Posted by Joey Peters on Aug 26, 2025
From the second time man dipped his finger into a mix of rendered fat and red ocher he has drawn a circle with a dot inside it in imitation of a breast. From the second time man shaped clay figurines he has made bodacious milfs with big boobs and huge hips. When a new communications technology is invented the second thing mankind will make with it is pornography.
I guess with this I’m going to out myself as a gooner. No way, I play these games for the articles. The thing is that pretty much everyone with the exception of a few aces crank something, so I’m in good company. You there, reading this, you probably crank it to something. Don’t lie to me.
In the last decade pornographic video games have become a big market. There are thousands of adult games on Patreon and slowly other platforms have allowed adult games onto their platforms. They spread across Steam and itch.io. Now, in recent months the Australian fascist group that wears a skin suit made from feminism, Collective Shout, created a harassment campaign targeted at Visa and Mastercard and they by proxy bullied Steam and itch.io into taking down vast amounts of adult games, and many safe-for-work games with themes that fascists do not like.
If you do some DuckDuckGoing the first two pornographic video games you will often see cited are Softporn Adventure and Custer’s Revenge. I don’t really think either of these really qualify as pornography. Often times people struggle to define it. They profess that this is because of unfamiliarity or propriety. That’s bullshit. Pornography is a simple thing to understand. Everybody knows what it is. They might be too embarrassed to say it, maybe, but that’s it. It is a genre of media where the theme being transmitted is sexual arousal. It can be a painting, a VHS tape, a sticky magazine, a sculpture, an online video or a video game.
Probably the first important platform for adult video games would be the microcomputers of the early 80’s. Computer users in this era were largely DIY enthusiasts who understood all aspects of their machines. The first personal computers were sold as kits, and for enthusiasts it remains like this to this day. Commercial software existed, but just barely, and most users were basement coders at any rate.
There was a small scene of computer erotica in this time, mostly relegated to mail order for delivery in a nondescript brown paper bag. The names of these games were such things as X-Rated, Interlude, Dirty Old Man, Bed Time Stories or French Postcards, all things which are extremely difficult to DuckDuckGo in this late day. They ran a gamut from bawdy comedy, spreadsheets about porno videos, to genuine jackoff fiction, but the problem you run into is distribution and archival. The best attestation I can find for these are The Dirty Book, a magazine published by Bourbon Street Press in the early 80’s that is, well, mostly reader letters, but nearly as much capsule reviews of and advertisements for adult video games. Probably most of their distribution were illicit copies made by users. It was super easy to copy a tape or a disk. I expect most of them are lost media and would be nearly impossible to track down. Anything truly pornographic would struggle to get rack space at a retailer. If such things existed copies were passed around by word of mouth.
Softporn Adventure was a 1981 adventure game published by On-Line Systems, which went on to become Sierra Online. It was a sex comedy. You might get some lewd descriptions, but ultimately the intended theme was more about jokes and the atmosphere. It wasn’t a particularly jackable game. Years later it was remastered into Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, a franchise that still creeps around in the background of mainstream video games, not so much the porno theater with sticky floors that is the adult games market.
The other game often cited is Custer’s Revenge. Whooboy, where to begin? Custer’s Revenge was a typical example of Atari 2600 slop. Initially Atari attempted to control the market on software for their machine, but they didn’t build any copy protection into it, so, once developers were dissatisfied enough with Atari’s business practices they spun off to create software for the 2600 on their own. While some of these games specifically from the old Atari devs were good (for the platform) there were many other companies who saw how much money PacMan made and slopped out a bunch of garbage onto the market in hopes it would make money. Custer’s Revenge is one of those games. You play as (presumably) Custer, a cowboy wearing nothing but a ten gallon hat, bandanna and cowboy boots. His dick is erect. You navigate hazards to make your way to a naked indigenous woman and have your way with her. The theme is horrible. The gameplay sucks. The horrible sprite art is not jackable at all. I feel like the theme for this game is more transgressiveness than anything else. Teehee, this Atari 2600 game has sex in it.
This wasn’t unheard of at the time. There were a small number of transgressive sex games for the 2600 but most of them fell into the same category as Custer’s Revenge.
But America isn’t the only country that exists. Once the communications media of personal computers made their way to Japan they got busy. Japan has different values around sexuality than the west and a less of the toxic influence of Christianity. Many of the most important video game publishers got their start with adult games. In the modern context our idea of adult games is tightly proscribed, but this early on no such rules existed. And, they are better preserved. As such, it’s much easier to find evidence of erotic computer software.
