NSFW The Adult Game Thread ***R18***

[Nano]

Even porn games can't escape the storyfags.

 

[Reinhardt]

rpg

tb or rtwp?

 

[HentaiWriter]

rpg

tb or rtwp?

Neither, the RPG element comes in with the storyline, choices, endings, etc.

That's why I called it an action RPG, similar to say, Secret of Mana, but as a platformer instead of a top down view.

 

[Lhynn]

Dude, you're in cope mode just like crazy funboys from f95.

No u.

The fact is, things are JUST HAPPENING starting with the store incident (what a coincidence, huh?), continue with some stuff to make possible for girls to move in to MC, it just so happened that ginger girl was his nurse at that time and so on and so forth. Nigger's condition is also not totally random, amirite?

If nothing was going on it would be a very boring story. Something has to set events into motion. Shit has to happen for the plot to move on, your criticism is retarded and you are trying too hard. Its unbelievable i have to explain this shit to a grown adult. None of that shit counts as "Emoshunal manipulation". The things that try and succeed to hit the emotional chord happen later.
These were all set ups that will pay off later down the line as different events interconnect. Its how you skillfully weave a story.

rpg

tb or rtwp?

Neither, the RPG element comes in with the storyline, choices, endings, etc.

That's why I called it an action RPG, similar to say, Secret of Mana, but as a platformer instead of a top down view.

Metroidvania.

 

[Immortal]

The only three things Steam bans for are;

• Underage characters (this includes flat chested characters that claim they're adults)
• School settings (at all; cosplaying in a schoolgirl outfit, visiting your old school, going to college, any of that = instaban)
• Obvious troll games that are made just to shock/offend purposefully

This list seems to be missing a lot of use cases, putting aside copyrighted materials as one, I can think of a few examples that don't really fall under this.
(Where are you quoting these rules by the way? this feels more like a thumb in the air feelies thing)


You could argue Rapeday is a Troll or For-shock value game but Valve's own statement doesn't suggest that -
It simply says, and I'm quoting here:
"Yea fuck this dumpster fire - peace yo" - https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1808664240304050758

AKA The thrust behind them rejecting it was more the thing was just way too much work to deal with.
Fine, let's chalk it up to Shockvalue / School Setting - But I have to think that if the puritans came for your game, I doubt your RPGCodex post about "Actually when you get fucked by the tree alien it's only dub-con" would appease the media or twitter mob. I can picture all your famous voice actor's running for the hills denouncing this game as well.

But fuck it, moving on, I'll just quote the other thread.

Definitely this one doesn't fall under your list (IMO)

(TL;DR - Game with zero nudity or sex but depicts real people instead of 3D / 2D graphics)
At bare minimum you'd need to update your best-guess-list - or do you differentiate between ban and a "will never be accepted on store - stop asking" ?

Genuinely curious on your thoughts around this.

I recall clips of the first game had girls in lingerie sitting on a bed with him when you guessed the right answer. So this lingerie excuse seems like BS.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I am glad that someone is finally taking a stand and putting thots in their place. This kind of smut in videogames will lead to impure thoughts.
Now I am off to go play my mass murder shooting simulator game.

 

[Immortal]

I am glad that someone is finally taking a stand and putting thots in their place. This kind of smut in videogames will lead to impure thoughts.
Now I am off to go play my mass murder shooting simulator game.

Carving zombies in half as guts and blood spew everywhere is fine, as long as the zombie wears tasteful rags covering nipples.

 

[TheEntitledOne]

I'm all for steam censorship, normies ruin everything anyway.

Most western made games are usually putreon fetishbait.
Those looking for interesting gameplay + relatively vanilla content are a trully oppresed class. But some day we will eliminate all degeneracy and enjoy a Vanillareich of a thousand years.

japs ocassionally do cool shit outside of the usual AliceSoft, Eushully, ShChara studios, mainly on off RPG maker types.

