding a thousand generic easy side-sluts for no reason.
-mom wasn't a slut. now, she was very quickly on board with the idea of fucking her son, but she still showed apprehension all the way through. she was interested right away, and it was shown in both imagery and inner monologue, but she still had to be convinced. however flimsy that rational was.
-son was a pervert and a moron, but he wasn't rapey. even though he forged the emails of mom's therapist to hint her that it's okay for her to fuck her son. now, the reason why I'm bringing this up, is that a LOT of people get turned off by rape vibes. it once again cuts out most of the audience. and here's the alternative, if you show the heroine's inner motivation you can get away with murder.
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so. what I'm getting at here is not that we should make games as badly as this awful thing. I'm trying to draw the attention to why it WORKS despite all the failings 'everybody knows' are wrong. and I think it does it with a very simple recipe: 1) keep your core audience intact. don't split it. 2) avoid early sex. tease, but don't give up the goods. and 3) don't write mean characters.
so when we ask: "what do people want?" I don't think we're getting useful answers. I don't think the answers even reflect the commenter's tastes very well. time and time again I see people saying they like 'deep characters' and 'story driven games', then they're asked what games they've tried and they give a list of nukiges. and when people say they hate sandboxes, they've played all of them. meanwhile the story driven games with 'deep characters' barely have supporters. excluding the like 3 japanese VNs that were made decades ago (with huge talent far surpassing anything we have here). people are bad at having relevant opinions.