Koei, who would go on to publish some of the first great strategy games, had a sideline producing adult games. Night Life was an adult sim for married couples, which includes explicit but simple graphics of a couple having sex. Seduction of the Condominium Wives was their next game, the first in their Strawberry Porno series. It was an RPG? Adventure game? About a condom salesman wandering around a condominium trying to get laid. The interface is clearly inspired by the original Ultima, but had aspects of the text parser adventure games that existed in the west. And this was followed up by Do Fuckdolls Dream of Electric Eel (a more literal translation would be “Do Dutchwives Dream of Electric Eel?” but you don’t know what a dutchwife is and I think you can figure out what a fuckdoll is). That is something we would more easily recognize as an RPG about a sleazy guy wandering around to get laid. That seems like the most obvious basic premise for an adult game. Then Koei made Nobunaga’s Ambition.
One of Enix’s first round of games was Guest Mariko Hashimoto. Yes, Enix of Dragon Quest fame. Guest Mariko Hashimoto is a game where you play rock-paper-scissors, and if you fail Mariko Hashimoto is put in increasing peril. In the first level a thug is trying to stab her with a very large X-acto Knife. If you succeed at beating your opponent at roshambo then Mariko removes one article of clothing and she is placed in some new situation of peril. Rinse and repeat. This is a format of game that survived for much longer than it had any right to, Yakyuuken Special was a game for the Sega Saturn where you unlock clumbsy strip tease videos when you win roshambo.
Nihon Falcom, the developer of the Ys and Dragon Slayer series also delved into adult games. Private Stripper was a puzzle game where you solve puzzles to reveal pictures of sexy ladies.
These early games followed the trajectory of the computer game industry. The first few were text adventures or featured primitive graphics, but by the 90’s games finally had half way decent art. They could finally become properly pornographic. All of this is to say that the initial crop of adult games in Japan weren’t all constrained to dating sims. In fact, these wouldn’t even really exist until the 90’s. Big and reputable companies would slowly abandon adult games once they had larger more mainstream sources of income. But many companies didn’t manage to crawl out of that well.
Elf was one of those companies. Their early games ran the gamut of gameplay styles: RPGs, strategy games, sports. Their Pinky Ponky series would be recognized as a progenitor to the modern visual novel style games of today where basically a comic plays out and the player only has input into what dialog their character says. Otherwise, their games tend to be of an established genre and use the lewd content as a reward. Their real innovation came with Dokyusei. In this game you are a high school student playing through a school year. You have to learn girls’ schedules and interests, then find and befriend them enough that you can eventually pork one of them. This game was extremely popular and led to the popularization of the dating sim genre.
Adult games weren’t completely dead in the west, but none of the few that were created ended up making much of an impact. During the early console era Nintendo and other console producers would not license their platforms out for adult video games generally. They tightened up security to avoid the problem that struck the 2600. There were a few Nintendo games that snuck small measures of adult content in where Nintendo would never check. For this check out Taboo, the tarot card simulator for NES. Some publishers did produce unlicensed games for the NES, including the successor to Atari. For our purposes, the most interesting game is Bubble Bath Babes, a color match style puzzle game where you are rewarded with increasingly lewd pictures of a woman if you win successive levels. Curiously, the bottom of the screen just straight up has a naked lady.
By the early 2000’s you started to see fresh attempts at sex comedy games, such as BMX XXX. That was originally a sequel to the Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX series, but retrofitted with cheap adult content until it would damage Dave Mirra’s brand, so he pulled out (har har). The Guy Game was another attempt at a quiz game that had stripteases as a reward, but ultimately it’s release was pulled because they didn’t properly verify the identity of one of the models, and it turned out she was seventeen at the time of recording. The combination of execrable content and the prudish attitudes of American retailers meant that there wasn’t a method to make money on adult games.
But where technology exists porn finds a way.
By the 2010’s web scripting languages had evolved enough that one could create video games that existed entirely within a computer browser. Many of these were made in Adobe Flash, a platform for animations and web apps. In the years since then it became outdated and was deprecated, although recently there have been preservation efforts to archive animations and emulate Flash in a more secure manner.
As seems to happen every time, the content of the games ran through every possibility of what could be done with the medium. Flash used relatively simple vector graphics, so most of the games relied on these. Some of these games were simple toys where you could strip and fool around with an anime girl. Others were modeled after the eroge (erotic games) common in Japan by this time.
Probably the most notable of these were the Meet&Fuck series of games. These were visual novels where the protagonist travels around and tries to solve a quest. To give an example, in Meet & Fuck Kingdom the King charges our hero with a quest to create fantasy Viagra. To make this potion you have to meet and fuck the various women that inhabit the kingdom. There isn’t much in the way of gameplay. When you talk with a girl you are presented with a few dialog options, one of which will advance the conversation and the others which get a minor negative reaction from the girl. After you expend the conversation you pork the lady and possibly obtain a key item. For example, the elf with big jugs gives you breast milk. The girls in a sauna wanna get double teamed, so you have to find some town guards and convince them to help you. There were tons of these games and they got millions of views.
The websites that hosted these flash games gave creators a cut of revenue from the advertisements shown alongside their games. This was the first functional monetization method for porno games in the west.
