BPGames
@BPGames

This is eighth of ten essays contained within the second issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. We will be posting a new essay every Friday from now until September, but if you would like to read all the essays early and support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by @pillowkisser!

by @leo-g

It’s 2004 and you’re horny. So you type into Internet Explorer the naughty words “porn game boobs” and click the first result. It’s a Macromedia Flash game! And it’s using the crustiest jpegs of anime girls you’ve ever seen.

It’s 2007 and you’re horny. So you type into your Wii Opera browser the naughty words “porn game boobs” and click the first result. It’s an Adobe Flash game! And it’s using the most obviously traced vector art of anime girls you’ve ever seen.

It’s 2024 and you’re horny. So you type into your VPN enabled Firefox browser the naughty words “porn game boobs” and click the first result. It’s an HTML5 Unity game! And it’s using the most beautiful art of anime girls you’ve ever seen.

The game says it’s got 50 girls to romance, each with 9 unique sex scenes. That’s 450 drawings of women getting railed, not counting any possible portrait or talk sprites. And all this for only $9.99? Before, those adult flash games were free, but if there’s this much content maybe it’s worth shelling out a couple of bucks. However, maybe I’m an experienced shopper, but where one might see a great deal, I see nothing but red flags.

Then it hits: something’s wrong. Maybe it’s how the same girl never has the same exact design details. Or maybe it’s the way her musculature will be off that’s questionable. And whoever the artist is seems to only know a handful of poses despite their masterful grasp on painterly renders. No, your intuition is actually working, that feeling is your gut instinct taking a trip through the uncanny valley. A human didn’t make this, a machine did.

This essay isn’t actually about AI. It’s about a problem that's deep rooted in video games, but especially adult video games: Content. Without a large amount of unique CGs, cutscenes, and features like voice acting and animation, the fear is that you can’t justify certain price tags. Using Early Access and Patreon opens a whole new can of worms. Now you have to provide a steady drip feed of content. Maybe a gallery mode with a cheat code to see all the sex scenes the player is entitled to.

You might’ve noticed that I never used the words “good” or “quality”, only “large amount.” What we’re tackling is an issue of quantity vs quality. So, what leads one to choose quantity? Why do developers of adult games feel the need to have as much content as possible? It could be about fulfilling promises and executing every idea they have. Every developer, amateur and professional alike are guilty of feature creep. After enough failed projects you
begin nipping that problem in the bud. But what good is fulfilling a promise if it’s done badly?

Adult games have two unique problems that other video games don’t. The first is that adult games are hidden. If a storefront even bothers to allow the sale of adult content, there’s a good chance they’ll hide it, unless you go on a journey to find the “enable adult content” setting. This has done the most damage to adult games in my opinion, because most people don’t even know where to buy them.

The second problem is that it requires content to sell, and a lot of it. All games need content, but the content isn’t always hard to draw and expensive images, paired with pages of well written prose and dialogue. In the adventure genre, one could sell their game on its puzzles. In roguelikes, procedurally generated levels and loot are bullet points on the back of the box. This isn’t the case with adult games. What ends up happening is recycled art for different cutscenes being advertised as unique CGs, or the gameplay being irredeemably grindy before you see a single nipple. Video games in general have a history of padding and unnecessary filler to extend game length. There’s a general consensus that a game’s worth is tied to how long it takes to beat it. But like beating it, a good time doesn’t necessarily
mean a long time.

Quality is an investment. Contrary to popular belief, nobody is a good writer or artist immediately, even if they have ‘talent’. It takes years of constant practice and a concentrated effort on improving. It means absorbing other media for inspiration and ideas. If you never wrote two characters talking to each other or drew a naked body before, you’re going to be in for a rough surprise when you start a project centered around well written and well drawn sex scenes. And this isn’t inherently bad, learning how to draw and write are fulfilling journeys with no true end. But in our capitalist hellscape, we’re all losing free time and disposable income. People are too stressed trying to make rent money to learn how anatomy works. So shortcuts and a lack of care for the craft become more and more seductive answers to the problem of “how do I add more content?”