Recently I played がちんこパイレーツ (Gachinko Pirates). There is an english fan translation out there. It has *some* porn, but the gameplay is what it sells it.
Turn based between enemy crews (the ships counts at crew). You win by either sinking the boat or annihilating the crew. If you sink you can recruit surviving characters, if you kill them all you get a new fancy ship. Starts easy, but quickly becomes challenging, to the point that end-game is almost a puzzle fight, where recruiting XYZ characters is a must to progress. Good shit. There should be a link floating around.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I'm all for steam censorship, normies ruin everything anyway.

Most western made games are usually putreon fetishbait.
Those looking for interesting gameplay + relatively vanilla content are a trully oppresed class. But some day we will eliminate all degeneracy and enjoy a Vanillareich of a thousand years.

japs ocassionally do cool shit outside of the usual AliceSoft, Eushully, ShChara studios, mainly on off RPG maker types.

Recently I played がちんこパイレーツ (Gachinko Pirates). There is an english fan translation out there. It has *some* porn, but the gameplay is what it sells it.
Turn based between enemy crews (the ships counts at crew). You win by either sinking the boat or annihilating the crew. If you sink you can recruit surviving characters, if you kill them all you get a new fancy ship. Starts easy, but quickly becomes challenging, to the point that end-game is almost a puzzle fight, where recruiting XYZ characters is a must to progress. Good shit. There should be a link floating around.

the problem with censorship is that while you want these games banned, I want all japanese games banned.

 

[jackofshadows]

If nothing was going on it would be a very boring story. Something has to set events into motion

No shit. But 'things' might be quite different, no? By the way, there's a VN called Sanguine Rose where almost nothing is going on and yet it's still engaging while the story makes perfect sense without any Deus ex machina stuff.

None of that shit counts as "Emoshunal manipulation".

Really? Reframe all you want but try to forget for a second the context, the story and read

Spoiler

blam! turns out that your best friend has end stage cancer

or

Spoiler

so there's fire, two well known to you girls are dying and you must choose to save one of the them

I mean... how cheap is that? Idk, if you liked the game that much and fine with these shenanigans - allright but I just don't think it's worth recommendation.

 

[TheEntitledOne]

I'm all for steam censorship, normies ruin everything anyway.

Most western made games are usually putreon fetishbait.
Those looking for interesting gameplay + relatively vanilla content are a trully oppresed class. But some day we will eliminate all degeneracy and enjoy a Vanillareich of a thousand years.

japs ocassionally do cool shit outside of the usual AliceSoft, Eushully, ShChara studios, mainly on off RPG maker types.

Recently I played がちんこパイレーツ (Gachinko Pirates). There is an english fan translation out there. It has *some* porn, but the gameplay is what it sells it.
Turn based between enemy crews (the ships counts at crew). You win by either sinking the boat or annihilating the crew. If you sink you can recruit surviving characters, if you kill them all you get a new fancy ship. Starts easy, but quickly becomes challenging, to the point that end-game is almost a puzzle fight, where recruiting XYZ characters is a must to progress. Good shit. There should be a link floating around.

the problem with censorship is that while you want these games banned, I want all japanese games banned.

I don't mean banned, but out of the reach of the mainstream.

 

[Immortal]

I'm all for steam censorship, normies ruin everything anyway.

Most western made games are usually putreon fetishbait.
Those looking for interesting gameplay + relatively vanilla content are a trully oppresed class. But some day we will eliminate all degeneracy and enjoy a Vanillareich of a thousand years.

japs ocassionally do cool shit outside of the usual AliceSoft, Eushully, ShChara studios, mainly on off RPG maker types.

Recently I played がちんこパイレーツ (Gachinko Pirates). There is an english fan translation out there. It has *some* porn, but the gameplay is what it sells it.
Turn based between enemy crews (the ships counts at crew). You win by either sinking the boat or annihilating the crew. If you sink you can recruit surviving characters, if you kill them all you get a new fancy ship. Starts easy, but quickly becomes challenging, to the point that end-game is almost a puzzle fight, where recruiting XYZ characters is a must to progress. Good shit. There should be a link floating around.

the problem with censorship is that while you want these games banned, I want all japanese games banned.

