what exactly are the options in 2025 to monetize your game?

[bladestorm69]

I have been steadily chugging along making my first adult visual novel and the first version is almost ready.

What platforms allow bdsm / spanking / incest themed novels? what options are there?

patreon probably says directly no and while i am not ruling out incest patches are there alternatives that actually work?

i read a little about subscribestar and nobody had anything good to say about it. it seems to be impossible to get your game there unless you already have an audience.

what other options are there then? does onlyfans allow visual novels?

what are the best platforms as of 2025 for new avn or games?

 

[Winterfire]

No, onlyfans is only for those who lost themselves in the darkness and depths of sin, not for us respectable and holy devs.

Build an audience on your discord server, by promoting your project here, on twitter, bluesky, reddit, etc. and host it on itch.io/newgrounds if you have a webgl build. Once your audience grew, make a subscribestar account and if you ever feel like becoming a big boi, go for steam as well (You'll need an audience for it as well due to the fact you need to harvest wishlists).

 

[mikednew]

I have a question about Patreon. Bad Bobby Saga was on Patreon for years with several things that probably go against the platform's guidelines. My question is: can we still keep games that go against the guidelines there today? Is there some kind of moderator who downloads and tests the games to check the content?

 

[osanaiko]

If you are making a game with the hope of eventually making a living... the odds of success are very low.

It's an imprecise estimation, but I've seen discussions where it was worked out that a typical dev makes an hourly rate of something like $0.10. It's true there can be exceptions... but how much energy will you bet on a 1% chance. (see Count Morado's annual analysis of adult game Patreon earnings for details)

Instead, you should make a game because you enjoy the process, and it will have to be your main hobby if you ever want to deliver at a rate that would keep fans happy. And then, if you keep up the effort for long enough, and have the talent or persistence to turn out either top level writing and/or graphics, and also spend a lot of effort doing marketing work, perhaps you will be pleasantly surprised by gathering enough fan's money to buy one new video card each year.

The handful of runaway success stories on Patreon or similar mostly have two things in common: they started pre-covid when the western amateur adult game market was just starting to get monetized, and the games themselves were top quality compared to the others at the time. There will likely never be another DarkCookie or PinkCake.

The only path that has reasonable chance of some monetary success is to treat it as a full time professional job, and target the least informed buyers. You would need to invest seed money to get pro help for art and/or programming, and then over time push out a large volume of low-effort steam games that use splash title visuals to trick horny "normies" to buying your stuff. You won't have the time or resources to make "good" games, but instead will be recycling game code and creating short dumb generic stories. You'll be a sellout, not an artist.

 

[bladestorm69]

If you are making a game with the hope of eventually making a living... the odds of success are very low.

It's an imprecise estimation, but I've seen discussions where it was worked out that a typical dev makes an hourly rate of something like $0.10. It's true there can be exceptions... but how much energy will you bet on a 1% chance. (see Count Morado's annual analysis of adult game Patreon earnings for details)

Instead, you should make a game because you enjoy the process, and it will have to be your main hobby if you ever want to deliver at a rate that would keep fans happy. And then, if you keep up the effort for long enough, and have the talent or persistence to turn out either top level writing and/or graphics, and also spend a lot of effort doing marketing work, perhaps you will be pleasantly surprised by gathering enough fan's money to buy one new video card each year.

The handful of runaway success stories on Patreon or similar mostly have two things in common: they started pre-covid when the western amateur adult game market was just starting to get monetized, and the games themselves were top quality compared to the others at the time. There will likely never be another DarkCookie or PinkCake.

The only path that has reasonable chance of some monetary success is to treat it as a full time professional job. Invest seed money to get pro help for art and/or programming, and push out a large volume of low-effort steam games that use splash title visuals to trick horny "normies" to buying your stuff. You won't have the time or resources to make "good" games, but instead will be recycling game code and creating short dumb generic stories. You'll be a sellout, not an artist.

I am not asking a lot here and having the game dev be my hobby until it makes (if it does) enough money to stop being one is pretty much exactly what i had in mind. and even if it never does every release i am adding new tools to my toolkit in the more broad area of 3D. but all i am looking for is ONE way to actually include a link in my game that allows someone to support me if they want to. any link like patreon, ko-fi , buymecoffee, direct paypal whatever. anything that actually works and would accept spicy content creator with incest and bdsm.

That being said, i disagree with almost everything you said, except the factual information which i have not checked but would except to be about correct just on quick glance.

I think there is immense potential in actually good adult games but people who have the means to code actually good game and have ability to do actually competent art to it seem to be non-existant. I don't know what kind of profit studio FOV and the team behind genesis order etc. are raking in.

 

[osanaiko]

I'm afraid you are underestimating the difficulty of making an "actually good adult game".

How many adult game devs do you think *intended* to make a *bad* game? And yet, it seems like there are 20 bad ones for every "good one". Weird, huh.

In answer to your actual question: at present Substar seems to be the only realistic choice to monetize incest content. All the others will cut off your account once they find out what you are making. Unfortunately Substar is a fickle paymaster: sky high fees, difficult to get an account approved, and far less visiblity than patreon. Kofi etc. are rounding errors at best

I wish you good luck.

 

[osanaiko]

Oh, and one more thing: once you get your Developers badge (which they give out to anyone who poops out the bare minimum game) then you get access to the secret dev subforum, where the exact topic you asked about is discussed at extreme length by people who actually know what they are talking about, unlike me.

 

[bladestorm69]

I'm afraid you are underestimating the difficulty of making an "actually good adult game".

How many adult game devs do you think *intended* to make a *bad* game? And yet, it seems like there are 20 bad ones for every "good one". Weird, huh.

In answer to your actual question: at present Substar seems to be the only realistic choice to monetize incest content. All the others will cut off your account once they find out what you are making. Unfortunately Substar is a fickle paymaster: sky high fees, difficult to get an account approved, and far less visiblity than patreon. Kofi etc. are rounding errors at best

I wish you good luck.

I am not underestimating the making an interesting game part at all and as of right now i am not even making a game but a visual novel and hopefully as my pipeline gets more robust and faster i can start expanding in to actual game mechanics. the difficulty of making a good game can not be underestimated as even most real games are often pure dog with a 300 million budget.

that being said i do have a pair of eyes on me and i can make a rough estimate on whether what i am able to put out can survive in the field. my concern is NOT quality but too niche. Not sure if there is an audience for dommy mommy incest spanking content :O) but like i said making it is also an exercise on doing 3D and gathering skill sets will still not go to waste even if there is no audience for it.