Steam gets naughty. Porn for sale!

This is something that always perplexed me a bit, why are there no AAA (meaning production values) porn games? Given how large a market porn seems to be, if someone made a porn game with some real budget and production values, it seems to be common sense that it would make a lot of money. I suppose it was never made because it wasn’t possible to sell it in any “respectable” place of business and get paid through normal (paypal) means, as evidenced above.

Yeah, or they didn’t want to mess with the extra regulations and the blowback. I mean… Mortal Kombat short-circuited Congress, and that’s in a country that has a history of violence is okay but oh no not sex.

Eh? It’s restricted in Germany because of German national law, which is much, much stricter on videogame censorship than pretty much anywhere else in Europe. It means nothing for the rest of Europe.

I did some digging, this in particular is not for the “usual suspect” German Videogame censorship (Swastikas/Nazism, portrayal of conflicts/wars, violence) designers, customers and those who know the industry are accustomed to. Germany has strict laws about banning activities online that encourage of the trafficking of women. This qualifies. Hence my aghast-ness at the strange dichotomy in German law. But then I go on to become equally aghast at the strange dichotomy in US law. However, we are nudging towards P & R territory now; inappropriate for this subforum, so I’ll abjure further comment along this line.

I think its going to happen. or AAA games will start to embrace adult themes more. As you say the market is definitely there. It already is in some ways.

In The Sims for example we always knew many of our players would download sex mods (usually the majority of the top ten downloaded mods were about sex) so we tried to always leave room for it.

The Sims 4 did a good job here. WickedWhims (the mod that allows full uncensored sex and the addition of new adult animations & interactions) has an active user base of (conservatively) around five million players.

That’s Sims players who have gone to a lot of trouble to add more realism in adult interactions to their game. I would say its part of the value promise of The Sims and has been since The Sims 2 which many players expect and is why they buy the game. Hopefully we can move past the “nod and a wink” stage and put it in the open.

I assume for the same reason you don’t see people spending a lot of money producing porn movies (anymore, at least) - there might be a larger audience but not commensurate to the increased cost.

I was going through my Steam queue today and was asked if I wanted to see adult content. I am an adult so I answered yes.

I was greeted by a picture of a large anime penis as the first screenshot of the game in the queue.

I was not amused.

“Adult content” always feel like being thrown back in middle school, doesn’t it.

Not even a little bit? Because that sounds funny as hell to me.

You and I seem to have wildly differing ideas of funny as hell.

http://i.imgur.com/Gw3Ug.jpg

C: Oh…how 'bout ‘Grate Expectations’?

P: Yes, well we have that…

C: That’s ‘G-R-A-T-E Expectations’, also by Edmund Wells.

P: (pause) Yes, well in that case we don’t have it. We don’t have anything by Edmund Wells, actually: he’s not very popular.

C: Not ‘Knickerless Knickleby’? That’s K-N-I-C-K-E-R-L-E-S-S.

P: (taciturn) No.

C: ‘Khristmas Karol’ with a K?

P: (really quite perturbed) No…

C: Er, how about ‘A Sale of Two Titties’?

P: Definitely Not!

Leave my grandma out of this!

Really? Well then let’s step into dive’s imagination - don’t worry, I’ll hold your hand -

Imagine Granath sitting before a steampunk difference engine, chugging away in a corner room of his immense Victorian palace. He clicks on the Steam client - and is promptly asked to approve Mature content.

“What ho! At last - will tonight’s perusal include a treatise upon Malthusian economics? Mayhaps a delve into Being and Nothingness?”

Clicks yes, is promptly assaulted by a waggling dick gif, monocle pops shortly before Granath faints dead away -

Come on @RichVR, that’s gold! Gold, I say!

I think there’s even more to it than that though.

@Rod_Humble can probably elaborate on this better than I can, but I think that the availability of sexual stimulus as an available reward has the potential to revolutionize game design.

There are certain things that games are very good at, such as evoking a feeling of triumph from conquering an obstacle, or such as promoting a sense of familiarity via long time periods of structured tedium (e.g. yhe affection you feel towards any RPG party by the end of 80+ hours). But outside of competitive conquest, the palette of emotions that games are uniquely suited to evoke are fairly limited. The palette of available emotions has expanded over time, with the proliferation of new game designs such as walking simulators, but the things that games are uniquely suited for are still fairly small.

However, sexual content is a powerful intrinsic motivation. I’m not ashamed to admit that. Whatever my rational opinion on anime boobies might be, I don’t deny that there’s a lizard brain electric jolt that fires in my head when I see them on the screen. For a medium that trades in distribution of frustration and reward, to deprive ourselves as artists from using such a powerful tool is like having a chef who decides to never use meat. It’s a perfectly reasonable (and perhaps even responsible) choice, but if your goal is to push forward the culinary world and explore what experiences are possible to achieve with flavor, you’re simply doing yourself and the medium a disservice by not exploring all possible options.

I don’t know what developing sexual rewards on games looks like in the long run. And there are absolutely very real and legitimate issues with development of that kind of content in a responsible and inclusive way, especially given the undercurrent of sexism that already suffuses games culture. I would encourage everybody to do their utmost to communicate to the industry that this should be handled in a responsible manner. But as a game designer, I simply can’t accept that it’s a realm of content that should be off limits to experimentation, and the only way that this industry truly funds experimentation is via actual commercial product.

By two cents: I don’t like it. But I have a hard time arguing against it. We can modify our steam preferences after all.

Legal stuff mostly. And then there’s the fact that a lot of men don’t want to sit through a half an hour of plot development just to get to the masturbation material. Plus, you can’t really make a game that’s centered on porn that isn’t a lengthy seduction story (like visual novels).

And if you make a game that has porn as a side thing, like say a game like the Witcher but with hardcore porn instead of the current erotica, would this increase or reduce the potential audience? It’s just cut scenes anyway.

And thus we end up with the static visual novel stuff which is relatively dirt cheap to make.

Well, I’m in the EU and I could buy it right now.

Yeah, it’s totally going to revolutionize the peripherals industry as we have finally found a real killer application for brain-computer interfaces, so the hands of gamers become “free” of the slavery of game pads or mouse and keyboard.

Sorry for the sarcasm but I doubt very much this is going to bring about a more mature treatment of sexual themes to PC gaming. What is going to do is to open the floodgates to porn FMV games: cheap to make, dime a dozen, optimised to maximise revenue.

Steam has lumped in games with adult content like Witcher 3 with anime hentai penis porn now. Modifying Steam preferences will generally result in either good, mature games being blocked or having far more graphic content displayed.