2is there money in adult games?
So I have wanted to make an adult game for some time but I am scared that it will not have a good return on investment. I am not able to find too much information online about these games. I looked on Steam on their adult section but they all had relatively low review counts, but maybe this is because people do not want to make the fact that they play the game public.
Has anyone here ever dabbled in adult games or know where I could find some information? Any information would be appreciated!
EDIT I will give some background for my ideas. I'm a 3d artist. I mainly do hard surface but I recently purchased Character Creator 3, which is a software to create high-quality 3d characters. I could model clothing. The game itself would be mainly a story driven game. Maybe action but lots of interactive sex scenes.
For example, you're a knight and you have to seduce the queen to be able to have access to some royal information. Or you have to fuck a witch to get some healing potions.
EDIT: I've been getting a lot of PMs for people asking me general questions about my direction and skills and others are interested in helping. I made a Discord group that will hopefully let me launch a project after I have some help/direction. PM and I'll send you the link.
The thing is, the distribution of adult games on steam is still pretty new and before that everyone was just distributing .exe files themselves with zero copy protection and as you can imagine piracy was running absolutely rampant.
AFAIK the biggest community for adult games right now is still f95zone.to, which is a weird combination of discussion forum and piracy website.
You probably won't be able to build a sizable community without being on that website, but being on that website also means having your game freely available for public download. This makes traditional publishing pretty difficult for adult games.
Because of that most adult indie devs use Patreon funding instead. Basically you make a version of the game freely available and then a second version with more updates and maybe some extra features for people who pay you [x]$ per month. You can also do higher tiers that allow people to do things like name characters etc.
Then once you're finished with development you can also sell the game to steam as well.
It's generally not a good idea to base your business model on the most popular products in the market. Achieving cult status gives you a lot more leeway when it comes to ways of monetizing your game that others can only dream of.
Most of the smaller games do use paid tiers with a bit of extra content, and I believe there's a reason for it.
Most od the big games (in terms of money) don't bother at all with copy protection. You just need to make a game so good that people wanna pay for it anyway, just to see how it continues.
People who are willing to pay wont generally care they can get it for free, and people who cannot won't do it for small benefits. If anything, this only hurts you long term.
I wasn't really talking about the overly complicated DRM stuff that AAA studios keep putting in their games.
Steam does have some built in copy protection. I imagine it's not hard to circumvent at all if you know what you're doing, but don't underestimate the difference it makes if people can just share their game folder online vs if they first need to fiddle with the .exe to trick it into not asking your steam client for permission to launch the game.
The latter limits sharing to professional or semiprofessional pirates, whereas the former allows literally anyone who has the game to upload it to a file-sharing site and post the link to a forum or discord server, possibly without even really realizing that what they're doing is enabling piracy.
Yes, I understood that part, but my point still stands, specially for adult games. Look historically at the ones that made the mos money, and you'll see them being super easy to pirate or straight up free, with at most just having early releases for patreons, or things like cheat menus and out of game extras.
Yes, yes there is https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-earners. Out of the top 20 earners on Patreon, there are 3 creating video games. They are all heavy NSFW, mostly about sexual themes. The rest is podcasts and video creation. So there clearly is a market. Given they all seem to have in common, that they cater to specific fantasies, specialization seems important.
ive heard plenty of stereotypes of furries being mostly IT people so that checks out
Python's "hit by a bus" factor, but the bus is being mounted by a dragon.
There's a ton in pretty much every tech field. Game dev is even actually pretty full of them; I know several furries personally who have worked on big AAA titles, with a couple who have held some pretty high positions. There's just also a lot of indie devs who are furries.
iirc there was an edit made to the furry Wikipedia page from the U.S. House of Representatives. Make of that what you will.
Wtf kind of commission is that? Has to be animations of some sort of length.
Fursuits generally cost thousands or tens of thousands. Indeed, animations generally will run you a few thousand for detailed drawings or renderings of any real length. Some very detailed drawings can cross into the low thousands. Etc
The real money is in a the amount of coms you can take. I alone have like 7-8 different art pieces I plan on getting at some point and at like $100 on average that’s almost a thousand from one person alone. Almost every furry wants art and shit so the only real limit for a furry artist is just how fast they can crank out quality artwork or suits or animations etc
Animations and fursuits mostly. Fursuits clock in at around $2-4000 for more simple ones, and it goes up from there with more complicated sewing or things like wings and antlers.
There's also been a big trend of VRChat avatars and VTuber models, which can get really high up there. Same deal with just general 3D models.
Comics can get up there too, as those tend to be charged by the page.
Illustrations tend to average $200-300 for 1-2 characters and a background for decent artists.
Source: furry artist for a living.
Well I wasn’t considering a fur suit as an “artist commission” not sure what I would classify it as though.
I guess I would consider it a tailoring commission or costume commission over art. But I agree, it still is art in its own right.
It’s in the realm of cosplay/costume/fashion design, I guess.
It is highly specialized because it’s a niche market; thus, it’s more efficient to design a product for a specific consumer rather than a generic product for everyone (although those DO exist, too, I think).
While yes, animators can pull in numbers like that, and for good reason, they’re almost certainly referring to Miles_DF, who routinely makes several thousand for still single character images, and even more bafflingly, they make that off of Your Character Here commissions (where the pose/background are predetermined, and the commissioner only has control over picking which character gets drawn).
