With INDIE INTERVIEWS, I talk to the game developers hanging here on Cohost to learn more about new games you might love.
Today, I chat with @Bigg about making adult work, viewing adult games critically in the Adult Analysis Anthology, and how creators can navigate the obstacles to pursuing adult game development.
NSFW Disclaimer
This interview discusses adult work, which is intended for 18+ audiences only and is Not Safe For Work. This interview itself is not explicit or graphic, but the links included may lead to 18+ material.
Help the Adult Analysis Anthology reach its funding goals over on Indiegogo!
You can find work from Bigg and BP Games on Steam, itch.io, and GOG.
Introduce yourself for everyone here on Cohost! Who are you?
Hello! I'm Bigg, Cohost's resident unbearable loudmouth. I'm also the designer/writer/coder for the boutique erotic game development studio BP Games.
Is there a project you're working on currently?
Two of them! Well, three of them. Well. Four. I guess. Let me start over.
BP Games's current game project is an erotic isekai-themed visual novel titled Monstrous Liberation. Following the final update to our previous game, Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story, I spent several months kind of lazily concepting ML alongside Pacha, BP Games's primary character artist, and we've been actually "in development" on it since about fall of 2023. In terms of planned content ML is an order of magnitude larger than Opportunity and we're currently undergoing some redesign stuff, so our planned launch is in Q4 of 2024.
The other big current project is one you're likely familiar with if you're on Cohost, that being the Adult Analysis Anthology, which is a recurring collection of longform writing about adult games and adult game culture. The first issue was published in January of 2024, and a fundraiser for the second issue is currently ongoing.
(Project three is a one-shot spinoff visual novel based on Opportunity that will star Olive (the best friend of Opportunity's main character, Jacqueline) and will be set on a sex cruise. Project four is an ongoing series of high-effort longposts examining the Forgotten Realms series of fantasy novels through the lens of my own recent re-read of my 60-book teenage collection. I resisted thinking of this as a Project for a while, but after spending 15,000 words talking about R. A. Salvatore alone I need to be honest with myself.)
How did you find yourself first getting into game development?
I actually started in 2009, when I entered Vancouver Film School's then relatively-nascent Game Design program, and was among the lucky few to actually secure a few years of employment in the games industry following graduation. During this period I mostly worked on free-to-play mobile titles, none of which actually have my name in the credits and only one of which is even still available to play in any form. I see that as a mixed blessing.
Lack of steady employment in games led me to become a registered massage therapist, but I returned to game development as an indie just a few months after starting my practice as an RMT in 2016. Massage is a tremendously rewarding profession in a lot of ways, but your workdays necessarily come with long periods of silent rubbing - game development gave me something to think about while my hands were moving.
I spent quite a few years treating indie game development as a hobby that I didn't really expect to make any money from, mostly noodling around with the ever-unfinished demo for our first game, As Above/So Below. Then COVID happened. My brain was pretty severely broken from March to June of 2020, but when I came back into myself I decided that what I'd really like to do was actually finish something, which is how we got started on Opportunity.
One of the core tenets of the Adult Analysis Anthology is to take adult games, and writing about adult games, seriously. Why is it so important that we do that?
Because, to paraphrase the opening essay of AAA's first issue, nobody within what remains of what we think of as the "mainstream games media" ever talks about adult games. Ever. Like, that's really the long and short of it. If your game is about displaying explicit sexual acts, you will not get coverage on IGN, Kotaku, or Polygon. Big-name streamers will not play your game. Your game will not feature in a Nintendo Direct or a Sony State Of Play - indeed, your game won't even be permitted on those storefronts.
This is damaging in a number of ways that go far beyond simply being denied access to storefronts and traditional marketing vectors. For one thing, literally every single porn game project is an indie project - there is, as of my writing this, no such thing as a truly well-established erotic game development studio outside of a handful in Japan. Making games as an independent can be an incredibly isolating slog, but if you're like me you can sustain yourself on fantasies of the impact your work is going to have when it comes out - the conversations it'll inspire, the ripple effect it'll have on the landscape of games at large. And then it comes out, and the impact is... pretty much nothing? Nobody cares? Why would anyone apply any level of care to their craft when that's the case?
One of the vital roles of critical discussion around games is to articulate the many difficult-to-see ways in which individual works exist in conversation with one another. This is how design conventions are identified, how best practices are refined, how harmful tropes are dissected, how trends are predicted. The artistic lineage of three decades of monster trainer games can be traced continuously from Palworld back to Pokemon Red/Blue (and beyond!) through thousands of essays, articles, interviews, and analytical videos. Where is that work being done for, say, pornographic sandbox life sims? It isn't.
