5 ms·
A big part of the actual success of a game is the aesthetics and the marketing. How good the actual game is doesn't necessarily correlate. Indie games these da
by meheleventyone 6y ago
A big part of the actual success of a game is the aesthetics and the marketing. How good the actual game is doesn't necessarily correlate.
Indie games these days are as conservative as regular studios. Loads of a proliferation of the last big thing etc. The real standout indie genre is porn games and even those stick to a generally similar design.
The problem for developers from larger studios is that the bizdev side of things is largely kept apart from them. So they might make something within a niche that's great but is never going to find an audience.
Which is a long winded way of saying no one bar hobbyists or people taking an extreme roll of the dice are operating without commercial constraints.
- GuB-42 6y agoGenuinely curious about porn games. They all seems to be either a show of pretty models with somewhat controllable animation or a "nothing special" game with explicit scenes thrown in for your enjoyment. Some of these games can be excellent, I am thinking about some Japanese visual novels here, but they all seem to be rather formulaic. Maybe I am missing something big here. I am not too much into porn games, and you are unlikely to stumble upon them unless you are actively looking for it.
- meheleventyone 6y agoHonestly I defer most of those questions to someone that understands the landscape better. It was an underserved market though and lots of people enjoy unrealistic depictions of sex so combining that with games is hardly rocket science. The bit I find interesting is despite the porn industry in the west being big on tech like streaming and VR it’s not really there on games. Too much reliance on real people or something? More generally I think it’s super interesting how puritanical the games market is in comparison with books or movies. Even within serious games.
- GuB-42 6y agoOne problem, I think, is that making good porn games is difficult. Sex is all about contact, and just look how messed up physics can be, even simple physics in AAA games. If something like throwing a punch is difficult to do right, even thought there is a single point of contact, imagine how hard a sex position where the entire body is in contact can be to simulate. To make things worse, sex (usually) deals with human bodies, complex objects we are very familiar with, and therefore, small errors can get us right into the uncanny valley. A solution, of course, is to use prerecorded scenes. But if you lose interactivity, you might as well watch a movie, something there is no lack of and can be cheaply produced. So while the idea is not rocket science, the execution may very well be. Of course, there is always the solution of taking an existing game genre (visual novels are a common one) and add porn to it. But as good as the game might be and as hot as the porn can be, it isn't very interesting as a concept.
- ArtWomb 6y agoNot my area of expertise, but I've heard, through the proverbial grapevine, there is a popular mobile game making the rounds that allows thirsty players to "send nudez" in which the full image can only be unlocked via solving a classic N-puzzle sliding game. Reluctant to search for it myself, but shouldn't be too hard to find ;)
- baud147258 6y agoRegarding Japanese porn games, I've played a few which were based around RPG gameplay (classic, dungeon crawling or SRPG). I remember also some puzzle and match-3 games. But it seems like the majority of them are visual novels.