The majority of those games are now visual novels / pornography.
Especially now with ever increasing rates of ADHD and other stuff, having an old school genre like an RPG have that type of stuff as a "reward" for beating a level or whatever reinvigorates a genre that felt outdated due to a lack of a proper reward structure.
Fact of the matter is, if you as a game dev want to make money, better lose your inhibitions real fast, because the consumers, want more choices in their game, even if it's just romance for the most part.
Look at stardew valley, I would never have played it if I hadn't found out you could literally date and marry a girl in the game, it just added a layer of reward to the gameplay.
Consumers don't want pornography in their games, they're completely different products: visual novels are closer to a slideshow than a game
People buy good games and they consume pornography, conflating the two doesn't help us analyse the market.
That said, I agree there is probably more money in pornography than in making indie games (which explains the explosion of the genre)
Yes obviously no one is saying elden ring will have pornography, but there are a lot of games that did sell or would sell more with more romance and to a stronger extent sex stuff in them.
For example take an RPG, like Witcher, Cyberpunk, etc. They skirted the line but it's obvious that people want to get to that point in the in-game relationships, it is what it is, it might offend certain people but fact of the matter is, I don't think the people offended are a majority.
You can always have that content as a DLC and sell it separately and or to block it from countries that don't allow it, but let's not pretend like it doesn't sell.
I kinda do. I just want them to be more than a fade to black implication or awkward not even colliding meshes with low res genetalia.
It's a landmine, so no AAA dev is doing any of that, and it's really high tech to do convincingly so few indies can pull it off. That's why 2d works like VN's tend to be the best compromise. a gif loop or a few still frames and a seductive voice can be just enough to sell the scene.
> they're completely different products: visual novels are closer to a slideshow than a game
most western ones. They're "expensive" to westerners, but if you ever buy a decent Japanese VN you can understand the appeal. full voice acting, multiple different scenes and poses, an actual attempt at a narrative (we can argue all day if it's good, but so many western ones have shifted to "haha quirky meta" as a substitute for substance), good music, etc. Some even have some surprisingly addicting gameplay, which makes you question why it's categorized as a "visual novel". But that's marketing for you.
I don't blame you for your opinion, but I assure you it can be done right.
Larian very very lightly did this in divinity 1 and I was kind of bummed out that it wasn’t fleshed out playing with my wife.
Interesting reason. But I guess everyone's different.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of most romances unless it's a central point. They just feel so superfluous because you need to rely on very strong charaterization to make it work. Hard to do if you also need to focus on making a good core game.