The early internet provided a new freedom that other communications media couldn’t hope to replicate. The anonymity provided by the computer allowed people to explore their sexualities in ways that would be too embarrassing in real life. I expect weird kinks have existed all the way back through human history, but before the internet it was impossible to discover that there were other diaper furs out there. On the whole, while I think this has had some negative effects (in exaggerating some genuinely dangerous fetishes and fetish communities) I think this has been generally positive in allowing people to explore desires in ways that never could be done before.
The next major development in western adult games is the release of Skyrim. Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series was, at least with the release of Morrowind and subsequent games in the series, supported by a large and active community that made mods for the game. Mods are typically free add-ons made by independent creators for a given game. Modifications. Morrowind’s presentation was too primitive to use as a platform for adult content. Body replacer mods might give you the option to remove underpants from nude models, that was largely the beginning and end of that. There were a few adult mods for Oblivion, the next game in the series. But adult mods really came into their own with Skyrim. It’s animation system was more robust and workable.
So enters the Lover’s Lab. LL or the Slab is a community mostly based around creating frameworks for and distribution of adult mods for Bethesda games. Bethesda is the creators of the Elder Scrolls series and the modern Fallout games, all of which provide vast open worlds where you can do nearly anything you want. The signature mod of LL was SexLab, a framework that made it easier to build adult mods for Skyrim and have them work together; comparability between mods being a major problem for Skyrim. Another important mod was Devious Devices, a mod built on top of Sex Lab adding BDSM devices and their use into the world. Beyond that there are mods to support any fetish you might have, waifu followers,pregnancy mods, sexy armor mods, anything you could imagine. There’s an Ohmes-Raht Khajit mod that adds a lore friendly race of catgirls to the world (yes, you could natively play as a catgirl in the second game in the series, Daggerfall), Schlongs of Skyrim that enables equippable penises and Bimbos of Skyrim, a mod that allows the player to transform various NPCs into “bimbos,” mindless, sex obsessed sluts with unreasonably gigantic breasts, lip injections and bleach blond hair (and very lore-unfriendly outfits to boot).
The problem of monetization remained for modders. Occasionally you could find mods supported by various crowd funding sites, but for the most part game modders create their mods for the love of the game and their communities.
The next major sea change happened when adult game creators realized they could use Patreon. Patreon is a website where users can subscribe to a content creator, whether that’s a game modder, podcaster, video creator, cartoonist or adult video game developer. Already at this time there was an underground scene of adult games growing out of Ren’Py, an engine for developing visual novels. These exploded after Doki Doki Literature club, a metatextual horror visual novel went viral. Finally, small scale games had a method by which to support themselves. Within visual novels there are two main types and gradations between them: there are what are essentially comics with limited paths depending on the player’s choices, and there are sandbox style visual novels, where there are a limited number of areas the player can go to and they may find characters to interact with and progress their stories.
The new generation of games that emerged tended toward several different styles. Probably the most populous were 3D CG games that grew out of the tradition of Poser erotica. CGs are the individual images of art used in a visual novel style game. Poser is a program where you can lay out 3D models in environments and was a common method of producing art for fetish material in the 2000’s and 2010’s. There are many problems with this, the rigging on the models is often rather bad, leading to obvious artifacts in poses, and the worst problem was the horrible sheen that all renders made in Poser seemed to have. Daz Studio was an attempt to horn in on that market. Daz Studio’s iRay rendering system produced better realized art and it’s models were superior to Poser’s. Beyond Daz Studio, the other popular method of producing 3D CGs was with the program Illusion Studio Honey Select. The models provided within Illusion Studio were simplified and in an anime style, and this could be an improvement if you found Daz CGs to often breach the uncanny valley. Daz models would often look realistic enough that the slight problems in geometry or rigging of the poses just looks wrong. Honey Select is a much easier program to work in than Daz Studio, but also it provided much less in the way of options. Games with Honey Select models are nearly entirely interchangeable from an artistic style.
The final major artistic style was 2D art. This was more uncommon because it’s a lot more labor to produce hundreds and hundreds of sprites, and even worse if you want to create animations. The styles that existed in 2D art varied a lot more than anything else, ranging from common American cartoon styles, to anime inspired art, to more abstract indie comics inspired art.
In addition to these two major styles you would occasionally see native 3D games built in the Unity engine or more recently Godot. There are a few games that are primarily text based. And the final rump artistic style common at the dawn of western adult games would be to use existing pornographic images, with this style called “real porn,” although these games are hard to monetize because major crowdfunding sites ban proper pornography and creators would generally not bother to properly acquire the rights to distribute the porn they were appropriating.