They’re an outlier though.
Crazy that people would pay that much to a single person for a still. They could get something super close, maybe even just as good from others for 1/10th that.
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Saw a post with various stereotypes. The ones that stuck with me were Russian artists charging $20 or $2000 with no middle ground, and figuring out how to commission a Chinese artist being its own ARG puzzle.
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If you are referring to the TrueAnon and Qanon Anonymous podcasts, I am glad to say that they are both left-wing creators using the name satirically.
Quite a few of the top earners are indie leftist media creators. Maybe the OP should consider making a leftist NSFW furry game to really capitalise on their efforts.
Hmmm… Maybe I’ll do that myself.
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The question is how good are you at building an adult community. From looking at what little sales data there is, I found that most adult (nsfw) games failed miserably.
However there are also a lot of them that earn way-way more than they cost to produce. Some where making nearly 1200% of their original costs. The key factor seamed that the successful games where made by people who where active in the communities around the topic (or fetish).
Basically it is like most games, if you make something that you don't care about there is little chance it will succeed.
That is good but, there is some demand for that. However NSFW players are looking for something else first, they would be happy with a high quality production, but it needs to hit their desire first.
It is difficult to explain, but quality isn't a necessity for them; it is a bonus.
The first thing you should consider before worrying over quality is what type of NSFW game you would want to play. What would make you pick a game over others, then make it high quality as you can.
From someone who has done NSFW art and comics for a long time:
You need to build your base and cater to that. In comics, you can have both people who are just fucking horny and want to get off ASAP, and you can have people who are looking more for a steamy romance novel situation where there's a real story surrounding the sex.
If you make content for one, that's what you attract. You can change gears, but it comes at the price of alienating one to attract the other.
You can also look at the market for what you want to make and really figure out what's going to make it tick. If you are making a story-centric game that features a lot of sex, you're probably not going for the porn crowd. You're more likely going to have an audience interested that is looking for sex-positive media, which will also likely have significant overlap with feminist, kink, and LGBTQ+ markets. That helps guide your project as well as how you should present and market it.
You can also work things like kinks into how your story is presented and the direction it takes! A lot of kink is built up around certain themes, power dynamics, etc, and doesn't need to be explicitly porn to grab that audience's attention.
The first thing you should consider before worrying over quality is what type of NSFW game you would want to play. What would make you pick a game over others, then make it high quality as you can.
I'd say as nice as that idea is, the reality is the exact opposite. It's much more profitable and easier to make hot-trash and hope that other people like the hot and ignore the trash. Just keep throwing stuff out there and see what sticks.
The market is just so small and so starved, that they'll prefer quantity over quality any day, and the market share is very all-or-nothing.
I mean, I grew up on comics like XXXenophile, Boneyard, Lost Girls, and Sunstone, but there's a reason they are in the minority. It's just not worth getting ghettoized most of the time.
I'd say as nice as that idea is, the reality is the exact opposite. It's much more profitable and easier to make hot-trash and hope that other people like the hot and ignore the trash.
Kind of, not really. I've been doing NSFW art and comics for around 14 years now. You can make general garbage, but it'll get ignored. That kind of stuff needs to either be really high quality or really cheap. However, if you can find a niche and capture the concept really well, the quality of the rest of the product can go down a bit while still being able to command a higher price.
Like, for example, if you have a game that's about a very specific, not very well represented fetish, you can have lower quality art and even a questionable story.
On the flip side, though, if you have good art and a good story, your game will likely go viral in that fetish community. You might even be able to charge higher than average prices, because people will be willing to pay for that well-done content.
It's much more profitable and easier to make hot-trash and hope that other people like the hot and ignore the trash.
Just like it's easier to play the lottery instead of working. It might be easier, but on average it's not more profitable than making a good game and marketing it well.You're pretty much advising to put in a little bit of effort and then take a gamble. Probably won't work.
Creating something like a shitty puzzle game with nude images will cost like nothing in time or money to produce, and then anything you make is all profit. These games get sold for $1-2 and get packed into a $10 bundle of similar games and people buy them by virtue of quantity per dollar.
Trying to produce an actual game will cost time and money, and you are not guaranteed a return.
Pumping out dogshit and using it to fund a passion project would make sense.
Yeah it's not the worst idea but it was more feasible before than it is now, it's becoming more of a lottery gamble than it was in the beginning of online storefronts. Here's a cool GDC talk on it.
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I'd be a bit worried about this angle: if what you care about is the story but you want to cash in by adding adult elements, maybe stick to the story part and don't do that?
The thing is, if your heart isn't in the adult side you're going to have your lunch eaten by creators who ARE passionate about that part. There's no shortage of 'em. It's kind of like creating tacky pop music: you can try to identify the formulas of what you think is a pretty cheesey exercise but you'll be obliterated by people who make it because they LOVE that.
Don't be fooled by looking at outliers, people who've been real successful and live for what they do. If you're looking to just bolt on some adult stuff to make money, look at the success of OTHER people who have tried to do just that. They're your real competition, not the ones truly committed to the NSFW side for whom that's their whole driving force.
if your heart isn't in the adult side you're going to have your lunch eaten by creators who ARE passionate about that part
This is so incredibly true. Everyone I've ever seen who does porn art "just for the money" eventually hits a wall and fails. Every single successful artist I've seen revels in it, enjoying from the bottom of their heart what they do. It's not even about being horny either; these are people who sincerely believe in being sex-positive, and whole-heartedly treat it as an expression of a part of themselves that deserves to be expressed.
