What's keeping the West from making DOAX style games?

infohippie

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erttheking said:
infohippie said:
erttheking said:
Johnny Novgorod said:
A history of religious prudery, for starters.
That and the fact that, despite all the hustle and bustle, there isn't a freaking audience for it.
Nonsense, of course there is. But the developers have to give at least as much attention to the gameplay as to the T&A, plus they have to be willing to tell the inevitable screaming Tumblrites and concerned mothers to go fuck themselves.

Look around communities such as Undertow Club and Lewd Gamer and you'll see there's a substantial audience for games like this. Though preferably with more nudity or at least easily amenable to modding such things in.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. If people on Tumblr keep devs from releasing a game overseas, either they have no drive or they have no spines. Either way I don't feel sorry for them and consider the blame to be on their shoulders. Also a game that has massive amounts of T&A AND good gameplay. Yeah...I don't see that happening. That's about as likely as there being a complex and engaging love story...call me if a game manages to actually do that though because having all three would be goddamn amazing.

Question. Do these people want to buy the game because they genuinely are interested in it, or to spite SJWs? Because I saw a lot of that for DOAX3. I'm not saying everyone did, but more than a few did.
Personally, I didn't buy DOA at all because I thought it was a crappy game. I enjoy games with sexual content, but they MUST be good games, or in the case of something like a kinetic novel that doesn't have actual gameplay, they must have an engaging story and interesting characters. So I bought all the NekoPara series, I bought HuniePop, I've bought innumerable eroge visual novels. But I did not buy BMX XXX or any of the other games that thought they could make up for being crap by simply having sexual content. I don't personally give a toss what the SJWs say about it, but if a company wants to make sales in this field, they MUST have the balls to stand up to that crowd when they start their inevitable complaints.
 

Erttheking

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Lightspeaker said:
We're not into the same thing as the Japanese, if you call that a sexual hang up I guess that would stop sales

Granted people do get weird looks for buying stuff like that so you have a point there...but with the growing digital market I feel like that would really be a huge problem. People who want crazy porn get crazy porn and aren't stopped just because of a few awkward looks.

Also let's be frank. Japan is prudish too. If it wasn't, that woman who made a canoe in the shape of her vagina wouldn't have gotten arrested.
 

Erttheking

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infohippie said:
Fair enough. I wasn't accusing you of doing that, I just know that plenty of people did it out of spite. I wouldn't say no to stuff like this, though to be frank I don't like paying for porn if I can help it.

I'm sorry, standing up? How the freaking hell do you stand up to SJWs? They're not like religious conservatives in the 80s and 90s where they were trying to get legislation passed against games, they're just saying they don't like it on the internet. At worst, they make petitions, and to be frank that's rare. Releasing a game despite people online not liking it is not standing up to people in my book. I released a story that I'm going to continue despite half of the feedback being negative. I'm going to continue writing it. I don't consider that to be standing up those reviewers.

This is without getting into how SJW outrage is blown out of proportion. It doesn't happen nearly as often as people act. Where was the SJW backlash against Huniepop and Nekopara?
 

infohippie

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erttheking said:
infohippie said:
Fair enough. I wasn't accusing you of doing that, I just know that plenty of people did it out of spite. I wouldn't say no to stuff like this, though to be frank I don't like paying for porn if I can help it.

I'm sorry, standing up? How the freaking hell do you stand up to SJWs? They're not like religious conservatives in the 80s and 90s where they were trying to get legislation passed against games, they're just saying they don't like it on the internet. At worst, they make petitions, and to be frank that's rare. Releasing a game despite people online not liking it is not standing up to people in my book. I released a story that I'm going to continue despite half of the feedback being negative. I'm going to continue writing it. I don't consider that to be standing up those reviewers.