The first really notable game to emerge was Summertime Saga by Dark Cookie. It is a game where you play as an affable pervert who, after the murder of his father, is on a quest to figure out why he was killed and also pork every broad in the world. The art was pleasing in a received American cartoons style way. The gameplay was kind of terrible, an attempt to create a dating sim akin to Dokyusei but with random bad minigames jammed in as padding. That wasn’t the main attraction. The smut was the main attraction, and it was well conveyed.
Another extremely popular game was Big Brother by Dark Silver. This is an interesting one because I think what happened was that it was intended as a cuckoldry game where you play as a disgusting little sex goblin who gets jealous as your mom’s boyfriend porks your mom and eventually your sisters. But the half way decent Daz Studio art, the name and the implications of it’s plot attracted a different crowd of fetishists than I believe Dark Silver initially intended. The patrons were horrified by the idea of another man cucking you through your mom and sisters and the creator was forced to pivot to incest. This analysis comes from having played the game, and it’s very apparent which scenes got love and attention in their writing, versus the scenes the creator felt compelled to produce. No, I’m not going to track down the original first version to verify that’s correct. That is the vibe I feel.
For a year or two porno video games flourished on Patreon. There was a gold rush of creators trying to monetize their fetishes. It worked great, at least until Patreon started catching flak for the content of these games.
One of the problems of sourcing details around this is that Patreon wouldn’t come out and say PayPal and Mastercard bullied them into censoring fetish games, but it became generally accepted among the gaming pervert community that this is what happened. Mastercard was active at the time in censoring content on Smashwords, an ebook store. In October 2017 Patreon created a new terms of service that disallowed, among other things, incest, rape and bestiality. One of the biggest games on Patreon at the time was Dating My Daughter. I think you can do the math on what that one is about. The rules were still selectively enforced, a furry game might make it through fine or it might be banned for bestiality. For a long time Patreon’s definition of “rape” wasn’t terribly clear, at least until a couple more revisions of the terms of service. I think they mostly gave their trust and safety workers discretion at least to start with.
Many of the biggest games on the platform were banned. The big three were Dating My Daughter, Big Brother and Summertime Saga. See, the “every broad in the world” mentioned above included your mom and sister. The creator of Dating My Daughter initially tried to change the name to DMD, but relatively quickly Patreon caught on and he was forced to move the game off the platform entirely and create a new game for Patreon that wouldn’t rely on a shocking title or content. The creator of Big Brother moved on to create a new game as well. Summertime Saga took the route of changing the mom and sister into your landlady and roommate and continuing on as before.
This has been one wing of a bigger attack on internet freedom. This was roughly contemporaneous with FOSTA/SESTA, a far right law that greatly restricted internet communications in America supposedly for the purposes of protecting sex trafficking victims. But of course, the American political class is very stupid and it’s very easy to trick them into helping out in moral panics, especially if they’re some kind of idiot that presents themselves as a moral person. Even today Democratic politicians too often (meaning at all ever) believe their Republican colleagues when they pretend to have any type of morals or ethics. FOSTA/SESTA had widespread support from the fascist wing of American politics and the gormless idiot liberals who don’t think about anything too deeply and can be spooked by “think of the children.” It is now undeniable that when Republicans say “think of the children,” they’re not thinking about their safety. The actual result of FOSTA/SESTA was to destroy anodyne dating platforms such as Craig’s List Personals, and to make sex workers accountable for “sex trafficking” if they are to work together and combine their own resources to keep each other safe.
But likewise, this push continues elsewhere. Some fascist American states and the United Kingdom have in recent years enacted anti-privacy laws that require website operators to collect personal information about their users to verify their identity, to scare people into not using websites the government doesn’t want them to use, and to allow hackers a juicy target to mass scale dox people for cranking hog to porn, a thing nearly everyone does in one way or another. YouTube is currently rolling out a broken scam AI system that purports to detect your age, but in actuality it’s only purpose is to collect your personal information so they can sell it.
Ultimately, the place that Patreon’s terms of service landed is fairly defensible. Rape is understood to be any violation of consent, whether by force, coercion or mind control. Bestiality is sexual contact with any non-sapient animal. Violations of consent are part and parcel with erotica, going all the way back to the Marquis de Sade. It is one of the most popular sexual fantasies across all genders and it goes in both directions. Many people want power exerted on them. There’s a lot of shame around sex in our society and this is one way to get around that. But at least as it stands now Patreon has clear terms of service on the matter and they’re not enforcing things piecemeal.
While there have been several rivals to Patreon across time, probably the most notable among them is SubscribeStar. The site started as basically right wing grievance Patreon, although with the Patreon purges of 2017 it opened SubscribeStar dot Adult specifically to target adult creators banned by the larger site. While it had roughly similar terms of service, they don’t really enforce their rules. It seems like the only thing they actually enforce to some extent is a prohibition on underage characters. Very quickly SubscribeStar became the Patreon alternative for games with extreme content. Dating my Daughter and many similar games appeared on the platform.