Frank public discussion of adult games is also crucial for building community between players and for deepening the relationship that a game's audience have with the work. You don't have to be very old to remember a time when video games were regarded more as toys for children than Serious Works Of Art. A time when being someone who liked video games was to feel constantly embarrassed and resentful that your preferred medium was unserious kiddy stuff. It took years, decades of dedicated work by many intelligent, passionate people who really truly believed that video games WERE worthy of serious artistic consideration, but now it's more or less a settled question. I want that for adult games.
What is the best possible future for adult games? For lack of a better phrase...is the goal for adult games to become slightly "more mainstream"? More eyeballs, more players, more revenue, more funding, more mainstream critical coverage? That way, it becomes more viable as a career path? I'm wondering what you think the benefits, and trade-offs, of adult games becoming a more mainstream presence in gaming would be.
Right now, I think that the most plausible "best possible future" for adult games is that pornography does not become either de facto illegalized within the United States due to credit card companies and electronic payment processors, under pressure from monied religious-right extremist lobbying groups like the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), suspending their services to retailers of pornographic content, thus rendering it next to impossible for anyone who produces adult content or provides sexual services to make a living from their labor, or more explicitly illegalized through a series of ever-tightening legislative restrictions on how citizens can view pornographic content online, such as through the swath of age-verification laws currently in the process of being passed throughout the country (like, for example, in California). This future coming to pass is very much in doubt. While I would like to say that the anxiety of "are the kinds of games I make even going to be legal in five years" is something that is unique to me as a creator of pornographic games, legal restrictions on "pornographic" content often double quite nicely as restrictions on all manner of queer content, placing huge numbers of independent games and their creators at risk! Diversity win!
Let me make an attempt at answering your question in the spirit it was intended, however. My idealized future for adult games, may I live to see it, would be for them to be available everywhere that all other kinds of games are sold, displayed everywhere that all other kinds of games are displayed, and talked/written about everywhere that all other kinds of games are talked/written about. This is not going to happen unless, to quote John Mulaney, "everyone gets real cool about a bunch of stuff really quickly". It would require a combination of loosened payment processor restrictions, loosened obscenity laws in multiple nations, loosened content policies on platforms like Tiktok, Twitch, and YouTube, and a games media ecosystem not completely beholden to advertiser dollars. I would really love to write in a more granular sense what I think the benefits/challenges of adult games gaining a more mainstream presence in gaming might be, but the simple fact is that for that to happen in any meaningful sense would require sweeping societal-level changes. For what it's worth, I do believe that any one of those preconditions, while certain requiring a lot of time and effort to realize, would all on its own represent a net good for society writ large.
Once in a blue moon, we get an example of a game with mainstream popularity that includes any semblance of sexuality or eroticism in it. My mind is going to Baldur's Gate 3 as an example. What do you think of those instances, and do you suggest that non-adult game devs push for more sexuality in their own non-adult (or "non-pornographic") game projects?
While I certainly don't think every game benefits from representations of sexuality, I would absolutely love to see more examples of it where it serves the game's ludic or narrative goals. Sex makes perfect sense in a game like Baldur's Gate 3 - such a large part of the game is about representing engaging relationships between characters, and sex represents one of the many ways in which relationship dynamics might be expressed. (BG3 is also intended to simulate the experience of playing a tabletop roleplaying game, and there is no experience more core to said experience than rolling good to see if you can bang it out with a drow priestess or swishy vampire).
Although I'll admit to a BIT of sour grapes as far as sexuality in these mainstream titles is concerned - titles like The Witcher 3 and Baldur's Gate 3 tend to get away with things that might get smaller titles booted from more conservative storefronts simply by virtue of being too big to turn away - overall I welcome them. I think it's healthy for people to be able to envision charismatic characters as having genitals and explicit sexual desires. It's good for advancing the medium, too - BG3 in particular gave rise to a lot of really interesting conversations about their approach to the game's sex scenes; how the pacing felt off in the initial release, with your party characters often stampeding towards fucking in a way that could feel cheap and pandering.
Over the past five years, we hear a lot about how payment processors pressure companies to punish adult work creators. What advice would you give to any creators who are interested in looking into making adult work, but are worried that there are "no platforms left" to even find customers on?