This is without getting into how SJW outrage is blown out of proportion. It doesn't happen nearly as often as people act. Where was the SJW backlash against Huniepop and Nekopara?
They protest and try to prevent outlets selling the games, such as the petition that got Target in Australia to stop selling GTA5. For Rockstar that was nothing more than a blip in profits that they could ignore. For a small developer that could easily be the difference between success and failure. It's not just negative feedback, it's concerted action to try to prevent it being available for purchase. I don't think NekoPara was much heard of in the west outside certain select circles, but I saw plenty of backlash against HuniePop leading up to its release. Sites like Kotaku panning it and calling it racist, sexist, trash, etc. I mean, there's even a campaign calling to pre-emptively ban sex robots (because they apparently objectify women, lol) and they don't really even exist yet!
 

Erttheking

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infohippie said:
You mean the one that was formed by former prostitutes that normally had nothing to do with gaming? Also it was a petition. If you choose to not to follow a petition the people who petitioned it can do anything. And I admit to not knowing about the Kotaku articles but I do have to say, they wrote articles about it, so what? They said bad things about it? People say bad things about every game ever made, including attempted boycotts. These things happen, and if developers ignore them they usually go away. I don't really consider them to be a big deal. I mean, what's the solution? Say people shouldn't be allowed to say when they think something is sexist? Say boycotts can't be organized?

That's a whole other can of worms that contains questions about machine sentience that we are nowhere near ready to answer
 

infohippie

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erttheking said:
infohippie said:
You mean the one that was formed by former prostitutes that normally had nothing to do with gaming? Also it was a petition. If you choose to not to follow a petition the people who petitioned it can do anything. And I admit to not knowing about the Kotaku articles but I do have to say, they wrote articles about it, so what? They said bad things about it? People say bad things about every game ever made, including attempted boycotts. These things happen, and if developers ignore them they usually go away. I don't really consider them to be a big deal. I mean, what's the solution? Say people shouldn't be allowed to say when they think something is sexist? Say boycotts can't be organized?
People can say bad things, sure, but when an influential site like Kotaku says bad things that has a direct influence on sales. I'm not sure what the solution is - apart from people not being so reactionary and ready to point to everything in popular culture as a bad influence on their precious little Farquhar or the reason why women need ever more protections - but that's getting further and further away from my original point which was to say that there IS a demand for (good) games like this, in contradiction of what a number of posters here were saying.

That's a whole other can of worms that contains questions about machine sentience that we are nowhere near ready to answer
This isn't even about machine sentience, these numpties are saying that something little more than a very sophisticated fleshlight is inherently bad because there are boobies that men can pose and play with at will. Yes, I've read their articles and that's what the thrust of their argument boils down to. It's the same reasoning as that video essay which concluded that Hatsune Miku was "problematic" because she could be posed sexily or used in other sexual content "without having a say in it". The anti-sexbot group actually compared these robots to sexual slavery. Insanity.
 

Erttheking

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infohippie said:
Wait, we're considering Kotaku influential now? Also I feel like saying they have a major impact is stretching it. I feel like their regular readers weren't really on board with buying Huniepop. Ok, people don't point to every piece of culture as having a bad influence, lets not fall victim to hyperbole here. As for their being a demand, maybe. I still question how much of it is a demand out of spite.

Bleh. I'll consider it something to worry about when they actually accomplish something.
 

Wrex Brogan

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...because they're typically shit games that rarely meet the West's demand for profit? Seriously, that shit is as niche as niche can be and plagued by Devs throwing out half-arsed work because 'T&A is enough, I guess', that's not in any way, shape or form appealing to an industry that considers 5 million units sold a 'failure'.
 

infohippie

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erttheking said:
infohippie said:
Wait, we're considering Kotaku influential now? Also I feel like saying they have a major impact is stretching it. I feel like their regular readers weren't really on board with buying Huniepop. Ok, people don't point to every piece of culture as having a bad influence, lets not fall victim to hyperbole here. As for their being a demand, maybe. I still question how much of it is a demand out of spite.

Bleh. I'll consider it something to worry about when they actually accomplish something.
I really can't see more than a tiny fraction of demand being from spite. People generally can't keep that kind of thing up. I know I certainly haven't played through thousands of hours of visual novels out of spite, nor did I hate-fap to 3D Custom Maid.
 