 

[Lhynn]

If nothing was going on it would be a very boring story. Something has to set events into motion

No shit. But 'things' might be quite different, no? By the way, there's a VN called Sanguine Rose where almost nothing is going on and yet it's still engaging while the story makes perfect sense without any Deus ex machina stuff.

None of that shit counts as "Emoshunal manipulation".

Really? Reframe all you want but try to forget for a second the context, the story and read

Spoiler

blam! turns out that your best friend has end stage cancer

or

Spoiler

so there's fire, two well known to you girls are dying and you must choose to save one of the them

I mean... how cheap is that? Idk, if you liked the game that much and fine with these shenanigans - allright but I just don't think it's worth recommendation.

Spoiler

Both of these happened because of Leah. Its a part of the main narrative thrust of the game. Liam is a "bad influence" so shes getting rid of him. The girls are in her way, so shes killing them.

 

[HentaiWriter]

Metroidvania.

Calling it a metroidvania though would be pretty dishonest for two reasons;
- Metroidvanias usually have very little storyline, much like the original Metroid games
- Metroidvanias are, at their core, about getting upgrades to equipment to backtrack to earlier areas where you couldn't go any farther without those upgrades; in our game, once you beat a level, you can't go back to it, and none of the upgrades (powerups etc.) you get allow you access to areas you couldn't previously access, as you can access any area in any map with whatever abilities you've gained up to that point just by naturally going through the game

This list seems to be missing a lot of use cases, putting aside copyrighted materials as one, I can think of a few examples that don't really fall under this.
(Where are you quoting these rules by the way? this feels more like a thumb in the air feelies thing)

Oh, to be clear, I was talking about hentai games, of course things like copyright come into play.
However, for copyright issues, that isn't Steam that will usually be an issue, it's the company themselves; if the company doesn't file a DMCA, you're actually in the clear, but they'll file it 99 times out of 100 if you're on steam with it, sooo...

As far as the rules themselves, Steam has went on record saying those things effectively; here's a screencap for it.

There's another screencap that specifically lists this out in the rules, but I've searched for it for 20 minutes now and can't find it, unfortunately.

You could argue Rapeday is a Troll or For-shock value game but Valve's own statement doesn't suggest that -
It simply says, and I'm quoting here:
"Yea fuck this dumpster fire - peace yo" - https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1808664240304050758

I dunno, it makes it pretty clear to me that they said "they don't think they can help the game out" aka "they can't really be a good sales platform for it", plus the "unknown costs and risks", both equate to them seeing it as a game purely made for shock value and not a game meant to be a game, etc.

But I have to think that if the puritans came for your game, I doubt your RPGCodex post about "Actually when you get fucked by the tree alien it's only dub-con" would appease the media or twitter mob. I can picture all your famous voice actor's running for the hills denouncing this game as well.

If the puritans came for my game, there's countless other forms of media that are widely accepted in the mainstream with far, far more brutal and violent sex scenes than anything in our game (especially since again, there is literally no violence coupled with the sex anywhere in it).
Orange is the New Black and Game of Thrones for two examples; both of them contain multiple sex scenes far more "rape" than anything our game even comes close to, and people have no issue with those.
The big difference here is that much like GoT and OitNB, you can strip all of the NSFW content out of those shows and they would still function as shows; the core factor isn't the NSFW.
The same goes for our game; we'll have a SFW toggle in the game that completely strips out all the NSFW content, and it will still function just fine as a regular game, given that the sex content isn't the core, sole focus (it's only about 5% of the content in the game, despite 100+ animations).

With Rape Day though, the sex content and violent sex was the focus of the game; it's in the title, even.

And I mean, even on Steam as it is, there are far, far more extreme games; there's games where women get beaten unconscious then gangraped repeatedly, there's games where women get impregnated and sold into sex slavery for breeding, etc. and they've been up for years as best sellers making 6-figures and getting mainstream attention in online magazines, so if those games aren't cancelled by now, I'm pretty sure we'd be safe given the radically lower amount of extremism in ours.