Likewise itch.io played themselves off as the soft boy alternative to Patreon where you could be free to sell you games. Initially, the problem was that they processed their transactions through Stripe and occasionally someone would report a given game to Stripe and it would be removed. Over time they took over a bigger chunk of the adult video game market.
But the biggest money making platform for adult games very quickly became Steam. Steam is a video game storefront that quickly came to dominate the PC gaming market. To start with they would only allow games from large publishers, but as time went on they opened up new programs for smaller independent developers. In 2017 Steam widened the content they would allow on their platform and creators flocked to it.
There’s three major sources that can be used to track the relative popularity of adult games. The first is SteamDB. It is a website that connects to the Steam storefront’s backend and displays information about games available on it. This is, due to recent events, woefully incomplete. Graphtreon is another vital source. It collects information from Patreon itself and you can use this to survey how many patrons a given project has and possibly how much money they make. The final source of information I am using for this purpose is F95 Zone. This is a piracy website for porn video games. It is an interesting quirk of the illicit nature of adult video games that advertising ends up being difficult, and the vast majority of games make no money what-so-ever, so many developers post on F95 Zone itself as advertising. Indeed, many release free versions on their various crowd funding sites. The forum has been around for a long time and is well established, and actually has some level of moderation. Files infected with malware are not unheard of, but they are cleaned up quickly. It’s not too hard to survey what games are popular just by sorting the Games forum by most replies or most recent posts.
A lot of the “inside baseball” is taken from F95, although it is an old internet forum populated by the extraordinarily online, so lurkers beware. There can be some rough content there sometimes.
One thing I think is important to keep I mind is that none of the companies involved in monetization of adult games are the “good guys.” They are companies. Their role is to make money. If they’re publicly traded its their responsibility to run themselves into the ground to make their shareholders a quick buck. They don’t love you. They’re not your friend. If they see you passed out in a ditch they’re more likely to go through your wallet instead of try to help you in any way.
The most popular western game currently is by a large margin Being a DIK. It is a visual novel about a frat pledge trying to get laid. It is the #6 most popular adult game on Patreon, has the fifteenth most concurrent players ever among adult games on Steam (this list includes free-to-play games), and by an order of magnitude the biggest thread of F95 Zone. It is a product perfectly designed for me not to like it. I cannot fathom wanting to revisit my late teens early twenties, but this is a powerful fantasy for many. For my part, I find this weirder and more perverse than the various mother-fucker simulators.
Steam for a while was big enough that they didn’t have to pay much attention to the content on their platform. This was both a good thing and a bad thing.
A ton of slop flooded onto the market. Low effort asset flips, clones of popular games, and retreads of content with added transgressive or sexual content to try and catch people’s attention. If you can’t make a great game, maybe you can take some slop and slap some offensive bullshit on it and hope for the best. This is the story of Sex with Stalin and it’s descendants.
Sex with Stalin is a game about transgressive humor where you go back in time to try and pork General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Josef Stalin. It is a long, slow visual novel curiously rendered in a fully 3D engine. Typically, adult games run on extremely simple engines. It includes tons of jokes about and references to Soviet Russia.
This game just have been at least somewhat successful, because other developers have ripped off the idea. Both H Studio and Romantic Room rushed their own versions of Sex with Hitler into production. H Studio’s Sex with Hitler 3D is a bad visual novel with bad jokes. Romantic Room requires a bit more explanation.
Romantic Room shits out slop endlessly. They’ve developed more than a dozen games, all of them lazy asset flips with either porn or transgressive content to make them notable. Romantic Room’s Sex with Hitler is a bad twin stick shooter where you play as Hitler and fuck anime girls in between levels. This must have been at least somewhat successful, because since then Romantic Room has vomited out Sex with Hitler 2, Sex with Hitler: WW2, Hitler: BDSM Bunker and Sex with Hitler: 2069. They are all interchangeable slop. The charitable interpretation of their deal is that they’re recycling assets they licensed for their other games and vomiting up another Hitler game with them along with new sex scenes. And they do make other games which are insanely buggy slop, some of the titles include Waifu Secret, SEX Prison 18+, Among Waifus, Cybercity: SEX Saga, and Cuckold Chair Simulator 2023.
The market is fairly healthy and there’s a fair number of diverse adult games. It’s hard to come up with hard numbers for money in the adult games industry. The data that Steam releases is limited and you have to make inferences. Likewise, with Patreon creators can turn off the display of how much money they make. There’s somewhere around 700 adult games making more than $1,500 dollars a month, and the top fifty making probably more than $10,000 a month. A lot of those games are also double dipping, also making money on Steam (anecdotally it sounds like the big winners at Steam make vastly more) or SubscribeStar (generally much less than Patreon, but many games have content too extreme for Patreon or Steam, now). I expect the games making more than $10,000 have teams working on them, now. Based on this, I expect adult games make a living for a few thousand people globally, and perhaps many more part time doing contract work for pieces of these games. Also keep in mind that a lot of creators aren’t necessarily in America and may be in areas with lower cost of living.