Erttheking

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infohippie said:
erttheking said:
infohippie said:
Wait, we're considering Kotaku influential now? Also I feel like saying they have a major impact is stretching it. I feel like their regular readers weren't really on board with buying Huniepop. Ok, people don't point to every piece of culture as having a bad influence, lets not fall victim to hyperbole here. As for their being a demand, maybe. I still question how much of it is a demand out of spite.

Bleh. I'll consider it something to worry about when they actually accomplish something.
I really can't see more than a tiny fraction of demand being from spite. People generally can't keep that kind of thing up. I know I certainly haven't played through thousands of hours of visual novels out of spite, nor did I hate-fap to 3D Custom Maid.
Maybe. Though I have to question what exactly the numbers. As well as how many are needed to make in profitable.
 

crimsonspear4D

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Forgive me if this sounds naively pragmatic, but to make a game as shamelessy male pandering and exploitative as the DoA franchise has gotten lately, they might as well make a decent soft/hardcore porn game. I mean... I'd have more respect for a KT and TN if it was just out-and-out porn at this point rather than another "mediocre" fighting game with the characters watered down to just bland stumps just so you could get all the female characters and put them string bikinis and maid outfits or something.

I'd fully support a game built on virtual cheesecake, but they'd have to do more than just stand in front of the camera and pose "suggestively" for 60+ hours and have $100+ or dlc costumes, and have some type of gameplay and story that's AT LEAST entertaining and/or engaging.

For my opinion about Japan, I don't know about their cultural or societal stance on sexuality, but I do know that they have FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR weirder tastes in their porn media that I can't even believe gets published. I think because the overwhelming, or probably sole, audience for this are single and unfulfillingly married men and they'll pay out of the bank for their "tastes" that anything they make is at least going make some money back.
 

Revnak_v1legacy

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Our market for porn games won't pay out the ass for it, Japan's will. Proportionate to population they may be fairly similar though. Japan is not the land of absurd perverts people seem to think it is, and pornography is looked at basically as shamefully there as it is in the west.
 

Gamerpalooza

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My only question is why Nintendo doesn't make a smash or fire emblem version, why capcom doesn't have their own capcom, snk does a King of Fighters version, who ever owns mortal kombat, but the one I'd be the most interested in would be a tales of series and a final fantasy one.

Especially when some of these would have way better mini-games to have.

Test your might
Scrap someone's car
Arenas
Chocobo Racing
Triple Triad
etc

So much untapped potential here. Though I think the process is restricted to thinking it's just a volleyball games with the focus being bikinis.
 

Lunar Templar

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Johnny Novgorod said:
Lunar Templar said:
Johnny Novgorod said:
A history of religious prudery, for starters.
while you COULD say something like this is the reason, it's not.

Andy Shandy said:
If I had to guess, because it doesn't sell. While the games generate controversy and discussion, they don't make money.
This is.
Why do you think they don't sell.
Because they are terrible games, soft core porn, for voyeurs basically, and that doesn't sell games, cause, ya know, people who buy games tend to want good game play to go along with it. Which tends to be why the DOA fighters don't do well ether, they just aren't good fighters.

so that 'puritan' malarkey doesn't really hold up, cause if they where good games, they would sell far better then they do, but they aren't so they don't.
 

Belaam

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Pretty much the same reason good horror games are hard to find. The audience is too small to invest in making a good enough game to make them happy.

I'd actually go the opposite route on all the people saying it's the fault of Western prudes. Have you seen Japanese porn? If all I could get was some heavily pixelated grinding filmed on someone's cell phone, I'd probably find DOA kinda hot. But outside of censored countries, you can just watch porn or go have actual sex.

But the number of Westerners with no access to sex or porn who would really love a DOA game is close enough to zero that western game companies might as well just mail thpse people who want one $20 for a lap dance instead. They'd lose less money that way.
 

infohippie

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WinterWyvern said:
Different culture.

Don't think we do not have games featuring skimpy sexy babes with big boobs.
We just have a very different way to do it.

