Exactly, and how many of those are commercial products that sell to hundreds of millions of people and have a self-sustaining ecosystem of producers and consumers? Bubble Bath Babes, Leisure Suit Larry, Virtual Valerie, Nude Raider mods, Elder Scrolls, etc are curiosities, oddities. The few that are commercial products don't last long enough to have more than a sequel or two before they die, and most of them are free mods that some thousands of people check out once and then delete. The key players involved in VR investment didn't come into this market to sell cheap content to hundreds of thousands to a few million people in the first few years, they came into this market predicting that this will be somehow/someway the computing platform for hundreds of millions to billions of people in 10-15+ years.
edit: The key players aren't going to let their investment get driven into the ditch because porn + cheap VR viewers = low risk, low ceiling profits for a limited market.
But I'm not talking necessarily about key Western developers. I'm talking about the Japanese development community where all of that already exists to some extent as non-VR commercial products. But in pure porn cases they mostly stay in Japan with a reluctance by developers to sell their games outside of Japan. But in Porn-lite category (no hard sex, and limited nudity), those already exist on the PlayStation platform and on Steam in non-VR capacity.
And while there is gameplay in those games, they certainly don't sell based on the gameplay for the most part. It's the pseudo-sexual interactions with the Anime influenced characters that sells those games on PlayStation and Steam.
I'd expect it to be driven by Japanese, French or German developers. All of which have made porn games. And especially in Japan, interactive 3D porn games.
And why would it succeed more in the future than in the past.
Well, listening to various VR users. VR makes things that were previously completely uninteresting as a game into compelling experiences. One example that TotalBiscuit brought up is a VR game/demo on Steam where you have a light saber and swing it around. As a regular game, most people in their right mind wouldn't get it. It's short, it's janky, it serves no purpose. But in VR, suddenly it's novel and compelling. Kind of like when the Wii originally came out, boring games suddenly became interesting because of the way you could interact with the game.
Most porn games don't have immediate (lots of reading required) or natural feeling manipulation (using a mouse to manipulate a breast isn't terribly intuitive for various motions). VR changes much of that. Similar to a swinging a light saber with a mouse or console controller being mostly "meh" but doing it with VR controls in VR is suddenly amazing, the same can happen with VR for interaction with a nude model. Even if that nude model isn't hyper realistic.
Think about the success of the DOA franchise. The first one was a solid but otherwise unremarkable fighting game (both graphically and in gameplay). But it succeeded due to the bouncing breasts. Using sex to spice up an otherwise unremarkable game. The same trend continues with the DOA franchise. It's only successful because it uses sex to sell it.
It's only natural that with VR that will be extended to direct manipulation of models or interaction with models rather than just generic bounces or interaction through a controller that isn't a plausible extension of the user's body.
It'll still have larger barriers than regular games (morality laws and regulations). But the potential is certainly there and very real. And I expect that it will be taken advantage of, and that it has the potential to sell better than most other VR experiences.
Regards,
SB