As I said above, those concerns are wholly legitimate. The only halfway-viable path towards some level of financial sustainability for adult game developers prior to 2018 was crowdfunding, and like most other independent creatives trying to support themselves via crowdfunding only a very small handful were making enough to do it fulltime. Things improved when Steam started allowing adult games in 2018, but so much rides on that continuing to be the case, and that's hardly assured. Like, it is really worth bearing in mind that adult games are just six years into having any kind of access to a fraction of the same potential customer base as most other kinds of games.
As of right now, we make most of our money from having Opportunity on Steam, Itch, and GOG. And, like, there isn't really anywhere else that we could sell it without making substantial changes to its content. Nutaku is really only viable for free-to-play porn games, and from what I hear things aren't even going too well for them on that front. Fakku technically sells games, but their userbase is minuscule and their developer support is atrocious. (Oh, and you can really only get your porn game on GOG if you're lucky enough to have a publisher who can liaise with them on your behalf.)
I should also point out that I am myself not currently able to support myself from the income from my adult game projects. Of the two of us, Pacha is the one who draws anything resembling a living wage from our income, and that's largely by virtue of living in a country with a low cost-of-living. Independent game development for me has always been something that I've had to support from my own income/savings - whether that's paying collaborators out of my own pocket, or just by working essentially for free.
So, like, I don't know. It's weird. Objectively speaking, there are actually more options at present for people who make adult games to monetize their work than there have ever been in history. But it's still insufficient, and it's so tenuous. I'd say that if you're interested in adult games, you'd better get in while the getting's good because I truly can't make any promises about how long things will be this way.
Any other general advice for aspiring adult game developers out there?
Building off my previous response: if you have the option, don't put yourself in a position where you're relying on the income from adult games. This is actually good advice for anyone making any kind of indie games, frankly - I think both your art and your relationship with your art improve immeasurably when you aren't suffering from the psychic torment of NEEDING something to make your keep-me-alive money. If you're already independently rich or have rich parents or a rich partner, by all means go ahead and dive in with both feet, but otherwise please don't quit your day job.
The other big one: information hygiene is huge. You're gonna want to publish your work under a pseudonym, this is non-negotiable unless you really relish the thought of a brigade of incel gooners review-bombing your workplace on Yelp because you made your protagonist brown, or e-mailing your mom's church book club because you didn't make the protagonist's sister fuckable. (Again, I think this is pretty good advice for non-pornographic-game devs.) This one is tough because it turns out that it takes a WHILE to really establish a pseudonym as its own thing, and you're mostly doing so without being able to access any clout or connections you might have under your legal name. But, again, the alternative is granting thousands of the worst people on the planet access to information they could use to ruin your life at a moment's notice.
Reading my responses back, I think it'd be easy to get the impression that I'm pretty down on adult game development, which is perhaps a natural consequence of taking the whole thing very seriously and being kind of permanently cheesed-off about the state of the world. Nevertheless, let me assure you that I consider adult games to be the last great creative frontier in game development. In so many ways, this is a subgenre in its infancy, one in which exciting new visions still possess the potential to have outsized impact. This is a genre defined by joyous indulgent excess in a way matched by no other.
Thus, my last piece of advice - which, again, can definitely apply to non-pornographic game devs - is to not cast too wide a net and give yourself permission to focus on what really makes you horny in your games. Making games is such a monumental task and you're going to make things infinitely harder on yourself if you deny yourself your right to be a complete sicko. I want to be able to imagine the drool running down your chin when I play your games.
Lastly, are there any indie games out there you've been playing recently? Any favorites to shout-out?
A couple, yeah!
The first I'd like to shout out is Mediterranea Inferno, which is a gloriously stylish and indulgent visual novel about a trio of unimaginably toxic Italian gayboys who reconnect for a slutty summer vaycay that's complicated by a dash of metaphysical forces beyond their imagining. You might remember it from the award it won at the IGFs for Excellence in Narrative! A very dear friend of mine did a lot of the English-language editing and writing and it's so deliriously wonderful.
I'd also like to give a quick shoutout to my buddy Alex, who in addition to being the best QA I've ever worked with, has also been building out his own games in Unreal for a while now! You can find overviews of his work on his website, and if you'd like to sample his work for yourself, his Dark-Souls-inspired mecha autorunner Dark Strolls is free on Itch!
Thanks for chatting, and for help in breaking down what the current state of online adult work is like! For everyone else...follow @Bigg on Cohost and go support the Adult Analysis Anthology on Indiegogo!