Will we ever see big money production in the adult game industry ?

[rockyfokken]

Always had the same doubt but I know, in some cases, there are truckloads of contracts with all sorts of publishers, studios, parent companies and so on that would kill the project at day 1. For the big ones in the business that is.

I took what, like 20 years for Steam to finally lift the adult genre restriction off. I maybe wrong here but I do think things are going to start move foward.

 

[Joshua Tree]

With Sisterly Love being on steam you'd have to ask the developers how much money they're making from steam sales verses the money they got from their patreons. Then you'd need to ask them if they could afford to make a game with no donations coming in and just the hope of money from selling the game.

I doubt there's much money coming from the sale of the game on steam.

For every indie sucess story (and there aren't as many these days) there's hundreds who've had to go back to their day jobs after not making a profit from sales.

I guess Steam doesn't have a huge issue with a incest theme. It being talked about in the discussion section for the game on Steam. I guess it doesn't exactly reflect sales, but the more active the discussion section is, the more players.

 

[khumak]

Honestly I think the biggest barrier to getting reasonable adult sales on Steam is that most people don't even know there is any adult content on there. I can't remember what the default settings are but I suspect, all of these default to being unchecked and most people don't bother to change them.



It would also help if there was an actual tab for adult content like there is for RPGs or whatever. I don't think anyone other than a dedicated porn company would spend much money on development for an adult game though. Brand issues... If VR tech gets far enough along that might change eventually.

 

[Joshua Tree]

Honestly I think the biggest barrier to getting reasonable adult sales on Steam is that most people don't even know there is any adult content on there. I can't remember what the default settings are but I suspect, all of these default to being unchecked and most people don't bother to change them.

View attachment 707285

It would also help if there was an actual tab for adult content like there is for RPGs or whatever. I don't think anyone other than a dedicated porn company would spend much money on development for an adult game though. Brand issues... If VR tech gets far enough along that might change eventually.

You can search on game tags can't you?

On the store front page. Select games, then more popular tags. And you will find such as; Nudity, Sexual Content, Mature.
Clicking sexual content you get "Browse all 2,425".

Tim Sweeney been lashing out at Steam many times for being a "porn store front".. for allowing adult games on the platform and vowed no such things would be hosted on Epic Store.

As for reasonable sales. People will buy if it appeal to them and at least look like reasonable quality. I know some people where their steam account is more like a "family" library of games, and if you in such a situation you might not want to buy such games on steam though.

 

[khumak]

You can search on game tags can't you?

On the store front page. Select games, then more popular tags. And you will find such as; Nudity, Sexual Content, Mature.
Clicking sexual content you get "Browse all 2,425".

Tim Sweeney been lashing out at Steam many times for being a "porn store front".. for allowing adult games on the platform and vowed no such things would be hosted on Epic Store.

As for reasonable sales. People will buy if it appeal to them and at least look like reasonable quality. I know some people where their steam account is more like a "family" library of games, and if you in such a situation you might not want to buy such games on steam though.

I didn't say you couldn't do it. My point was most people are lazy and don't even realize it's an option. I could be wrong of course, but I doubt it. In my case, I just assumed adult content wasn't allowed on Steam until relatively recently and never even bothered to check. My account options did in fact have adult content disabled by default so I enabled it when I noticed but only because someone mentioned something about Steam on a site like this, triggering me to check what was actually available (yes, I'm lazy as well).

 

[M Schum]

Tim Sweeney been lashing out at Steam many times for being a "porn store front".. for allowing adult games on the platform and vowed no such things would be hosted on Epic Store.

He says a lot of things, notice how he doesnt police what Unreal is being used for.

But the fact is, porn is never going to be mainstream and will always have a stigma and this why no Porn movie is going to be a blockbuster because you arent going to go with your friends to watch porn in a movie theater (then again, movie theaters are going the way out), games were for a very long time reliant on brick-and-mortar stores for sales and those stores would not carry those games because they didnt want to be known as adult stores, heck until about a decade ago publishers tried to avoid the M rating due to retailers policy over selling M rated games, its not the same now but the stigma remains more or less ... this is the west really as DMM.com does have a +18 section but there are also specialized publishers for adult rated games, like MangaGamer but even in Japan adult games are niche.

 

[Niteowl]

The short answer to the original question is: probably not....

Others have mentioned various reasons, and on top of that, porn is a lot cheaper to make in real life. Paying an actress is way cheaper than paying a whole team of coders to develop the software
All those interactive porn movies (one actress, you pick the scene etc) provided the kind of freedom that separates games from normal porn, but even so they were never that huge and they've mostly disappeared now... so yeah, can't think of any reason why the adult industry would make an effort to produce better games.