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You had me up until this part:
Basically it is like most games, if you make something that you don't care about there is little chance it will succeed.
I hate to burst this romantic little bubble but the amount your care about your game does not translate into how many sales you will make. Passion can play a part, but the people who make a living as devs are highly skilled in array of disciplines, know how to scope a project, have experience, are sponsored in some way, are very smart, are ruthlessly masochistic, and last but certainly not least, are very lucky. If you're gonna be passionate about anything, be passionate about making money........................................................................... as a game developer. That way, you might have a chance of keeping a roof over your head.
Caring about your game doesn't magically make it sell, but that's not what was being said. What was said is that people who don't care about what they're making rarely make it as a small/indie dev, since the vast majority of the time they won't put the same effort into it and it'll show. And unless there's a brand loyalty or obscene amounts of built up hype (ie: No Man's Sky), most players aren't interested in playing a half-baked game that the developer didn't even care about.
OP said:
if you make something that you don't care about there is little chance it will succeed
You refuted something else, namely: "if you make something that you care about, there is a big chance it will succeed".
Those are two very different statements.
OP said
... if you make something that you don't care about there is little chance it will succeed.
The opposite of that statement is: If you make something you care about, there is a great chance it will succeed.
That's what I was responding to....
That being said, I see your point. The thing is, I've just been to a number of meetups and events where there are wonderful, kind, and passionate people who have projects and aspirations that they are very much in love with. These projects are fun, funny, quirky, cool, etc etc... but the vast majority of them stand almost zero chance of making a financial return that would be proportionate to the time invested in them. I'm just saying that people need to be real with themselves. If the goal is to make games for fun or as side projects, then by all means, have at it. But if you're trying to make a living off of your project, and it's your only means of income, you better be damn good.
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Quick Intro - Im Tiny Devil Studio and I've been making Monster Girl Hunt for 2 years and 2 months now. My Patreon cracks 250 before the monthly drop, 1200 person discord, 775,000 views on discord, several volunteers on staff, etc etc etc
So, is there money in it. Yes and no.Those big guys you see at the top, they got in early with little competition and at least a serviceable product, or they got in a bit later with high quality product. Right now there are over 200,000 creators with more than 1 patron on patreon. Don't attempt to go in thinking your going to hit it big like them. They have years and years of accumulated content and patrons + an early adopter advantage.
If you want to know what to expect, go to Graphtreon.com, all patrons (at the top), advance filtering, adult games. FInd something like 50 creators in the patron range you wish to be at and see how long it took them. Thats what to expect for time frame
Then flip a coin, cause less than half of all creators make $100 per month.
Holy fuck! I was making $400 a month on Twitch with subs and thought that was ok but not really that good as I couldn’t scale it. (Limited audience for my content -on camera leatherworking.) Guess I was doing better than I thought!
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Here's a major tip: Don't just develop and publish a finished product, get a patreon (or equivalent) and release in updates. A lot of people will pay out of their ass if it's even halfway decent. There'll be a lot of piracy but that's inevitable.
Also, decide whether you want broad appeal (more chance that someone will be interested but lower chance of standing out) or a niche audience (lower chance of a big audience but they will be more willing to dish out cash)
Also, decide how much you're willing to bend over for the whales. There's a lot of cash to be made in shelling out custom content, but that's likely going to hurt the broad audience appeal.
User-payed additions to the game. Custom user-requested NPCs or starting character presets, specific fetishes or scenes, additional equipment or traits to make specific gameplay easier.
Like a sort of reversed-DLC. One person pays you to make changes and additions to the base game. Fenoxo Games, for example, are a tossed salad of such things.
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Here's some Steam data for you:
https://howtomarketagame.com/2022/04/18/what-genres-are-popular-on-steam-in-2022/
There's a lot of competition (that genre has the highest number of games released), and the median income is around $3000. Looking at another graph near the bottom of the article, you can see that expected earnings are in the $1-10k range for the majority of games.
In short, if $10k sounds too low for you, it's probably not a good idea. It seems to me that the whole genre is about releasing many small, easy to produce games instead of one big hit.
Keep in mind that Sims 4 and Mass Effect Legendary Edition are some of the top selling games in the 'sexual content' category on Steam, so it's less clear than the tag implies.
Talking as a "costumer", I searched a lot of this games and they are pretty bad. 90% of it are just image power points with text. The story's are usually 'meh' and there is very little entertainment at the adult genre.
I strongly believe anything with the purpose of being a "game" and not just "paid porn at steam" could really make a lot of money.
A fap takes 5 minutes. Design something I can play for 1k hours and fap along the way. Than shut up and take my money.
Also doesn't necessarily has to be RPG genre. Everything can use a little naked people fucking. Do a platform with naked people. An RTS with naked characters that have sex.
Also I love when I'm playing a game and suddenly naked people fucking. That was the final touch of Witcher 3.
All this text is: the genre it's not properly explored, and there is A LOT of room for more.
I strongly believe anything with the porpoise of being a "game" and not just "paid porn at steam" could really make a lot of money.