I conducted an adult games survey over the course of a week through Tumblr, Twitter, and Cohost. The survey collected 1159 anonymous responses, and among other data points, what was found was that people don’t necessarily expect a lot of content. In fact, when it came to expected game length, a whopping 57% didn’t have expectations of the game being any
length. What they did care about was good writing and unique, competent art. The majority wants quality over quantity. So why not lean into quality if that’s what the people want?

Quality isn’t something you can just throw money at, and then it happens. It involves having an eye for it, and knowing someone available. These things can be hard to get, especially on short notice, and if nobody’s available it lands on the developer to provide these things. But what isn’t in short supply are ways to fake the funk. Google images, auto-tracing, and now AI image generators are always available and always cheap. Quantity is easy, and a free market combined with entrenched beliefs about time value combine to make storefronts that reward quantity.

Now to say what nobody wants to hear: AI isn’t the problem. Destroying AI isn’t going to magically make low effort projects disappear. The only difference between now and then was how convincing it was to fool the customer into thinking the art they were paying for was original. In the aforementioned survey, a landslide of 91% of people said that AI will actively make them avoid buying a video game. But saying you won't support a project that uses AI only works if you can tell it's AI. Back in the day, if you didn't know you could look up nude drawings of anime characters, you just assumed the Meet N' Fuck mech game made that art. Most people don't even know how digital art is made, let alone how easy it is to steal it. Blatant vector auto-tracing also has a similar function between AI and theft. If it's done well enough, it will fool people.

Fixing this could be as simple as having higher standards on the storefront and customer level. Outright banning projects where the main art elements are AI would also dissuade quantity over quality, since that would be one less method of generating effortless content. Currently Steam’s policy is that the product has to let the customer know if any content is made using AI, and that the content isn’t stolen or infringes on copyright. People make the argument that ethical models could exist in the future, which would be great, but we’re in the present where those models don’t exist yet or aren’t being used. It’s not difficult to change the rules when that comes to pass, but right now, all AI art models come from a soup of copyright nightmares. And because there’s already rules in place against using stolen assets, why should AI art be any different?

As it stands, the reason you keep seeing games with AI being sold on Steam and other storefronts is because those companies get a cut of every sale. It’s in their best interest to have these games claim to be selling you the moon for a quick buck, and the storefront will look the other way when it comes to the ethicacy of their AI models. As long as these storefronts keep profiting, they have no reason to run out the scammers. It doesn’t help that a lot of people don’t actually know what an adult game marketplace looks like. When they finally get a peep and see nothing but AI art and poser models, to them that just might be what adult games are like. Making it easier to actually find adult games would naturally cause customers to build a discerning eye for what’s good and what’s a scam, since it won’t be their first time interfacing with that market. However, some people don’t care about quality and just want the Lays family size bag of porn games.

This is where change actually has to happen, it’s on the customer to actually want better. I don’t have sympathy for creators that only want to make a quick buck by taking shortcuts that remove any humanity from a game. Making games shouldn’t be a get-rich-quick scheme, it should be because you have an idea you’ve always wanted to share, or to show off the fruits of your labor from a hobby you enjoy. I don’t know how you’ll search “porn game boobs” in 2030, when you’re horny, but I hope the results are better than they are now.

*Leo G. is a programmer and writer that has been in tech for a decade running. As one half of [Clown Control], they write the Field Report series chronicling the sexy misadventures of space-faring scientist Del Doppler. They're also hammering away at an adult video game, with a demo dropping this year. They like long walks on the beach and even longer walks in the woods. You can find them on Cohost @leo-g, on Twitter @leognyc, and on tumblr @leog4u.

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Bigg
@Bigg

A lot of you might remember @leo-g's adult game survey - here's what it was in aid of! Come check it out!


leo-g
@leo-g

It was fun writing this and running that survey, which you can find right here!


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in reply to @BPGames's post:

it is encouraging to hear that most people looking for an adult game are not expecting like a gigantic gorgeous visual novel, because all the adult game ideas ive been messing with are not going to end up being that haha. not least because it would kill me to try to produce one