If it ever happens, it would definitely be restricted to some kind of SF/Fantasy setting....., since those are arguably as expensive to make with real actors (whether the demand will ever be there remains to be seen).
There is plenty of SF/fantasy in porn (and even more in hentai anime), but when it comes to porn it's easy to argue that even the movies they spent some money on are not that great and look pretty silly compared to standard movies.

But the mainstream will never touch incest or other genres done by indie developers, and normal porn already covers most realistic scenarios for, as said, a fraction of the cost.

 

[Delmach]

the games would get as good as fullprice games if there was more money

So most of the times it would be overpriced crap? And I wholeheartedly mean it that way, nowdays those AA games are literal crap to me. Uninspired, overpriced, bland, shallow.


I for one really dont want big money productions, as those tend to have to also have to adjust their themes to be marketable, and that just screams vanilla for me. Some people might like it, but whats fantasy for if not to go a bit further.

Already seeing it with Subverse by StudioFow. They are known and loved for their darker themes, and now they produce a game where they said they dont tackle those themes.

 

[Joshua Tree]

He says a lot of things, notice how he doesnt police what Unreal is being used for.

But the fact is, porn is never going to be mainstream and will always have a stigma and this why no Porn movie is going to be a blockbuster because you arent going to go with your friends to watch porn in a movie theater (then again, movie theaters are going the way out), games were for a very long time reliant on brick-and-mortar stores for sales and those stores would not carry those games because they didnt want to be known as adult stores, heck until about a decade ago publishers tried to avoid the M rating due to retailers policy over selling M rated games, its not the same now but the stigma remains more or less ... this is the west really as DMM.com does have a +18 section but there are also specialized publishers for adult rated games, like MangaGamer but even in Japan adult games are niche.

Remember I saw a documentary about "Behind the green door" from 1972. Movie theaters packed full of people. Not just "single" pervs!. But couples, young, old... Probably as "main stream" it could get, at least back then. As for today with Internet, the millions upon millions consumers of adult entertainment in the privacy of their own homes? Idk... I just look at it as another genre in entertainment. Internet changed the adult movie industry though, the age of full length feature movies more or less gone. The Golden age of the likes of Vivid Entertainment is far gone. With internet it became more or less; "why pay for it, when you can get it for free"... and any couple with a camcorder could start churn out adult content on publish through internet for next to nothing. Hard to compete with such.

The "most" erotic games I can remember game stores sold was the likes of the Larry games by Sierra. What people would regard as "smut" magazines I suppose, which not so much a thing any longer. I do remember you had adult games being advertised in. With CDRom's become a thing, the adult industry started churn out a lot of simple games that was just more or less FMV games which game the player some simple options in how it would play out.

 

[DuniX]

But the mainstream will never touch incest or other genres done by indie developers, and normal porn already covers most realistic scenarios for, as said, a fraction of the cost.

Japanese Style Hentai Games might appeal to the Weeb Market.
But that goes counter to the current Western Aesthetics, and they are frankly unappealing.
To me Real Life Porn is Boring, they have no concept of Eroticism.
Western Porn Games aren't that different and no amount of story can save them.
A focus on story is the wrong thing, porn + story does not make it better.

They have no concept of Moe, no concept of emotion and reaction, even caricature and extremity.
How many Western Games do you know that have Characters that you could consider them Waifus?

 

[khumak]

I don't think we'll ever get big budget porn games but I do think the tech we use to produce games will continue getting both more powerful and easier to use at the same time. So the stuff we're making will still be low budget but it will be a lot higher quality for the same amount of effort.

I think the tools will improve to where making a nice smooth animation will actually be easy to do (I mean like motion capture quality without needing the motion capture). I think collision detection and deformation tools will get to the point where most of it can just be calculated automatically for you just by having the materials in your assets set up with the right properties.

So for instance turning on collisions and deformation you could push a girl up against a wall and Daz would automatically calculate how to squish her tits into the right shape as you press her up against the wall without you having to manually tweak anything because it knows roughly how squishy tits are and also that a wall is not squishy. Right now that's a huge pain in the ass to do.

 

[Niteowl]

Japanese Style Hentai Games might appeal to the Weeb Market.
But that goes counter to the current Western Aesthetics, and they are frankly unappealing.
To me Real Life Porn is Boring, they have no concept of Eroticism.
Western Porn Games aren't that different and no amount of story can save them.
A focus on story is the wrong thing, porn + story does not make it better.

They have no concept of Moe, no concept of emotion and reaction, even caricature and extremity.
How many Western Games do you know that have Characters that you could consider them Waifus?