Sure, HuniePop proves that. There's a ton of low-effort shovelware in this space, but I agree that there's still some untapped market space for sex games with good production values.
Exactly. If it's primarily about sex, then make it fun and entertaining. If sex is one thing among many things to do in the game, then make it feel like it belongs.
Point-and-dick isn't really compelling.
As a dev, the problem is that there are quite some solid psychological traps that hinder doing anything but creating "image power point" games. (besides the instability of the expected market)
Recently, the rise of Let's Play marketing has brought the rest of the indie community to the same set of problems: The first 10-30 minutes are so absolutely critical that you have very little room for "build up".
Also, as a completely seperate problem, from a story point of view there is a ghettoization problem. If you do just a little NSFW, there is very little reason not go fully into it because you're already "fucked" from categorization point of view. So it's all or nothing, and that doesn't just determine your audience but people that are willing to work with you.
It's also very hard doing, let's call it, "HBO-chique" because if you don't warn the audience they generally feel offput and leave bad feedback, and if you do warn them, they take it as.a promise and get mad you're not delivering it every 10 minutes. People suck.
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Midnight Castle Succubus DX is a fairly decent metroidvania with adult content -- namely the character designs and some cutscenes that show up at specific points in the game (e.g. when you die).
It's a game by all accounts, and strikes a balance between gameplay and the adult content way better than most of the games in the genre.
Yeah I've put some thought into how I might make one in the past and never came up with a satisfying idea.
I mean, the fact that Lust for Darkness did well enough to get a sequel despite being tragic both gameplay and content-wise says otherwise.
I don't know how much it's frowned upon here. But the only website i know, where there's an actual large collection of porn games and community is a pirate site called f95zone. They mostly run through patreon, and people pay them every month, and they are mostly all early access, with monthly updates or something similar.
Most of them are visual novels with 3d models, but there's also a ton of rpgmaker games.
Some of the larger ones make more than 10k usd a month i think. There's also some projects blueballing their patreons and making super small releases every few months that make a few hundred to 1k a month i think. Been a while since i checked how much they earn.
edit: if you need some inspiration or research from some good ones, i can drop some names ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°)
This was already mentioned but I think the game "Being a Dik" is something you should look into. I've played most of the game (I only stopped because I want to wait for it to be more developed) and I think its clear that the developer wanted to make a game that focuses more on telling a good story. Its a fairly vanilla game that doesnt really cater to a specific fetish (maybe milfs idk). Also as far as I know.. DrPinkcake develops everything by himself so expenses are probably fairly low.. at least compared to if he had a team.. while also having a high patreon count. This is of course if you specifically wanted to make something that didnt fall into the more hardcore scene. So TLDR I think there is money to be made in adult game Dev. Although tbf I am just a consumer that is just starting to get into this scene... so my bias may be showing. Anyways good luck! I wish you the best of luck
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If I weren’t living in a conservative nation, I would’ve tried developing an adult game at some point. It’s one of those genres which will never be taken over by big AAA companies which gives it some economical safety. AAA corporations don’t want to be associated with a game about big dick Kermit choking Spongebob.
The real money is through Patreon, by making a deep intricate game system which can have new content added and expanded in regular intervals.
This is definitely something that I've been giving a lot of thought to. I love the idea of making programs modular and augmentable. If that's even a word. I've played some games that are regular fps games but all the characters are anime girls and you buy different "sexy" outfits. But I think there are a billion of those games.
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The audience/fetish content you want to cater to. There's a lot of things to consider as well, quality of art and art style, game play, story, etc. At the end of the day, it should still be entertaining. People like myself will pay for quality content but if it includes content that is a key part of the game (and not optional) and is a turn off, I'd rather not bother with the game. Ultimately, this is similar to any game. If I don't like the genre or gameplay, I won't bother playing/buying it.
Like video games as a whole, adult video games are very boom and bust.
It's a smaller pool though - your competition is substantially smaller, but so is the market buying and paying for this stuff.
But hey... if you make a good game that's also adult oriented (i.e. good game first, not just porn in a mediocre game), it's far more likely to find traction in a market where such a thing is a rarity.
I myself have yet to find a good adult oriented roguelite. I'd also go for a souls like. I hear the armor flying off on damage genre is thirsty and largely untapped.
Hm. That’s odd. Do you even like games? Or is it just that you found yourself too busy to bother and play anything anymore? Genuinely curious.
Short Answer - Yes, just as there's money in non-adult games. But the bar is higher and the audience harder to find.
(Assume all links after this are NSFW)
Longer Answer - I'm in no way an expert, so understand that. I have looked at a lot of various adult games, how they're doing and so on and while Steam allowing Adult Games was a game changer for adult game devs, subscription models (Patreon, Subscribestar) are still very much in play - even for games on Steam - and I'd say that most Adult Games aren't on Steam. I know some of the big games are pulling in five figures on Patreon.
I also know they are very much the exception and most Adult Games are doing fantastic if they make three figures.
Which is also part of the issue - because most of them aren't on Steam, they don't even have the simple hurdle of "The dev had $100 to burn on putting their game on Steam". There are a lot of Adult Games, and most of them are awful.
On Reddit, there's r/nsfwdev (seems to be mostly links to games) and r/adultgamedev (I'm trying to make that just a shop-talk subreddit) exist, but the information there is limited.
