thinking of starting a hentai game company

[giapwaye]

This is a question to all experienced developers out there,
I've been wanting to start a small mobile game startup company in California,
but the market is just too competitive.
So I figured why not go for something a little more exciting and different, why not try the adult industry. However, I wonder how the market is like?
Will it be a good investment? or is it equally as challenging as a regular indie company out there?

Most of the hentais projects (besides the h-games from Japan) i've seen so far have been pretty small projects because they either aren't working on this full time, or they're just a 1-2 person team.

What is I gather a group of experienced people and start a small company making good quality US hentai games, Will it do well in the Market?

If Toffi, Verdani, Kyrieru or anyone else out there would like to discuss about this, please let me know. I would love to hear from you.

Thank you

 

[Sithri]

Re: thinking of starting a hentai game company

the adult industry is probably even more competitive than the other markets because of it's nature. Its more easy to pirate adult stuff than it is to legit buy it due to constraints on how hard it is to but it or because they don't want adult items in their finance records where as if its a movie or a non adult video game, no one cares.

you also got to try to figure out what sells and what demographic you are looking at. Hentai definitely does not sell as well here as it does in japan so you got to think about stuff like that as well. How are ya going to market it?

 

[Shimmerene]

Re: thinking of starting a hentai game company

As an appropriate response to anyone with a startup: h t t p :// w w w.tomscott.com/doomed/

Not to say it's a bad idea, but that the market hates everyone.

 

[Serifyn]

Re: thinking of starting a hentai game company

I know Kyrieru wrote on his blog the other day about the possibility of creating something like this, he said that with the money he makes with titles like Kurovadis, he could probably support it.

Though the post was mostly for purposes of thinking outloud.

I would personally love to see a group of skilled individuals get together and create English H-games, people love being interactive with their entertainment and they also love their porn, almost all of the Japanese H-games are not considered because of the language barrier they inherently possess or the lack of a recognized outlet for such material (DLsite charges an arm and a leg).

Like anything else, in order to be successful you need exposure, it can be difficult to advertise a pornographic game outside of the usual channels such as Hentai Communities like this one.

Having played a game like Kurovadis and seeing it's success, i know that any game (H or not) can be successful as long as it is good, my suggestion is start off being based on using action or skill gameplay rather than heavy text which would come as a turnoff to potential non-English speaking customers in the same way Japanese games hinders our ability to enjoy their games now.

I'm sure any of the other Developers you've listed could give you a better idea, having experienced the market firsthand, if i had any technical or artistic ability i'd probably be doing something similar to what Fenaxo has done with with Corruption of Champions or what Zone or Rock-Candy have done with Flash, i think H-games have great potential for growth if they are created and presented in the correct manner.

 

[giapwaye]

Re: thinking of starting a hentai game company

hi
thank you for your replies...
i really appreciate it...
I'm an artist at a social game company. I've managed to gather a team of people who would love to give this h-game idea a shot. How would you guys suggest I market my products?
I'm thinking dlsite for now, anyone with other suggestions?

 

[trekila]

Re: thinking of starting a hentai game company

Hi, giapwaye !

It may sound a bit strange, but try to talk to these guys pinkpencil.com. They made adult platformer game ( search for "Framboise" at these forum ) and i as their customer can recommend them as very open mind team. They are indies, so probably can advice a lot about how to sell etc.

 

[azurezero]

Re: thinking of starting a hentai game company

hi
thank you for your replies...
i really appreciate it...
I'm an artist at a social game company. I've managed to gather a team of people who would love to give this h-game idea a shot. How would you guys suggest I market my products?
I'm thinking dlsite for now, anyone with other suggestions?

I'd go with kyrierus method, selling unlock codes for your games, that's how he avoids breaking paypals tos since theyr paying for an "unlock" rather than paying for porn
(this also keeps the download size to a minimum)

 

[Hentie]

Re: thinking of starting a hentai game company

Might not be a totally feasible idea but:

You can create a version on all your hentai games that cuts out all explicitly xxx material and sell that as normal indie game with a bit of fan service (leave any bits that doesn't cross the line in, or perhaps minor graphical modification so it qualifies as "safe"), which would expand your marketable segment.

Plenty of option distribution wise, could be as simple as a patch / mod. Which reminds me of the FO:NV or Skyrim sex mods.