(TL;DR - Game with zero nudity or sex but depicts real people instead of 3D / 2D graphics)
At bare minimum you'd need to update your best-guess-list - or do you differentiate between ban and a "will never be accepted on store - stop asking" ?

I really should have specified I was talking about hentai games, haha.
This is all a result of just working in the industry and a lot of "common sense things" for people working in it, you forget to make blatant in your posts.
It's like if you were a cook, it would just be common sense for a chef to say, pre-bake this or that item so they may leave it out of the cooking instructions when telling someone how to make something, etc.

But yeah, real life pornography and real life nudity has always been banned on Steam and most other platforms similar to it, for one major reason; there's a ton of legality that goes into effect when you're dealing with real people's bodies.

Steam also notes this in their ToS too, because there's just far too much problems that can arise; for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guy_Game#Lawsuit could happen. Wasn't a huge deal back when it happened, but can you imagine the headlines nowadays?
Even if they're just in lingerie, the possibility is real, and the legal risk is massive.

Those looking for interesting gameplay + relatively vanilla content are a trully oppresed class. But some day we will eliminate all degeneracy and enjoy a Vanillareich of a thousand years.

Keep an eye out for one of our games coming after we're done with Future Fragments called Eroding Ego. 100% consensual scenes, relatively vanilla, no monsters, no demons, no crazy things, just a sci-fi plotline with a male protagonist, 5 women to possibly get with, and a mystery plot.
The gameplay is a combination of the mines in Stardew Valley (top down, 2D pixel art) with an adventure/investigative mode (isometric, 2D still) and around 40 or so endings too.

 

[Immortal]

Interesting. Just to follow up on a few things you said.

I dunno, it makes it pretty clear to me that they said "they don't think they can help the game out" aka "they can't really be a good sales platform for it", plus the "unknown costs and risks", both equate to them seeing it as a game purely made for shock value and not a game meant to be a game, etc.

IMO this is a pretty interpretive reading of that, they didn't sight the focus of the game or the setting being a grey area pr shock value.
It was pretty much entirely the media backlash. The author even did a interview where they essentially stated they studied every game banned on steam and tried to make something within the rules but still pushing the line.

Again - could argue it feeds into the 'shockvalue' factor.. but that revealed after the fact. Steams response was vague at best - it came off as "fuck it" to me.

With Rape Day though, the sex content and violent sex was the focus of the game; it's in the title, even.

I would argue your game is not that far of stones throw from having "Dub-Con" be a focus.. half the images on your store page picture sexual content or tree men offering tender loving care to the protagonist.. I understand you have actual game play underneath but it's clearly a central theme.

And I mean, even on Steam as it is, there are far, far more extreme games; there's games where women get beaten unconscious then gangraped repeatedly

The big difference here is that much like GoT and OitNB, you can strip all of the NSFW content out of those shows and they would still function as shows; the core factor isn't the NSFW.

OitNB gets a puritan hall pass that anime games will never get in <current_year>. Obviously.
Game of Thrones though was raked over the coals for it's rape scene, which it weathered fine but the equation of profits to twitter outcry doesn't quite stack as well for your game I would guess.

All that said, I think you should be free to sell whatever type of game you want on Steam.
Just trying to dig into the mind of someone about to release a product like this.

Thanks for the detailed response.

 

[HentaiWriter]

The author even did a interview where they essentially stated they studied every game banned on steam and tried to make something within the rules but still pushing the line.

And that right there, is the issue; they deliberately tried to "push the line". Anytime you do that with any company, deliberately, it's going to bite you in the ass.

I would argue your game is not that far of stones throw from having "Dub-Con" be a focus.. half the images on your store page picture sexual content or tree men offering tender loving care to the protagonist.. I understand you have actual game play underneath but it's clearly a central theme.