There are multiple Adult Game Discord Servers out there. It also seems every Adult Game Dev has their own server too, so once you start getting on one, it can be useful to get on others.
Of those, the LewdPixels and SpicyGaming Discord Servers will probably be your best bet to get real information from people who are making money (but not much) in the business. I hate pushing people on one platform to another, but when it comes to Adult Games Developers, Discord seems to be where the actual conversations are happening.
There's also a couple of piracy sites out there that also have developer discussions. If you've been looking around, you probably have already found at least one of them. There's tools and links you can find there to help you out too. And also use them to understand that even more than non-Adult gaming, your game can and will be pirated.
Good luck.
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Heya, I'm a lead developer at Anduo Games, we exclusively make Adult games. Our Patreon has 2850 Patrons right now, putting us in the top 50. We've been at it for 5 years now.
I think that it is much easier to establish yourself with a quality indie adult game in the adult gaming scene, than it is with a quality non-adult indie game in the normal indie scene. However, I only have experience as an adult gamedev, so it's possible that my view is one sided on this. There are much fewer gamedevs doing adult games than regular games, so the competition is much smaller and generaly less experienced.
I believe there is still lots of opportunity in the field, especially in 3d. Having quality 3d character models with solid rigging and animation is rare in the adult game industry. Most games are 2d. I can only think of a hand full of games really managing to pull this off. Each one managing this has been a fairly large success (Wild Life and Subverse come to mind for example).
At the end of the day however, by adding nsfw content to your game, you limit your audience (18+, not visible by default on steam, etc.). So it's a trade off between ease of establishing yourself and limiting your potential audience.
Hope that helps!
That’s great for OP that you’re here weighing in. I’m sorry I think it’s hilarious you saying that it’s easier to establish yourself as an indie with an adult game.
The 5 years of experience means your studio had early adopter advantage before indie space got crowded and every game you release has a built-in audience.
Still, I’d love to see some mainstream press site claim adult games are the way. Well, I did see a mainstream game dev say furry games always get crowd funded.
The amount of sex mods for Skyrim implies that it is(skyrim was and still is one of my most favourite RPGs)...
Also the existence sexlab and other such websites....
It's an adult modding framework for Skyrim, native to loverslab, not a website. Epitome "work of love" since it isn't even an adult mod, it just makes such mods possible.
tl;dr yes. But you have to be smart about it. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/990500595/subverse/description
You'll have to do some number crunching and research, but any genre you are thinking of making. It would help to go through process like this.
Find some games whose style and content quality you hope to match. (Be a bit realistic on this) Identify key tags that distinguish them. Steam discovery is heavily tag driven now days and you should really invest into learning more about how all that works. HowToMarketaGame.com community should get you started.
Anyway, once you identify tags. (Not just adult and mature and hentai, but other tags that deal with core gameplay and themes). Use game statistics websites to get a rough idea of well each tag is performing. https://howtomarketagame.com/2022/04/18/what-genres-are-popular-on-steam-in-2022/
https://games-stats.com/steam/tags/ https://gaminganalytics.info https://vginsights.com/
What you are looking for is how much money average and median games make in a tag, and how many games are being made in there.
Use genre analytics, tag analytics and individual reference game estimates ( https://games-stats.com/steam/?title=subverse ) to get a rough idea how well games closes to your idea and execution quality you hope to put out are doing.
If it all looks good and promising, scour the similar game reviews on steam. Pick out top complaints and praises from across many games. This will give you good idea what players love, and give you ideas about what is missing from the genre and could be your unique selling point.
If statistical prospects for your initial idea don't look so good, then look at popular tags and genres, especially under-served ones. Apparently rogue like deck-builders are doing awesome, so maybe a sexy card builder rogue like is better idea than yet another visual novel. Maybe not. You'll have to use your best judgement, insight from steam reviews and your understanding of the genre to make your best judgments.
Also BE VERY CAREFUL, when choosing art style, UI, theme and setting for you game. DO NOT ASSUME original or new ideas are automatically good. It's common and painful pit to fall into.
Most modern store and media algorithms literally run on players being able to assume at a glance that a thumbnail of screenshot, gif, or a poster they spotted at the periphery of their vision amid sea of other competing titles is something they might like, is something they know and feel like its theirs. Whatever you do make sure at least a significant part of your target audience can understand what kind of game you are making when looking at tiny screenshots thumbnails.
A lot of money even.
People pay premium to some devs on patreon only to have access.
On top of what other people have said, there's also this interesting post on the Law of Boob.
To put it simply, people know what they're getting with that niche and as long as you deliver the basics it's not hard to find yourself a small following. That being said it absolutely is a 20/80 niche, the top earners are mountains above the masses. And the quality is also much lower in general (edit: really, abysmal honestly) and it's an easier barrier of entry for a small/solo dev in many ways.
Also, something else I'd like to share, and this is something that's been recently on my mind but not systemized anywhere is that there is a "loop hole" for adult works that is as old as time: place it in opposition.
This is what the Horror genre is basically all about, and how Lust for Darkness managed to get a modicum of public recognition. It's how Warhammer, let's be honest, manages its figure sales and setting. It's the universal catch-all: the thing that titilates must die by the end. You'll see it a lot in "moral gray"/"anti-hero" works, where the bad side is inevitably the hot one or the one that engages in the field. It's also why "bad end porn" is an automatism in adult game design.
