This is second of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental 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 Wednesday from now until March, 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: Yarrun
In 1982, a company named American Multiple Industries, in a bid to garner free publicity through controversy, got to work on a game designed to upset people. Custer’s Revenge, a simple, poorly-made game for the Atari 2600, focuses on the eponymous Custer’s attempts to sexually assault a bound Indigenous woman, named ‘Revenge’ in the game’s instruction manual. It was decried by feminist and Native American activist groups alike... and it quickly became AMI’s best-selling game, moving at least 75,000 copies at an inflated cost of 49 dollars a cartridge, netting a revenue of over three million dollars. The stunt worked like a charm, but the game would linger in infamy for its blatant bigotry, and for years after, it would be the most prominent example in the West of what an ‘erotic videogame’ is.
Sex sells. So goes the common adage. But when it comes to videogames, while selling normal games via scantily clad female character has consistently been a viable tactic, selling games about sex has generally been more fraught, with most companies unwilling to garner the same reputation that Custer’s Revenge earned. Admittedly, in the East, developers that started on erotic videogames could transfer over to making non-erotic videogames with relative ease. The Fate franchise, after all, went from a visual novel with sex scenes added to increase its value to one of the most profitable gacha games on the planet. But in the West, erotic games and the companies that developed them were kept in their own ghetto away from the rest of the industry, with most success being found in the computer game market with various strip poker titles.
It was in the 2000s, as the internet became mainstream, that erotic games truly became viable as their own genre. The ubiquity and relative ease of Flash led to thousands of new developers testing their ideas by making Flash games, several of them lewd. And the anonymity of the internet allowed those games to be created and consumed without suffering cultural stigma. Sites for hosting erotic flash projects spread like wildfire, collating hundreds of titles from various sources: strip poker games, foul-mouthed RPGs, awkward games meant to simulate sex. And, in the midst of all that, the occasional unequivocal gem. Newgrounds in particular provided a platform where those projects could be hosted alongside more mainstream Flash titles. But even as erotic games gained an active playerbase, the creators themselves often missed out on that popularity, unable to harness it for their own benefit, financially or otherwise.
And then, in 2013, Jack Conte and Sam Yam would create Patreon.
This changed the game entirely. This didn’t just allow erotic game developers a way to monetize their work; it gave them a way to centralize it. Flash games were often downloaded and rehosted on other sites. You’d play a game and often have no idea who made it, the only sign of its origin being a link to the creator’s site that had long since gone dead. It also had no way to monetize those games, and unless you were willing to set up your own site with your own paywall and your own secure finance system and your own anti-pirating system, you weren’t going to make a single cent off of that work.
On Patreon, the focus is on the content creator, allowing them to establish themselves as a creator, as a brand. Now games can link back to their creator’s Patreon, a stable link that they can use indefinitely so long as their Patreon account remains intact. The creator no longer had to force people to play their game through paywalls (though many do still limit access to their games to their subscribers); one could simply give the game away for free and provide a couple of extra advantages to those who subscribe. And several developers have managed to capitalize on that. Fenoxo, developer behind Trials in Tainted Space (TiTS) or Corruption of Champions (CoC), has over six thousand subscribers at the time of writing, and makes thirty two thousand dollars a month: about six times the average income in America. DarkCookie’s Summertime Saga is the top earner in the genre for Patreon at fifty one thousand dollars a month (albeit with a design philosophy that’s closer to Custer’s Revenge than I’d like). Overall, adult games on Patreon are a two million dollar industry. Sex sells, and with a unified storefront for it, the selling could be good.
But as Patreon became a hotspot for erotic game development, it also shaped how those games were developed. The first and most obvious effect would be Patreon’s changes to its content guidelines. Due to pressure from Mastercard and other payment processors, Patreon has repeatedly curtailed the freedom of its erotic game developers. The aforementioned Summertime Saga, for example, was forced to change its content after Pateron amended its rules to ban incest kink material. The main character’s mother and sister, both romanceable characters, were now his ‘friends’ with an option to change their names at the beginning of the game to how they once were, a pattern that was quickly copied across dozens of other games featuring incest. Other rules proved harder to circumvent. Content revolving around hypnosis was banned in 2019 due to ‘glorifying sexual violence’. Similar rules against forced transformation and sexual slavery were used to cut out a large swath of fetishes, ranging from bimbofication to expansion.
A more subtle effect is how it alters the process of game development. Because Patreon is built around the developer instead of the game, the developer has to maintain a positive relationship with their audience in order to keep the cash flow running. Content - sexy, enticing content - has to come out at a regular rate, lest the subscribers start questioning the worth of their investment. This pushes the industry towards long-term projects developed over several years rather than the multitude of short, one-and-done games that permeated the 2000s, as new content is easier to provide when you’re building on top of an existing project rather than developing a new one entirely. As such, many major Patreon-funded erotic games are functionally live-service games, with no expectation of the game being complete any time soon. Corruption of Champions II has been continuously updating for the last five years. Summertime Saga for the last seven years. Trials in Tainted Space started over a decade ago; the earliest builds came out when I was still in high school.
This takes a different shape with smaller teams lacking large fanbases or sizeable incomes. I’ve seen dozens of newly minted devs putting out a simple ‘v0.1’ demo for a game that’ll take months or, more likely, years to finish, hoping to snag enough subscribers to get the support to put out another update in a month or two. I’ve seen a lot of projects die before getting to 0.2. Developers who manage to grab audience attention have to retain it month after month, update after update, meaning that it’s often more important for a game to have regular new content than for the content to be good. An update that just provides quality of life improvements, or fixes to the back-end code, will likely be dismissed. An update that reduces the amount of erotica in the game, either because it’s being redesigned or because the plot has progressed to the point where some scenes are no longer accessible, will get people unsubscribing. This isn’t a hypothetical. Arc started Act 3 of Corrupted Kingdoms in November 2022, which locks away any sex scenes you’ve unlocked, and that stopped what had been a steady increase in subscribers and cash inflow since 2021.
I can’t argue against the benefit of Patreon. I’m funding the works of several developers there right now. But it’s hard to look at the current shape of sex games over the internet and wonder whether it could be different. The erotic games that littered early Newgrounds were of wildly varying quality, with odd bugs and stolen assets and writing that uses swearing like punctuation, and they often provided nothing to their creators besides the joy of making art. But with no obligations to be profitable or to adhere to strict content guidelines, they could be as bizarre or experimental as they liked. They were, in most cases, finished. Still, as influential as Patreon is, it’s no longer the only valid option for someone trying to make their rent with games about fucking. SubscribeStar, a similar content-hosting platform launched in 2017, has a dedicated sub-section for adult content with less restrictive rules than Patreon. Steam also allows erotic games as of 2018, making it a viable route for more traditional game development, where the product is sold and not the development process. Same with itch.io. None of these platforms are ideal, but they at least allow options, and options breed diversity. After all, sex will sell, but how it sells and who dictates how it sells still matters.
Yarrun - “I’ve spent an exorbitant time thinking about videogames, titillation, and how they affect each other whenever they intersect. It’s an area with a lot of questions and minimal scholarship, so I’ve taken great interest in trying to trace trends back to their origins, tinker with the mechanics underlying much of the genre, and just get an idea for how it all works. Aside from that, I have a smattering of experience across a number of different fields, ranging from fiction writing to music to programming, with my most relevant credit being lead music producer for Dragon Dares.”
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