If all that was required to make a huge company without taking VC funding was to make romance games for women and that’s a such an easy thing to do why was the niche so underserved? Or it wasn’t underserved and they were extremely good at it? Either way I don’t think the implication that people like sex means that these romance games were easier to make or easy to make appeal to women.
2.) Despite being massive market amd financial success, romance is the most looked down at and despised genre. People just know it is stupid, regardless of whether they played or read piece in question. (See also universal "it is porn" dismissal regardless of whether the actual piece is smut or not).
The article makes it seem as though it be a unicum, a new hole in the market dived into.
Otome as a genre is old, and has been commercially viable for a very long time, and there are tonnes of products in it, not merely video games, but books, television series, theatre dramata and so forth.
The anime exist but don't really seem to be too popular, even if the games are big. Diabolik lovers, Amnesia, etc. I think the female market is too segmented; female fans like shonen sports anime, boys love manga, traditional shoujo, yuri, and otome content.
I've heard stories of all-male teams trying to localize a Japanese game like this and changing all the parts women liked because they couldn't take them seriously.
On the male side, there's a lot of bad visual novels that are trying to "improve on" or "take down" what they imagine are Japanese dating sim games, but have nothing to do with actual Japanese games because they've never played any of them, and so have little real appeal.
Yeah, sex/romantic relationships are quite base and easier to sell than say universal paperclips about paperclips.
[1] a clone of a Japanese game called Kantai Collection, which did the classic JP move of accidentally becoming super popular and dealing with this by refusing to improve anything and hoping their customers would go away.
Ah, I meant the non-explicit ones. But note that the space has a lot of overlap with r18+ ones that are usually browser-based, but may have hybrid clients (including iOS ones for the sanitized clients but share the same account); DMM Games and its r19+ brand Fanza is a market leader in publishing them.
Games are still sex filled escapism. News at 11.
This isn’t some opinion peace of the few either. The modern versions of Jumanji featured Karen Gillan in a sexy hot pants and a tight top as a direct parody of the clothing worn by female characters in computer games.
It’s just western content: anime is frequently male oriented. There’s even a thing called “fan service” where popular anime’s pander to the lusts of male audiences.
Obviously people will chip in with examples like Factorio and Sim City and yes, I agree that not all computer games are sexist. But a lot already are and it’s an established trope that has been called out many times in the past.
(I appreciate this is written from a heterosexual perspective. Obviously I’m not suggesting that women can’t enjoy male-orientated content and visa versa)