It is, to me, a disgusting and a sad observation of human psychology, but it works to get passed the unnofficial ghettoization and onto more mainstream-ish reviewers.
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If you decide to appeal to the furry audience and make a furry nsfw game, you will without a doubt be SWIMMING in cash. They throw money around on furry stuff like nobodies business.
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Yes.
Take a look at the visual novel market, it's more standard to have sex scenes than not. Even massively successful visual novels like Fate hedged their bets on release with sex scenes (though in that case they later released "clean" versions after having enough commercial success).
It's something that is a pretty niche market but has a dedicated following. r/visualnovels is the general sub to goto for that and r/Otomegames (I think - something close to it) for VNs specifically catering to women.
Focus on making a good game first and foremost. Adult or not, if the game is good then the profits will come.
From what I hear, it's a low hanging fruit market. Apply good game design and dev principles to a porn game (yes I have issues with the taxonomy... This war of mine is more of an adult game dealing with adult stuff than all porn games ever made combined), and push a new narrative or a new mechanic into the space, and you'll differentiate so much that you'll garner a decent amount of it.
The general level of quality seem so low, anything remotely of the quality of a good regular game should have both (specialized) media coverage and sales just by being novel and decent.
I have zero hard numbers as to the size of the market, but given the amount of money in the passive porn market (movies and books and such), probably a lot of potential.
I would think there is if the game play is fun and interesting enough and/or the story is good enough. The main driver should be the game play and not the sexual stuff.
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Very interesting conversation here. I’ve never touched an adult game, just never interested me. With that said, I can see it being an open market. There just isn’t much precedence other than the cheap games others have made. The question is, how much are people willing to pay for this kind of game? Also how do you handle the different sexualities. You’re suggesting a game where the player has sex with a witch or queen. What about straight women or gay men? Would your game account for sexual preference? If not that’s a piece of the market you’re cutting out. I think you could make money. You’re entering a market not many are in. You’d just have to really think about these things.
I suppose I was thinking very thin scope. But this does sound like big potential. I suppose I could make a base game that is simple and short, and offer it for free. But have no actual sex. Then have DLC to unlock ways to interact with things.
For example, super random, a game about the main character, either man or woman, trying to find a job. He goes to interviews and tries to convince people to give him/her a job. You have basic dialogue. You pay to unlock more options, some of which are sexual. Unlock positions, outfits, different interviews for different companies, being able to be the one that is hiring and letting people seduce you. But you always have the option to pick the gender of yourself and the character that you will be interacting with.
Anyone else chuckle when they said " mainly do hard surface"?
Would be interesting to see a Conan type game that's all about getting that fair maiden to bang but you have to kill a boss first or like you say, fuck a witch for some potions. Lol. I believe Conan fucked a witch as well.
There are lots of adult games out there. Your competition would be very stiff.
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Haven't dabbled into adult games (yet) but I am a porn artist who can definitely tell you a thing or two about what works and what usually doesn't.
The main thing is knowing the niche you're trying to focus on. Who is the game for? General "sex" games with a lot of open-endedness often try to add in one or two scenes for every major fetish to go on, but then where does that get you?
Someone who's into one thing would have to sift through the whole game to find the scenes they enjoy and basically ignore the rest. You'd be putting in a ton of work only for most players to only enjoy a couple scenes out of potentially dozens. That's not a very good ratio.
So focus on a particular genre of kink and gear all of your scenes and gameplay toward that. You'll entice less overall players to play your game, but if it's really good, they'll spread positive things about it to their other friends who also enjoy those kinks.
You see a lot of games with a core kink to it do really well. General sex with one specific gender or the other, Traps (the sexual term, not trans characters), BDSM, free-use, breeding, etc. Games that try to cross too many of these divides alienate content away from their players.
Picking a niche of players to focus on will almost always be more successful than trying to make a game for everyone. And that's just general good game dev advice!
Hope this helps.
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Adult games frequently sell well on Steam and, depending on what it is, don't typically cost too much to make compared to other genres. You could commission, say, a set of 12 adult pics from an artist, wrap it up in a simple matching game or something, and find modest success if you shop it around well enough.
It depends. If you want to make a hardcore game with explicit scenes of sex and overall genitalia, you better off making simple and short games for adult web sites, if you want to make money, make echi games like senran kagura, neptunia, ikkitousen... As you mention explicit games dont generate much traction because people dont want that on their profile, its a niche product, echi games are more broadwild because are still a game besides the partial nudity. I've made a hardcore one once and the results were absmally bad, i agree to do it because i was getting payed nonetheless.
Can you create adult content with CC3? I know Reallusion cracked down on adult content in their content store a couple of years ago, so I'm not sure how easy it is to stick genitals onto your characters.
I made an adult visual novel using Daz and some assets from Renderotica a couple of months ago, but man, Daz Studio really is a pain in the ass to use.
I've done the same before in the past. Game had 10x the views and downloads of any other game I made, but I offered it for free which probably helped. Did your visual novel do well? Did you make any money off it?
I have my problems with Daz, definitely a pain to use, but if you want to make pictures of people being naked it's probably the best option unless you have lots of money
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Look into MakeHuman
Free base mesh builder with a good amount of addons
I been living off adult games for the last three years.