I’m going to provide capsules about a few more adult games, either because they’re popular or because I like them.
Harem Hotel is another spectacularly popular visual novel. It’s a massive sprawling game about a young man who inherits a tiny hotel. It’s art is produced in Honey Select, so Harem Hotel’s monetization is firmly planted on Patreon. And it’s content doesn’t really infringe on content that would be likely banned. It’s got a lot of anime (pejorative) baked into it’s world building. It’s a near future fantasy world set on a continent recently colonized by humans where elves are enslaved. The love interests are computer wizard nerd girl, elf slave, deranged tsundere who wants to be impregnated, mega slut with traumatic background, a girl and her clone who previously bullied the tsundere, a robot maid, and a fantasy fundamentalist. I get the vibe from it that this started as a slop project just for fun but took off, so the creator is now using this as his main creative outlet. The elf slaves in particular started off as high test fetish fuel, but with subsequent releases there is increased world building and sympathy for them. For my money the most interesting thing about it is watching the original lore from when it was a hog crankin’ game as it gets reworked to make sense in the context of an epic scale head pat simulator.
Milfy City is another visual novel that was caught in the incest purge on Patreon, and changed everything so now you’re actually trying to pork your landlady. Once it was one of the most popular adult games when first released, although the increasingly censored content drove away a lot of it’s fans. It was set apart initially by it’s pretty good Daz Studio art.
Hard Stuck is a relatively minor game in the grand scheme of things. I’m basically putting it in here because I like it, and this is my essay, not your essay. It stands out among most adult games in that it is natively rendered in realtime 3D. It is a roguelike dungeon crawler RPG about a chubby nerd girl who quests into a dungeon filled with horny monsters so she can get gang-fucked by kobolds and minotaurs and monsters of every description. For a game with that premise it’s curiously adorable and consensual.
The last couple years has seen the rise of a new major kink and a new major artistic style.
NTR (Netorase) is a Japanese variant of cuckoldry fetish. The excitement comes from the feeling of jealousy as a woman you have some “ownership” of (a wife, a girlfriend, a childhood friend, or even your mother or sister) is “taken” by someone else. This fetish has existed since at least the modern age of adult video games (see Big Brother) but it has become overwhelmingly popular recently, especially with games with AI CGs.
As a corollary to my statement above about the second thing a new communications technology produces, as generative AI has become, well, not good, but not completely horrendous if you don’t look at it too hard, it has become a popular artistic style. Generative AI has allowed creators too incapable of posing models even in Honey Select to create CGs for game use. The games look trashy and lazy, but it’s easy to pump one out far quicker than you could if you were bespokely posing models and writing scenes. If you look at F95 Zone you can filter the game forum page to only see AI CG games and you’ll see just how many of them exist. And as far as I can tell, each release is a roll of the roulette wheel. You can vomit out more releases with no effort slop and even if it kinda sucks you still have a chance of randomly hitting the jackpot. This is basically how every creative endeavor works, especially now in an algorithmic world.
The adult game market operates in waves. A new money making method is discovered. Creators flock to it and there’s a goldrush. Initially extreme fetish content is used to attract attention, but eventually it breaches containment and there’s backlash.
“SWERF” is a pejorative term for sex work exclusionary radical feminists. There are “radfems” who are actual feminists with radical politics, but in general you are more likely to encounter fascists wrapping themselves in a skinsuit hollowed out from feminism. I don’t take this lightly. The psychology of fascism is when you have an in-group that is aggrieved about their fear of losing prestige and power. It is the jetski dealer worried that he’s going to have to get a real job. It’s the rich white woman afraid that someone is using femininity in a way they believe they should be the boss of.
SWERFs and their sisters the TERFS are tools of patriarchy who attack marginalized people under the guise of feminism. They are feminists in the same way national socialists are socialists.
Collective Shout is an anti-woman fascist org that attempts to censor media. They frame themselves as against the objectification of women, which would be fair enough, until you realize that the founder is an anti-abortion conservative and they happily work with Christian fundamentalist groups like the successor to the Moral Majority to fulfill their goals. They claim to not be against pornography but also the vast majority of their campaigns have been attacks on pornography or things they perceive as pornography. A group that exists to criticize objectification of women in media could be a useful and good thing to exist, but Collective Shout is not that.
The thing that really gives away the game for me is their campaign against Fifty Shades of Grey. I hate those books, they suck, and provide a problematic view of BDSM kink relationships, but also, like, pretty much all kink content does. The point of the content is that it takes the themes further than you can in reality in a safe way. They are letters printed on paper or rendered on a screen. Fiction cannot be traumatized. That’s what fiction does in general and erotic fiction most especially. Ultimately Fifty Shades of Grey is a woman produced, woman centric series of books about women’s sexual fantasies. They have a lot of weird artifacts because they came out of a society that has weird issues with women. I have a lot of thoughts about it from a sociological standpoint, and about how women are allowed to desire and accept pleasure. I also have a lot of quibbles about it from a craft standpoint as a writer. Most people’s sexual fantasies are problematic. I respect it.
