The short version of this post is that due to a frustratingly persistent recurring lower-back injury rearing its head again today, I'm having to reduce my hours at my massage-therapy day job over the next week or so. This is fine and I'm not in any dire straits, but it does represent a loss of personal income in the hundreds of dollars since massage therapists are subcontractors - if I don't work, I don't make any money, and I don't get sick days or health insurance. It'd be very nice if Opportunity were to bring in enough this month that I could afford to pay myself enough to offset this loss of income, and if you'd like to help with that, Opportunity can be purchased from the following places:

• Steam - Leaving reviews here is very very helpful also!
• Itch - We keep the most from purchases on this platform due to not splitting it with our publisher, fyi
• GOG - Reviews appreciated here too, since we just plain haven't gotten that many!

As a reminder, here's what Opportunity is about:

With two young children, a full-time job, two student loans, and rent due every month, it’s no wonder that millennial single mother Jacqueline is struggling! She’s exhausted, she’s stressed, she’s overworked, and worse: she hasn’t gotten laid in over two years! But things begin to change after she reconnects with an old friend, who makes her a surprising offer…

Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story is a warm, lighthearted erotic visual novel exploring what it means to rebuild and reinvent yourself against a backdrop of late-stage capitalism. What do you do when you realize you haven’t been really happy for a long time, and what does it mean to be REALLY happy, anyways?

As a bit of a value-add, I thought I'd write about a couple aspects of Opportunity as a property - specifically, its queerness (which tends to get downplayed) and its coziness/wholesomeness (which tends to get somewhat overemphasized, at least in commentary about the game).

HEADS-UP: Pornographic images and plot spoilers from Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story below the cut!

Queerness

Historically, I've been a little gunshy when it comes to marketing Opportunity on the basis of its queer content. There never seems to be the right place or time, y'know? Porn-oriented spaces might appreciate knowing that there are lesbian sex scenes ripe for perusal, but the interest there is based more on having precise knowledge what types of hole they'll be seeing, with less of an eye towards the authenticity of the characters. On the other hand, it always felt a bit like colonization for me to push Opportunity as a brand-name Queer(TM) Story By An Outsider(TM) for the people who might be looking for that kind of thing, since I'm white, straight, cis, male - about as threatening to greater societal power structures as a spirited game of checkers.

Lately, though, my thinking on this has shifted somewhat. For one thing, it feels a bit inequitable that my not-queerness should override the queerness of the queer people who worked on Opportunity - which, I'll take this chance to point out, is literally every single other person who contributed work to it. Seriously - the rest of the team includes a pansexual woman, two bisexual woman, a trans man, and a bisexual genderqueer. (It feels tawdry listing all of them out like some kind of Dragon Quest party composition, but I suppose that's the cost of doing business when it comes to Marketable Identities.)

The makeup of this team isn't the result of some kind of diversity initiative - the people I worked with on this project were wholly friends or friends-of-friends. These are the kinds of people I love & who I choose to surround myself with - and, consequentially, the people I'm specifically trying to please with my writing. When writing Jacqueline, I'm trying my hardest to make her resonate with the bisexual mother of two I've been friends with since 2011. I want the abrasive trans artist with more taste than patience & a penchant for topping I share a Discord server with to be seen in my writing for Rose. Sasha as a character wouldn't be possible without the numerous girl-loving internet-poisoned gender gremlins who have populated practically all of my social circles since I was in university. To what degree does being filtered through my fingers make these perspectives I'm attempting to capture less queer?

It sometimes feels unfortunate that due to the whole "sugar baby story" rider, the sex-work aspect of Opportunity's narrative tends to get pushed to the fore, which I think makes the whole thing come off as straighter than it is. Heck, over HALF of the sex scenes don't have a dude in sight! Viewed from a certain angle, Opportunity is about a woman who starts doing sex work, has her first-ever lesbian experience, and immediately decides she wants to spend the rest of her life neck-deep in pussy and girldick. This same woman decides to risk it all with her BFF while in bootleg Revolutionary Girl Utena cosplay and winds up essentially marrying her two months later. Opportunity's cast has two (2) straight men in it, and one of them doesn't show up until the very last chapter & is basically only present for 1.5 scenes. I'm not saying it's the GAYEST story in existence, but I don't think I could ever call it a STRAIGHT one, that's for sure.

A big part of my difficulty around this stems from the fact that I think it's very hard to sell a story that, yes, okay, is PRETTY gay, but also has a fair amount of hetero content and isn't so much ABOUT being gay as it is about living a life that just so happens to contain a very high concentration of gay shit in between going to the mall and picking your kids up from school. Thumbnail blurbs and 90-second trailers tend to defy that kind of nuance, y'know? I don't know that there's a marketable term for whatever Opportunity is when it comes to sexual identity. However, speaking of marketable terms,

Wholesome & Cozy

Wholesome games are on everyone's mind right now, so I thought I'd include a few words regarding Opportunity's relationship to this well-meaning-but-ultimately-pretty-ideologically-suspect buzzword.

Placed against the vast majority of narratives in porn games, Opportunity's story is positively saccharine. Heck, even most non-pornographic narratives are more harrowing. Opportunity is a story where pretty much everyone finishes better off than where they started. There isn't even an antagonist, really - not unless you count an absent husband & father who ran out two years ago or the ever-looming spectre of late-stage capitalism. Nobody gets kidnapped, or arrested, or murdered. If you're a person who needs a lot of tension and conflict in your narratives, you'd probably find it to be a bit of a snoozer.

This, combined with its cast of multicultural queers and its warm, friendly color palette of pinks and oranges and deep reds, would seem to make it a natural fit with the ever-growing crowd of Wholesome(TM)-brand titles - but, of course, it isn't, because you see the dick going in. Which is sort of the beating heart of the issue, isn't it? I didn't write Opportunity to try and chase wholesome/cozy trends, but if I had I would be eternally disappointed because of the inherent "family-friendly" baggage forever grafted to any designation of wholesomeness. That really sticks in my craw, since a huge part of Opportunity's central thesis is an exploration of the shifting ways in which "family" is defined and preserved. Jacqueline comforting her son as he grapples with his understanding of his father's departure will never matter to the kind of people who make Wholesome Directs because at other points we see Jacqueline with cum on her. Olive threading the needle of her extant marriage to her husband with her burgeoning partnership with Jacqueline will never rate because at another point we see Olive on a wild extramarital fuck-bender. And so on.

It's not as though the validation of finding a story I wrote placed on a pastel pedestal is especially alluring - these aren't sour grapes in that sense. It's just that (as many others have pointed out) there's something that makes one feel paradoxically grimy when really considering what signifiers will net a "wholesome" diagnosis by the curatorial zeitgeist, and what things are considered mutually exclusive to said diagnosis.

Anyway. I've rattled on enough. My back really hurts, and I'm staring down the better part of a week of bed rest and a lot of heat pack application, so it'd mean a lot to me if folks would consider buying the game I just talked so much about. Have a good night!