I started with zero knowledge on how to make games, so what I acomplished so far would be completely impossible with SFW games. However, the amount of money is usually related to not only the quality of the work but the concept.
If you wanna do a VN you won't have much success, because there are a lot of those. But if you find something that you like and a niche and do something you may have some success.
In my case, my games focus on both gameplay and the idea of sexfights, two things where the market is not oversaturated as RPGM games or VNs.
Keep in mind that getting reviews on Steam for adult games is way harder than for SFW games, people just don't wanna have their names "exposed" for everyone to see it there.
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I feel like Adult Games are being over-hyped here? Yeah, sex sells, but only to an extent. There are loads of hurdles. You won't be able to use most major game markets or even certain countries.
If you refer to this recent post you'll see that sexual content indie titles don't make much money despite there being tons of them.
I am scared that it will not have a good return on investment.
Numerous competition + Limited availability = no, you probably won't make any money.
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Make a Porn Game that actually has Gameplay.
Games like that are pretty much crickets in the market.
Don't just make another "The Great Story" Visual Novel that takes 5 years to complete.
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Reaching your audience will probably be your biggest challenge. Some gems are not found until after it's made like among us, a streamer blew the game up. You could be putting years of work and it might become popular till years later. So don't get defeated of success is not immediate. Also if you can make any scenes VR or more than just press buttons correctly I'd play it
I've been contemplating getting a VR set but then I'd probably have to buy one for every dev who wanted to help me progra the game. So I think VR will be put off for some time. Until I make enough money to not have to buy one from my own pocket.
But you can't steam sex games can you? I wonder, can you steam sex games on those cam girl websites?
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It really depends on how much of a following you have accumulated over the years making adult art and games. Some adult artists have been grinding at it for years and were there early, which gave them a 'hit' advantage to their adult games and are raking in loads of money.
As far as I can tell, going Steam is the easy choice but you'd make less money since it's considered as a mainstream source and it's harder to build a strong community there. Adult games there are also often considered as quick 2 hour cash grabs which doesn't give it any more credit.
Slowly gathering up followers through adult game sites like f95zone or art sites might give you better long term profit, as more people are likely to build a community around your artistic portrayal and concept of the game. Hence, they are more likely to support your work over the months as you work on the project.
As a consumer it seems there is a lot of money in it because every shitty renpy soap opera has a „successful „ patreon. I don’t think steam may be the best platform though but that’s a point of view from a country where something like „house party“ is not available. I think one of the biggest successes is „summer time saga“ and tbh it can’t be that hard to make something better but I can’t so I shan’t judge
If you want an honest exchange from the consumer point of view hit me up
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Buddy, never underestimate the money to be made satisfying fetishes. Question is can you bring yourself to work on it or not? Sounds easy at first, until you realize that you need to do the fetish justice and learn all of the detail / inner-workings of it.
Whatever you do, make sure it fulfils a fetish of some kind. Whether its cute anime girls or some sort of furry-bdsm sub-genre, play it up. Look up peak shifting and isolation in art for better fetish related design. Half measures = no one cares
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If furries artist make enough money to do full time commissions of nsfw stuff and buy a house, Im pretty sure there's a market for adult games
I think there is a market for good adult games that are not just renpy vns that use the same engine for models/animations of all other adult games. Honestly it seems anything above average gets lots of attention, and the average is a html5 text story with images from porn scenes.
Also, furries, it seems the memes about suspiciously wealthy furries are true.
I'm not developing nor playing these types of games, so can't tell you much. But : I did a game jam once where we ended up making a game about fighting drugs in a "drug prevention dream" kind of way. This theme meant that on various plateformes it would require the tag "not for kids". On itch.io this ended up being the NSFW. Well I've since discovered from the metrics that it's my most played game. And when looking at where they came from it's almost all from people searching for the NSFW tag.
My hypothesis is that the market is definitely there but consumers will look for games on their own (can't really advertise for that) and they are really looking ! I'm not sure if they have a proper community but if they do your game could get around pretty fast.
Another thing: I'm not sure but I think they are also ready to pay a bit more upfront then the general demographic due to the niche market. Don't quote me on that.
For that group it is going to be appealing to a very specific group. Those people want their fantasies to be done and want specific things. They not fully care about things like quality or purely story or game mechanics. You'll have to ask people into that what they are wanting but just be prepared to be appealing to a smaller group since majority of people don't buy games like that.
As a Patreon supporter of few adult game studios, the question is do you sell the game in the end, or do you sell the game while producing it? I've seen a number of indie adult games based on IPs that aren't theirs, but they aren't selling the game, so it's treated as fair use. They get Patreon supporters funding them throughout the development, but when all is said and done, the game is free.
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Honestly that idea sounds compelling and hilarious. If you believe in the final vision, desire it as a customer yourself, and you can deliver the quality you would demand as a player, then ANY game has potential. More importantly, if you make a game that meets your vision and that you’re proud of and that satisfies your customers (even if it’s not many), then it’s worth doing.
Patreon is your friend! Make your game available publicly but lock some behind a paywall; you could also have feature voting, early builds, devlogs, raw CG and WIP animations there. That’s the most common model I see and it seems to be working for lots of people! Good luck to you and your pornographic dreams lol
Three words: Leisure Suit Larry.
Joking of course but it was the first thing that came to mind when I thought of an adult game. Your ideas sound really fun!
