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Comment by pwaai | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered why there are no serial killer type of games or with realistic gore simulation. It's bad PR for giants like EA yet they've repeatedly opted for pay to play models which resulted in huge backlash.

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Pay to play gets backlash from gamers with enough sophistication and experience to notice and care, which if sales figures are to be believed, until recently represented a small minority. Something like Manhunt or a serial killer sim outrages all sorts of people, fed by the media and congressional hearings, and game publishers would like to avoid that. It’s a different type and magnitude of backlash, and for what? You’re never going to make CoD or GTA money from a serial killer sim, so why take the heat? A serial killer sim also runs into the issue of just what a serial killer is, and why they do what they do. Serial killings unlike spree killings and mass killings are typically sexually motivated, and that’s pretty dark territory for a mainstream company to wade into. “Click X to masturbate on the corpse” is something that is probably a moral line for a lot of people, as would, “Rotate right stick to remove nipple, try to max scream meter!”

Games like GTA and Mortal Kombat have done edgy stuff, but they’re also really great games and technical achievements. Manhunt for example, was just boring and technically mediocre, which made it harder to defend and easier to hate. It’s the difference between a masterpiece of the horror genre or something like Nabokov’s Lolita, and a movie like Hostel or cp fanfics. How many developers and publishers will have great ideas that require shocking subjects, and then execute it so well that it’s defensible? Most publishers aren’t even taking risks with things aren’t divisive, they just want money and sequels and DLC. Serial killer or gore sims?... nah.

Well, there was the Manhunt games, which always represented the worst side of Rockstar North to me.

Does "Hatred" count? It goes more in the "mass murder" direction than "serial killer", but I feel like it would fit.

SimEarth was a realistic Gore simulation!

http://www.paulloeb.org/articles/InconvenientVideo.html

Serial killing is a drop in the ocean of blood you can spill by parallel killing in SimEarth, wiping out all life on Earth with meteors and floods!

You can't officially license an Adults Only game on most (all?) consoles, and even allowing that finding a publisher or a place to sell your X rated games would be difficult. Major retailers don't want to be known for selling those kinds of games.

> You can't officially license an Adults Only game on most (all?) consoles

There are a bunch of PEGI 18 games on consoles. Call of Duty World War II, Farcry 5, Fallout 4, GTA5, etc etc - all of these are PEGI 18 and licensed for consoles.

Those are all M in the ESRB rating though (not AO). Despite the parallel in AO and PEGI18, they aren't really the perceived the same in the respective markets.

Best case study for this difference is the "Hot Coffee" mod for GTA: San Andreas. There was originally a very adult minigame in it but it was disabled; the "mod" simply enabled it. This caused so much controversy the game was re-rated AO by the ESRB and consequently pulled from store shelves until they re-released a patched version with the minigame removed completely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_mod

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