That's all.
Unfortunately, the way the west does it is to expect the boobs to hold up the game all by themselves. Doesn't matter how many boobs your game has in it, it needs story, character design, and gameplay. Sadly, those three elements are often skimped on badly.
 

DOOM GUY

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I can think of a few reasons... they're not good reasons, mind you.

Hell, I'd buy it though.
 

Lightspeaker

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erttheking said:
Lightspeaker said:
We're not into the same thing as the Japanese, if you call that a sexual hang up I guess that would stop sales.
*sigh*

You really have to make this about Japan vs West when that is totally irrelevant to the point?

Fine. HuniePop. Stick HuniePop in there instead of Nekopara. Or HunieCam. Neither were made in Japan as far as I'm aware. Same question. I'd lay money on it being someone buying HuniePop getting a weird look rather than Doom.



Granted people do get weird looks for buying stuff like that so you have a point there...but with the growing digital market I feel like that would really be a huge problem. People who want crazy porn get crazy porn and aren't stopped just because of a few awkward looks.
Except this here is the whole point. Its not about people being able to buy these things on the sly. Its about mainstream acceptance. I can go to a supermarket right now and buy any number of unbelievably violent films or games; but anything with titillation is derided.

I'm directly comparing the western attitude to games primarily containing extreme violence to the western attitude to games containing things that are 'a bit rude'; not even extreme pornographic things...just titillation. It is, frankly, very weird.


Also let's be frank. Japan is prudish too. If it wasn't, that woman who made a canoe in the shape of her vagina wouldn't have gotten arrested.
Japan has some of the most confusing attitudes towards sex and sexuality in the world, honestly. I think partially because of the massive clash with American culture after WW2.

I'd hesitate to try to compare because frankly its so inconsistent. In some ways its more open and in others it is most definitely not. So I'm not sure why you're trying to argue about this except to try to make it about Japan vs West...which misses the point I was making. :-\



Also I also agree with the above points about laziness in actually developing these things. There's an overwhelming tendency for developers who DO put this stuff in their games to actually forget about the entire rest of the game. Like story. Or gameplay. Or whatever.

Though in fairness gameplay and story for romance stuff can be very difficult to do. Which is why Visual Novels tend to do romance stories way better than more interactive games. But it can be done, with effort.
 

Ragsnstitches

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Prudishness? If we're understanding Western as "north american" then that's possibly a big reason... north america really has its knickers in a knot about sexuality (though Ireleand and the UK aren't far off that either, but our games industry is significantly smaller). The major publishers won't touch anything sexual unless it's done "tastefully" (read: boring dry humping as part of romantic sub plots).

Lack of demand? Pornography is literally in our pockets these days and every fetish is catered for with a few swipes and presses. It's largely free as well, oft to the detriment of the porn industry. A premium priced game that only goes as far as skimpy bikinis caters for an extremely small demographic and the people willing to pay that premium are fewer still.

Budgets? Big publishers are stuck in the mindset of making big games and nobody is going to throw millions of dollars at fucking "Titty Quest". Pornography in general is cheap to make, but games generally aren't... even indie games are more expensive then porn shoots.

Personally I'd actually like some sexually themed games, not just games with sex in them. I'd be down for an Erotically themed RPG (that isn't some shitty hentai jrpg) or point'n'click adventure game (not leisure suit larry).

infohippie said:
WinterWyvern said:
Different culture.

Don't think we do not have games featuring skimpy sexy babes with big boobs.
We just have a very different way to do it.

That's all.
Unfortunately, the way the west does it is to expect the boobs to hold up the game all by themselves. Doesn't matter how many boobs your game has in it, it needs story, character design, and gameplay. Sadly, those three elements are often skimped on badly.
I'm confused. In general the use of boobs in western games is purely a lazy aesthetic design, true... but they are usually inconsequential to the rest of the game (beyond possibly making no sense thematically). In fact, I actually can't think of any games outside of Leisure Suit Larry that has tits as a focus at all, and those games are largely played for laughs as the sexual payoff is tepid at best.

I read this as you saying that eastern developers make good titty games that don't rely on the sex appeal?