What makes a popular porn game?

[Doorknob22]

Constant updates ; P
Also appealing to specific fetishes.

I think the opposite is true. The most popular porn titles I'm aware of have:
1. Very good production values (graphics, programming, etc).
2. Very vanilla in terms of fetishes, so they can be easily distributed on many platforms such as Patreon, Steam without playing constant cat-and-mouse with the platform's gatekeeper.

Commercially, I think it's better to go for fetishes you love (and put your soul into) than trying to win the vanilla game. If you're producing a good fetish game, fans of the fetish will find you, stick by you and will tend to forgive gaps in quality as long as they see you're commited. In the high end of the vanilla scene, the quality is very high and it's very hard to distinguish your game, especially since you're going against publishing teams who sometimes have 5+ years of experince.

 

[skzl]

I'd recommend avoiding repetitive, grindy elements like fetch quests, back-tracking or slaying an arbitrarily high number of monsters and so on. A lot of RPG Maker games I end up cheating to skip past that stuff.
Erotic horror sounds pretty interesting. For gameplay, maybe have it be stealth-based, cause then you could have the tension and suspense of horror. Making an action game seems like it would be a lot harder and puzzles would probably be too similar to visual novels if you are really not interested in that route. Good luck!

 

[MarshmallowCasserole]

Gorgeous art.

There, I said it. A lot of popular games are popular because they have eye-catching art. You can milk a lot of suckers with a pretty picture, even if your story is dogshit, and your updates come at glacial pace.

Good story is definitely not essential (again, empirically demonstrated by pretty games with dumbfuck stupid stories or no stories at all). Neither is good gameplay. Which is a travesty, if you ask me, but I'm not the general audience.

Art. The answer is art.

 

[Anthony11553]

Please, don't talk in my name.
After near to 40 years of constant video gaming, and around 30 years of, less constant, playing porn/adult video games, good writing is the main reason that make me play a game. There's few exceptions of course, but there's not many things more boring, for me, than a porn/adult game with an average, or below, writing. This whatever its game mechanisms.

he's right, "story driven games" is what inspired the trash telltale games (aside from walking dead season 1) and those trash untill dawn ripoffs to not add any gameplay

 

[coffeeaddicted]

Stories build an arc for the game. You have to have a start and end.
If there isn't anything like that, its just a slideshow.
Though, i think that all games are like dime magazines. Stories are mostly thin and have the usual highs and lows.
Especially in porn game, the goal is to get women or sometimes woman get women. Or whatever.
They don't make usually sense but thats ok. I think people don't play adult games for a deep story. As long as they entertain, its a win.
Darker stories shiny for me.

 

[anne O'nymous]

he's right, [...]

The instant there's people who play those games "just to see some fanfic", he is wrong. And with more than 5 millions players, just for this sole forum, there is people who do it.

"story driven games" is what inspired the trash telltale games (aside from walking dead season 1) and those trash untill dawn ripoffs to not add any gameplay

It's also what inspired The DeLuca Family or, years ago, Sakura Dungeon, to name only two. And in both cases, the game mechanisms are more advanced than in most games, and directly come from the story.

It's not because you agree with him, and don't play for the story, that you represent everyone. You can't even claim to represent the majority.

 

[woody554]

Vampire life:
You start as a recently arived vampire in a new city.
You are going to spend the next 500 years here.
How will you live your unlife?
Will you be rich or poor?
Hunt for blood or get it via other means?
Will you encourage crime or help deal with it?
Will you create your own clan or avoid the possible competation?

The idea of vampire life is that you are a vampire.
The kind that burns in the sunlight and needs human blood daily.
You might want to make it so that if you dont stop the bleeding people will bleed out after your done feeding.
A crime infest city makes hunting easier(After all people get killed all the time) but it also makes it for more likely you end up being robbed or having to fight off criminals.
Where a law focused city makes it harder to hunt.

Going from homeless vampire to a rich powerful and influence vampire that has people who buys blood from the blood bank or has a human cattle farm.
The goal is to live your unlife and try to make the best of it.

ooh, I like this one. there's so many ways you could do this. not sure if I like the idea of easy hunting because loads of victims will make them equally forgettable. but I like the idea of focusing more on the vampire american dream than easy sex.

still, I'd like more if there were a restricted number of women to feed on, so that accidentally/deliberately killing them would have a big personal impact and involve strategy. maybe have conflicting resources you can get from people, some of them requiring to perma-death them leaving you with one less food resource. also turning them would be zero sum game, losing one food source and gaining one more hungry mouth. so there would always be a trade-off, and it would never be a simple as 'more victims = more power'.

maybe even have ways to increase a person's blood production so there's an upgrade path with bonus effects. like ability to fly after magically enhancing someone's blood. turn invisible from tier 3 blood. industrialize blood farming for quantity.

 

[Evil Dr Porkchop]