MindGeek's (online porn conglomerate) annual revenue was $460 million in 2015.
Steam has 125 million active users. I doubt they will make an average of $3.68 per user on porn next year, considering the VR install base is small, and there is so much free online porn.
Porn has a huge influence on technology. I won't be surprised if within the next few days, there's a huge surge on VR headset sales.
I'm pretty sure that's literally in the realm of how much Valve makes selling hats and skins for CS:GO [0].
Porn is definitely bigger than Counterstrike. They're doing this for the money.
[0] https://www.hltv.org/blog/11798/how-much-money-valve-is-maki...
A very small minority of the population literally derives pleasure from simulating murder. And you can't act on that / do it in reality to drive the stimulation further, unless of course you want to murder someone and take on the very high risk consequences.
Or put simply, sex is radically more popular than murder.
The difference in popularity between the two is over 10000x.
A sex simulator will typically have a direct, considerable physical consequence to you in real life. Murder simulation very, very rarely will have that - at least until or unless VR gets hyper realistic.
The more movies, games etc we have to meet such needs, the less we seem to want the real thing. This actually strikes me as reducing the risk of pregnancy and STDs. On top of that, actual studies show that increased access to porn correlates to reduced incidence of sexual assault.
An extremely small percentage of the population feels any motivation related to wanting to murder other people. Murdering people isn't very popular at all, and drives no pleasure for 95%+ of the population, despite the attention it stirs in media.
Somewhere between a very large minority and a majority of the population spends a large share of their teen and adult lives being motivated by wanting to have sex, sexual intimacy, etc. with other people.
Most people are biologically driven to want to have sex with other people. An extremely small number of people are similarly biologically driven to murder (perhaps a near zero population).
If you are sexually clueless and try anyway, it's embarrassing and you go have a good cry and write about it in your diary. If you have no idea what you are going and try to kill someone, well, there's still that issue that they may fight back and then the cops get called afterwards.
I think there are a few holes in your theory. Repeating it to me over and over doesn't fill them in.
I said very few people derive direct pleasure from simulating murder in eg a video game. When you stomp on a bad guy in Mario, you are not feeling the serial killer equivalent to some kind of sweet orgasmic reaction high to murdering a fellow human with a butcher knife in real life. There is no connection at all.
To put it into movie terms: a lot of people enjoy action movies (which include violence), the latest flick by The Rock etc, they're exciting. A dramatically smaller share of the population enjoys watching highly graphic, gruesome, murder movies like Hostel or Saw. And that's not the person simulating murder, that's second hand, watching the simulation of it, and the drop off in popularity is extreme.
People are not having fun in GTA because they get off on actually murdering people and their sole physical outlet for it is relegated to a video game. All of those players aren't actually lusting after wanting to slaughter their fellow humans.
You can simulate sex in VR, or watch porn, and then go have sex, jerk off all day, etc. There's a direct connection.
Very, very, very few people murder or actually want to murder; some extremely high percentage of the population wants sex, has sex, jerks off, etc.
How about Assasin’s Creed?
I have a feeling they'll use tasteful judgement on segmenting that section of the store and it's not going to turn into a big smut-house overnight.
Prior to this announcement, Valve was taking a -hands off- approach to erotic games. Now, Valve has a plan for segmentation.
I think naivete would be overlooking an emerging and highly profitable market. There are vast incentives for Valve to segregate the pornographic material from the general games feed. The incentives quite outweigh the -hands off- approach of the past.