With adult games, if you're doing it right (IMO), the hook is the adult content, but it's not what keeps people playing; it's the gameplay/story/art/audio etc.
In the entire storyline, for instance, there's 25 hours of voicework. Less than 1 hour of that is sex scenes.
There's also about 250 cutscenes or so; only 10-15 of them are sex-based ones.

So compared to your average game, there's a ton of sex, sure, but there's far, far more non-sex related content.

Again, you can play the game entirely in safe for work mode and it'll play effectively the same; you can also go the entire game in NSFW mode and just not have sex, too. You're not going to miss out on any big plot points or big events if you do this. If it were truly a focus, the game would be gutted when removing it, similar to say, removing incest in some adult games or removing the sex content resulting in removing the entire core gameplay loop.

It would be like claiming the violence in GTAV is "the central theme" (and it's much more so than the sex is in our game), but it's not the central theme. There's lots of missions without violence and lots of gameplay to be had without violence, despite all the trailers for the game revolving around the violence.

A large reason why we're doing it this way is because we want to push the idea that adult games can be *actual* quality, legit games, but to do that, people have to actually try out the game in the first place, and to attract adult game fans, you need to put the adult content front and center in advertising. Granted, again, there IS a lot of adult content even when compared to a good amount of other adult games, but it just still pales in comparison to the amount of safe for work content within the game.

Ideally, in the future, adult games wouldn't even be in their own "category", it would be more like how the Witcher or Cyberpunk handles it, where sex and sexuality are just another plot avenue for you to explore, rather than being some sort of crutch the game stands on; our game (and many other adult games in the west) are trying to strive towards that ideal outcome in the future for adult games.

Game of Thrones though was raked over the coals for it's rape scene

But not nearly enough to say, get it cancelled off the airwaves or really for anyone to care past the first week of outcry and such.

All that said, I think you should be free to sell whatever type of game you want on Steam.

Just trying to dig into the mind of someone about to release a product like this.

A lot of this is me/our team playing the long game; we don't want to release just one game and get out, there's an entire actual universe we're planning with multiple games set in different eras but all linked to one another, so we're putting a lot of work into trying to ride the line between "mainstream acceptance" of adult games and "catering to adult game fans", all while trying to make it a legit, quality game in all avenues. It may sound like marketing-speak, hell, even what I said above in this post may sound like that, but it is genuinely how we feel.

There's unfortunately no real way to market an adult game as of now besides how we did it on Steam (as in, if we just hid all the adult images, people would feel lied to if they all appeared in-game without them having expected it, but putting them all over the page can also result in people expecting nonstop sex-fest which the game definitely comes nowhere near), so it's kind of difficult to be 100% honest in our marketing delivery, but we're trying our best to be as honest as possible about what's in the game and the content it's got with things like trailers and social media posts and stuff.

We're pretty active on Discord too, so we try to answer a lot of questions there, also.

Thanks for the detailed response.

Happy to help :D

 

[Caim]

So now that Subverse is out, I have a question: is it worth playing for the game itself while disregarding the porn stuff?

 

[Curratum]

So now that Subverse is out, I have a question: is it worth playing for the game itself while disregarding the porn stuff?

The only passable element in the game is the twin stick bullet hell shmup, and that gets repetitive real fast because of the lack of any real powerups, meaningful upgrades, varied battlefields or enemy variety.

Everything else, including the porn, is poorly done and screams "minimal effort".

 

[Caim]

So now that Subverse is out, I have a question: is it worth playing for the game itself while disregarding the porn stuff?

The only passable element in the game is the twin stick bullet hell shmup, and that gets repetitive real fast because of the lack of any real powerups, meaningful upgrades, varied battlefields or enemy variety.

Everything else, including the porn, is poorly done and screams "minimal effort".

Hackjob that can't even be played with one hand, got it. Thanks.

 

[GrainWetski]

It's not out, it's in Early Access.

 

[Mexi]

I was curious just now because I remember Tim Poole 'reeing about it. They have some of the sex scenes on Xvids, and yeah, that shit isn't even as good as the sex scenes in Skyrim. It looked like shit, so it looks like an easy skip; although, not that I've ever bought an adult game in my life anyways.