The current wave of censorship was kicked off when No Mercy put up a Steam page and it broke containment. No Mercy is a visual novel about a gross little creep who blackmails and dominates women, including his stepmother. In the grand scheme of things, the content is roughly in scale with Fifty Shades of Grey. The fringes of the adult game scene contain games with vastly more extreme and horrifying content, but you’re not going to stumble onto Guro Slave Simulator accidentally, and for a brief moment No Mercy was up on Steam. And let’s not pretend that a game where you blackmail your stepmother into sex is an anodyne innocent head pat simulator. But the snap back has affected all games on Itch, and many games on Steam.
Collective Shout began a bullying campaign against MasterCard (a company already attributed to be censorious above) and Visa for the purpose of getting adult video games pulled from Steam and Itch.io. When fascists came running Gabe Newell, Steam and everyone at Itch.io got down on their knees and deepthroated the boot.
Let me step back for a second. I have spent the last decade of my life protecting my community from fascists, though more in the context of street fascists. When a fascist scumbag tries to threaten you there is only one response you can have and that is maximal resistance. Anything less is acquiescence to fascism. Likewise, when you stand up to modern fascists they will initially try to press the issue, but if they can’t get you to back down they themselves will back down.
The biggest problem in our society right now is that people with ostensible societal power immediately bend the knee when fascists start whining. But here’s the thing: bravery is infectious.
Steam and Itch.io can go fuck themselves (and not in the fun way). I don’t care about their excuses.
I do care about the creators of all these adult games, and all the safe-for-work games on these platforms, and if Steam and Itch will bend the knee here they’ll gladly throw developers under the bus at any future difficulty. Itch in particular is panicking, their fascade of a soft boy just trying to help distribute games shattered forever. They de-indexed safe-for-work yuri games in their purge and are currently trying to pretend like they didn’t do that on social media. They are a small company that somehow never saw this coming and did not prepare for it.
It has been a bit of a weird month for a woke antifa socialist pervert. Gamers (pejorative) and blue hair trans social justice warriors have engaged in roughly the same parallel campaigns of mass harassment against MasterCard, Visa, Collective Shout, Steam and Itch.io. It is a time of extremely weird bedfellows. The thing is I don’t really expect the Gamers (pejorative) to maintain their interest, and I wouldn’t trust them in working together at any rate.
This is a really pressing issue of free speech. I don’t take free speech as a value in and of itself. When institutions cry about free speech nearly every single time they are talking about the freedom of speech of Nazis to be racist pieces of shit and receive no pushback for it. Look at how pro-Palestine advocates are treated across the Western World. Some in groups that are useful to the scum that own our mass media deserve all the consideration in the world and some groups that threaten the profits of our handsomest weapons manufacturers need to be thrown in double prison forever. So if you are to advocate for freedom of speech you need to be very clear on what speech you are defending, and you cannot allow yourself to be used by literal Nazis.
It is not lost on me that while No Mercy has no platform, Steam will happily sell the entire Sex with Hitler series. Again, these companies are not our friends. They only care about some people’s free speech.
So what can we do?
The blue haired social justice warriors (and ultimately I count myself among their number) need to create a pro-sexuality free speech advocacy group. Only organized push back that always exists in the background is likely to have any kind of future effect. That’s what Collective Shout has been at for decades and while they mostly humiliate themselves and eat shit, that hasn’t stopped them from skulking around in the background and trying to get sexuality banned in public. The long, slow slog still gives them the occasional victory. I specifically place this weight on the shoulders of blue haired SJWs because like, do you expect the guy who created Dating My Daughter to come out of the woodwork to advocate for incest fantasies? Itch.io is still censoring perfectly safe for work romance games about queer subjects. The creators of adult video games are (a very relatively safe) sex workers of a sort. Trying to recruit the creators of fetish material will only work if they are allowed a measure of anonymity, and that would limit their reach. If you examine how mass media treats sex worker advocacy groups it becomes quickly apparent that they are a group to be banned and abused with the most egregious methods. So you need outsiders to do the work.
Tactically, the things that work against fascism are intelligence gathering and sustained focus. We need to make it shitty to be a censorious fascist. People need to know who these scumbags are and treat them appropriately. Movement phase fascism can be destroyed if you keep up the pressure and remove the positive benefits of adherence to the fascist movement, which is primarily the feeling of strength. If it’s shitty and embarrassing to be a member of Collective Shout their membership will burn out and dwindle. Knock off the low hanging fruit, and slowly even the hard cases that believe in thule energy won’t have anyone to boss around and will become demotivated.