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This is gonna sound a bit biased but……most of the successful adult games I’ve seen is mainly furry stuff.
I’ve seen some of these games pull in thousands of dollars a month just off of patreon.
If your gonna make a adult game purely for profit: I’d go with the furry side of things.
Most of what other people have said is true: you need to build up a base and stick with it.
One of the most hilarious ironies is modern people thinking sex isn't profitable when it's probably been the most profitable thing ever in human history. Even when you talk about trade of basic commodities, quite often that trade is not indirectly motivated by sex.
Im not a game dev at all, but of course yes. Presuming you're equally capable of making an adequate porn game or an adequate whatever game, yes. Absolutely yes.
The real hurdle is going to be advertising one so it becomes profitable in a market with so much competition. But if it's capable of making people yank off, and enough people are exposed to it, it will sell.
Also someone correct me if Im wrong but arent most of those hentai games like asset flips or people making derivitave bullshit from the same set of 3rd party assets? Maybe that's just how all hentai looks but its almost impossible for me to tell the difference personally and trust me, I. keep. loooooooking ;) ;) ;)
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i play alot of (bad) adult games and i think the thing that really sets them apart is the artwork...from my perspective you should have interesting gameplay that teases you along and awards you bread crumbs of better/more content kind of like leveling up gives you better access to abilities and higher stats
but the artwork needs to be GOOD if the artwork isnt good it will feel very sloppy and lazy for instance the sex kitten games have good artwork (although its obviously stolen) and trash gameplay...the artwork makes up for it and it strings you along with content to unlock
for examples of good games from someone who enjoys adult games check out: third crisis (good xcom style rpg with alot of options for how "naughty" you want to roleplay), legend of krystal (furry shit ig? idk im not into furry stuff but i love the animation in those games) and crimson keep (typical turn based rpg with AMAZINGGGGG art gameplay isnt really terrible either typical rpg bullshit) - honorable mention for the meet n fuck games just because i used to play the shit out of those as a wee boy
you can monotize your games with patreon too and pay wall certain things and it will get horny people who are in the moment and NEED to see that content to give you money and also possibly give you a good fanbase
my apologies that i dont know anything about the steam marketplace as far as adult games go ive never looked there personally and id assume most of those are shitty and im not paying money for a potentially shitty game (this might answer youre original question)
cheers good luck on your journey into one of the many dark parts of the internet hope i answered some of your questions
...holy shit i wrote alot lmao
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Of my games on itch my adult game has by far the most amount of downloads. A vampire game with full up close nudity. Here is the artist that made the nude models. They are supper realistic. Got them working on Unity using mixamo.com animations.
The prices is weried and changes. I paid between $16-19. Got 2 of her models. Woman from Philippines made them. Great work for price point. Almost got all of her models for future cause felt so cheap for quality.
Here is a youtube video with two of the naked models doing the Triller dance. Was in VR. Lower part is very realistic but I dont show on youtube video. Was first test with these models. I thought about making a VR stripper exprience cause thought would sell. But decided against it for now, cause too boring to make and not somthing I would put on resume.
Anything that allows you to top out, talking from a anecdotal pov.
The money in adult is from the big-spenders. A flat rate means that they just shell out the minimum and then you have to output something else. Hence the low-quality shovelware on Steam.
And reason why Patreon/Subscribestar does better, and also Ichi as a potential platform. The primary goal, from a financial point of view, is to allow those with cash to spend to throw money at you. i have yet to see a freemium nsfw game, but i"m sure it's worth looking into it as a business model.
Microtransactions, donations, bespoke content. Multiple ways to do the same thing, which is get those that really like your game or are more financially stable to put up a bigger share.
It's kind of just the reality of this sort of thing due to consumer imbalance, and the supply and demand. Some don't care, and some are willing to singlehandedly pay for something to just exist, out of pocket.
The catch of course is that it is still in many ways a design choice. Bespoke content especially puts a lot of power in the hands of the whales and it should be handled with quite a bit of tact.
I mean, Huniepop 1 & 2 were successful in the adult games category as basically Tetris with dirty pictures so I don’t see why you couldn’t make something successful as well
I think it was a snarky comment about the incel culture and overall mental health of mostly male audience
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You can make a patreon and let the game be perpetually in alpha. The simps will play regardless of the status.
The visual novels that fall under “eroge” (18+ visual novels) have always been pretty popular with Japan and the US and have been known to be cheaper to produce depending on the quality
3D model sex game number 188284849483e10
If you want to go ahead, but if you actually want to make significant money there needs to be a reason to buy your game rather than all the other games. 3D modeled adult games is a genre that is absolutely disgustingly flooded due to the smooth workflow.
Adult games balance "game" and "adult" poorly, always. As a rule, think of it as content delivery, not a game, and you'll have way more success. It needs to have some control in that content delivery of course, but really, it's been a problem of the fact that repeated events with adult situations are usually not desirable and almost all the frustrating parts of gaming that become rewarding eventually are inversely rewarding to the adult parts of the game. Novelty is key with adult scenarios and definitionally, novelty wears off.
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Yes, they're very popular and profitable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1JhFiiRqW8 NSFW obviously goes over some of the top rated adult games and reviews them.
Many of them are pretty simplistic and lacking features.
Nutaku was throwing around $$$ a couple years ago i wonder what ever happened to them and their mobile game biz
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