Tbh, I'm not sure I understand your point here.....
I mean, I like Japanese hentai and JAV, and I agree western porn and western porn games are not as interesting.....
but they are a lot more popular and easier to make than hentai games, at least for western markets (and even in Japan porn with actors is more popular).
Also, there is a lot of porn in the west... it's true that most of it is very poorly done and very poorly directed, but there are exceptions.... and no censorship
I would also slightly disagree about your comment on "adding a story doesn't make porn better"... I think all the best porn has a story.... Look at all the guys who like incest here.... how is an incest scene different from any other mainstream porn with a guy and a girl? It's not, not even one iota. Only the story makes it different.
But western porn is full of 'people in a room' having sex with no story..... Unless the chick is really my type, yawn.

 

[Joshua Tree]

I would also slightly disagree about your comment on "adding a story doesn't make porn better"... I think all the best porn has a story.... Look at all the guys who like incest here.... how is an incest scene different from any other mainstream porn with a guy and a girl? It's not, not even one iota. Only the story makes it different.
But western porn is full of 'people in a room' having sex with no story..... Unless the chick is really my type, yawn.

Porn flicks made before the internet age, had majority of the time a story, albeit cheesy. Heck, even incest themed porn flicks was better before internet and what you see floating around today if that get your rocks off.

 

[M Schum]

Remember I saw a documentary about "Behind the green door" from 1972. Movie theaters packed full of people. Not just "single" pervs!. But couples, young, old... Probably as "main stream" it could get, at least back then.

Yet the movie was banned in several states due to Miller vs. California that changed the definition of Obscenity from that of "utterly without socially redeeming value" to that which lacks "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value".

Also this doesnt have anything with piracy, it have to do with porn being used primary as a masturbation aid and simply the market adjusted as expensive "art" pornographic movies will sell as well as renting a mansion and simply film it there, this is what always lead to the "low budget", anomaly asides there is no reason to risk financial ruin by going too far and this is why Vivid is what it is now.

The point is, Ubisoft isnt going to sink 100 millions on a videogame that will be rated AO and will be grilled in the media because they might be "left" but they arent that much to left, likewise you cannot do that in movies because they would be banned or issued a Adults rating outright in most of the world, Internet or not.

Making pornography still carries a stigma, no matter how the current PC mob pretends to be oh so body positive and such, they will scatter away the moment things go too far into things that are still considered improper.

 

[memoseku]

Adult games are illegal in many countries, so probably no.

 

[DuniX]

Tbh, I'm not sure I understand your point here.....

My point is the Weeb/Anime Market is probably the only larger more mainstream market that could accept a semi-professional hentai game. Mostly because they are already used to the translated japanese games.

The Western Porn Market is pretty much all about Real Porn, "Games" don't figure in the equation. As such adding a story or not is pointless. In other words its Niche.
And those Games are incompatible with the Weeb Market.

 

[Joshua Tree]

My point is the Weeb/Anime Market is probably the only larger more mainstream market that could accept a semi-professional hentai game. Mostly because they are already used to the translated japanese games.

The Western Porn Market is pretty much all about Real Porn, "Games" don't figure in the equation. As such adding a story or not is pointless. In other words its Niche.
And those Games are incompatible with the Weeb Market.

More than often these "real porn" games get pieced together and sold as full movies (whatever) as well. So kinda like "double dipping"...

 

[bbay222]

I mean Subverse got close to an AA budget and it is stuck on development hell so I don't really think we will. You also end up with the sacrifices between making an actual game with porn or making a porn game with good gameplay, not that those dilemmas aren't present nowadays, but it gets worse when you actually do have options.

You could end up with a Baldurs Gate 3 with the sex system of Honey Select 2 and the Pregnancy and cycles system of Koikatsu, but I think at that point your focus will be all over the place and most of the systems will end up being shallow in either the sex sim or the gameplay part.

 

[freebirdfreebird]

I think it is possible for something AA level, say a dedicated group of 40 people working hard (how big is Illusion/ILL?) on something. However, it’s going to be limited in fetishes and the like, and you’d have to have a clear vision going in. I actually think something like Patreon could be a detriment if they are asking backers what they want and the like.

 

[Jack Madrigal]

there are a couple of big production already with decent budget, at the top of my head I would say Studiofow and Adeptus Steve, there's definitely a busyness to make in that field... but there is one main obstacle that have many implications: social pressure, there's not a lot of peoples that would openly admit to make porn for a living, let alone being the top CEO of " TOTAL ULTRA CUM PORN GAMES 3000 "

so with that in mind It's hard to gather 400 peoples to work on a 50 millions budget game for 10 years, ruin their social life because they will be shamed and ostracized, for a 30 second fap session.