It is also important to maintain perspective.
The attempts to censor adult video games will fail. Remember that just as soon as the Apple II came to exist adult video games emerged as one of the first genres. Bimbos of Skyrim was created without the profit motive in mind. We are in a bad period of politics the world over. The liberal order is rotting to nothing and fascism rushing in, especially in America. They/Them Odin help us, it turns out everything is the same struggle, from attacking racism to freeing Palestine to cranking it to weird porn. And when we fight, we win.
Glossary of Terms
Bimboification
A form of transformation fetish where a woman is given exaggerated feminine features, gigantic breasts, lip injections, blonde hair and her interests are reduced purely to societal denigrated feminine coded activities (cosmetics and the like) and sexuality.
BDSM
Bondage, domination, sadomasochism. It is a bundle of concepts for power play and runs a wide spectrum of fetishes and kinks.
Eroge
Japan has this thing where they form words out of shortened forms of words smashed together. Erotic games.
Dutchwife
A human sized doll that you use to fuck.
Guro
Japanese transliteration for “gore.” An extreme form of BDSM content. Guro Slave Simulator is not a real game, for the record, I was just stringing words together to sound extreme.
Head Pat Simulator
This isn’t a literal genre of game, but a theme common in many games where you are presented with a sad anime girl that you must make happy by doing nice things to, such as head pats.
NTR
The Japanese version of cuckoldry fetish. It has two main variants. Netorare (NeToRare) is a kink where the erotism comes from the jealousy of having someone “taken” from you for sexual purposes. Netorase is the opposite, where the erotism comes from making someone else jealous that you’re porking their girlfriend, wife, mother, sister, et cetera.
Skin Suit
A fetish premise where a subject is hollowed out and someone else wears their skin, transforming into them and adopting their identity. It sits on the intersection of Transformation Fetish and harder forms of BDSM.
TERF
Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. A fascist who presents themselves as a “feminist” but is afraid that trans people will steal the special privileges of femininity.
SWERF
Sex Work Exclusionary Radical Feminist. A fascist who presents themselves as a “feminist” but is afraid that sex workers will steal the special privileges of femininity.
Ugly Bastard
A stock character from adult games. A disgusting ugly pervert who is porking a beautiful woman, often times to accentuate the cuteness or innocence of the love interest.
Waifu
A word to make fun of anime nerds who have a special interest in a specific fictional woman.
Yuri
The Japanese term for “girls love” or lesbian content.
Sources
The Dirty Book v2i1 https://archive.org/details/TheDirtyBookV2N1/page/n1/mode/2up
The Dirty Book v2i2 https://archive.org/details/the-dirty-book-v-2-n-2
Softporn Adventure - https://www.mobygames.com/game/9303/softporn-adventure/
Custer’s Revenge - https://www.mobygames.com/game/13603/swedish-erotica-custers-revenge/
Night Life - https://www.mobygames.com/game/52261/night-life/
Seduction of the Condominium Wives - https://www.mobygames.com/game/58780/danchi-zuma-no-yuwaku/
Do Fuckdolls Dream of Electric Eel? - https://www.mobygames.com/game/58781/oranda-tsuma-wa-denki-unagi-no-yume-o-miru-ka/
Guest Mariko Hashimoto - https://www.mobygames.com/game/58760/mari-chan-kiki-ippatsu/
Private Stripper - https://www.mobygames.com/game/61251/joshi-daisei-private/
BMX XXX - https://www.mobygames.com/game/8683/bmx-xxx/
The Guy Game - https://www.mobygames.com/game/29522/the-guy-game/
A link about the legal case: https://www.theregister.com/2004/12/22/topless_teen_game_ban/
Video about the possible developer of Meet&Fuck games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keuGmE6g3bo
Flash game archive: https://flashpointarchive.org/
A link about Newgrounds monetization, basically in this form it says that previously creators could put ads in their flash games and get a cut of revenue: https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/creator-resources/monetization
Lovers Lab: https://loverslab.com
F95 Zone
This is the primary forum for fans and creators of adult video games. They have pages for all of the modern adult games mentioned and discussion, but here's a couple threads anyway.
https://f95zone.to/threads/dmd-patreon-kills-dmd.8639/#post-455209
Steam DB: https://steamdb.info/charts/?category=888&sort=peak
Graphtreon: https://graphtreon.com/patreon-creators/adult-games
EFF article about Smashwords and PayPal https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/payment-processors-are-still-policing-your-sex-life
Sex with Stalin: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1085750/Sex_with_Stalin/ / https://f95zone.to/threads/sex-with-stalin-final-boobs-dev.65098/ / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_with_Stalin
Queer Devs talking about Itch: https://www.thegamer.com/adult-game-ban-affects-lesbian-lgbtq-yuri-content-itch-io-collective-shout/