 

[Luka-boy]

Where's Teraurge?

Funny thing, the dev used to be an internet buddy of mine many years ago and he used to talk a lot about the game with me until I lost contact with him. As far as fetishes go teratophilia doesn't bother me and I made clear I was only creeped out by non-sentient creatures because as far as I'm concerned they're animals, so the dude was pretty chill about it and was eager to share his ideas and sketches with me.

He was a pretty depressed Scandinavian (Finnish I think?) guy, but he had some pretty inclined tastes in vidya, like Fallout 1 and Planescape: Torment being some of his favs. In fact he had some good ideas for Teraurge involving Choices & Consecuences that could range from individual relationships with characters to diplomatic consequences around the world and a fuckton of endings (both good and bad), and I really liked his idea of the setting.

The world was formed on the fossilized corpse of a HUMONGOUS creature and every now and then it would randomly teleport from somewhere in the entire Universe a person, artifact (and/or) or group of people somewhere in it. That meant many different (both sentient and feral) races, cultures and communities formed mostly by descendants of alien species. Technology levels and infrastructure could vary a lot, but even best case scenarios would involve a community living close to an abandoned starship would more or less know how to operate and mantain its technology if the descendants of its crew were around but would only be able to replicate primitive versions of it. Most of the cultures were primitive, feudal or at most 20th century-like though. Really high-tech stuff is either quickly snatched by powerful individuals or unclaimed because it's freaking dangerous due to not being understood, like some wrecked cargo ship with a damaged reactor that would lethally irradiate anyone that entered unprepared (and barely anyone in that world would be able to detect/sense/understand radiation) and some biomechanical creature that was some kind of living turret attacking anyone on sight and the player could potentially re-program to "befriend" it and learn more about that ship.

Like, you wouldn't believe how many different species, cultures, locations, events and imagery the dude came up with for that game.

But I spent the evening doing some research on the game's development and I can see two things clearly:
1) He casualized his concept. Everyone can fuck everyone and that's the priority. It's cool that he's "making a game for degenerates" but the writing takes a nosedive when pretty much every NPC has to be a fuckbag/waifu/husbando and less time is spent developing locations and quests.
2) He's a single guy making a game that's way too ambitious and since he takes years to make any progress and barely documents anything, other writers either get frustrated or eventually abandon the project because their work is not used, which means he has to burden all the weight of development and thus takes longer to do anything, becomes more depressed and so on.

What a shame.

 

[jackofshadows]

Spoiler

 

[JarlFrank]

Like any platform, there's games that get through the cracks (or are ignored completely because of the publisher/developer's status, like how Life is Strange 2 has underage sex scenes, but because it's by Square-Enix, it's allowed).
Context also matters too; if the point of a game isn't to tittilate, sex gets way more leeway.
(This is why if you're planning on making an adult game, it's probably a good idea to make your game as gameplay-heavy and actually a quality game as much as possible.)

Kinda like with Amazon and written erotica. Bestiality, rape and incest are a total no-no there but the big name authors that make Amazon a lot of money get away with it. Amateur authors who try to do the same get shafted.

 

[Caim]

Like any platform, there's games that get through the cracks (or are ignored completely because of the publisher/developer's status, like how Life is Strange 2 has underage sex scenes, but because it's by Square-Enix, it's allowed).
Context also matters too; if the point of a game isn't to tittilate, sex gets way more leeway.
(This is why if you're planning on making an adult game, it's probably a good idea to make your game as gameplay-heavy and actually a quality game as much as possible.)

Kinda like with Amazon and written erotica. Bestiality, rape and incest are a total no-no there but the big name authors that make Amazon a lot of money get away with it. Amateur authors who try to do the same get shafted.

Huh, I thought that there was quite the market for stuff like "Ravished By My Executive Wolf Brother" on platforms like that, short bouts of extremely niche erotica that I'm not entirely convinced of are not written/read for the meme.