The downside is that the game will need to have enough gameplay (or supplement with *gasp* story) to stand on its own, Kurovadis, escape space (mitsuko X?), Unholy sanctuary and the like are good references which I see as the very bare minimum.

You'd also need to do the additional work of creating a "safe" version, which shouldn't be too bad considering it's mostly just a bit of tweaking, with additional replacement graphics for the racy parts. Hell you can get away with no replacement graphics if you're lazy and just turn the sex mechanic off period "no grabs".

Might not be a bad idea to reverse your design in fact, and start from designing an interesting indie game before tossing in the hentai. If you have something that's good enough for steam greenlight that'd multiply your revenue from a strictly hentai audience. Otherwise something less mainstream like desura and the like would also be worth it.

Sneaky: If you can somehow advertise on the "safe" version that the real version is designed with heavy xxx element that's help sales on your "safe" version also.

It'd also mitigate the whole incentive to pirating porn games due to finance record thing

 

[azurezero]

Re: thinking of starting a hentai game company

Might not be a totally feasible idea but:

You can create a version on all your hentai games that cuts out all explicitly xxx material and sell that as normal indie game with a bit of fan service (leave any bits that doesn't cross the line in, or perhaps minor graphical modification so it qualifies as "safe"), which would expand your marketable segment.

Plenty of option distribution wise, could be as simple as a patch / mod. Which reminds me of the FO:NV or Skyrim sex mods.

The downside is that the game will need to have enough gameplay (or supplement with *gasp* story) to stand on its own, Kurovadis, escape space (mitsuko X?), Unholy sanctuary and the like are good references which I see as the very bare minimum.

You'd also need to do the additional work of creating a "safe" version, which shouldn't be too bad considering it's mostly just a bit of tweaking, with additional replacement graphics for the racy parts. Hell you can get away with no replacement graphics if you're lazy and just turn the sex mechanic off period "no grabs".

Might not be a bad idea to reverse your design in fact, and start from designing an interesting indie game before tossing in the hentai.

My next game i'm planning on making a safe version as well, but i prefer to do the hentai version first, because it would feel like i have the bulk of the work behind me, and actually i think this will be a fun enough game with a story that isnt hard to modify

e.g the rape can be changed to mana draining or similar g rated violation, and the fox girls can simply by satiated by kisses

 

[Zikare]

Re: thinking of starting a hentai game company

@azurezero: Ah, I've always wondered about whether my PayPal account would be at risk if I accepted payments like that

Regarding the original topic, I've had a short discussion with Kyrieru about just that here:
www .kyrieru.com/2013/02/added-work-log.html?showComment=1360040064320#c4354697716991171141

I've yet to go through the whole process myself, but his comments sound encouraging!

 

[dirtyc101]

Re: thinking of starting a hentai game company

I think about this a lot myself. Mostly daydreaming really, not serious enough to turn my hobby into a business. That said, here's some points you might want to think about:

How are you going to stop piracy? Trick question, you can't. But you do need to have a strategy in place to at least mitigate it. If I was going to try & start an adult studio, I'd probably try something more like Kickstarter, where you get fans to donate up front. Kickstarter itself doesn't allow adult content, but offbeatr does. (Not a plug for offbeatr, just the only Kickstarter clone of know of catering to adult content).

Of course, in order to get fans you have to have a product for them to be fans of... sort of a catch 22 I reckon.

Before you go thinking donations are the solution though, I should warn you that the first year my site was up, I received a grand total of $20 in donations. Not quite the same thing of course, I wasn't promising deliverables, just had a donate button on my blog. Also doesn't help that I'm on the hobby side & haven't put out a game in 2 years. hAhha. Pretty sure you're aiming for the opposite side of the spectrum.

At some point you are going to be sued by a religious organization. How dare you put smut on the internet?!?!??! Do you have an attorney willing to deflect this type of harassment? How well versed is s/he with the various laws regarding adult content?

Hm... I thought I had like 3 more points to make, but they're gone now. Just as well, less to read. hahah. If I think of them, I'll post more later.
Best of Luck
DirtyC101

 

[robdelobe]

Re: thinking of starting a hentai game company

If you're really serious about starting a company you can try

You must be registered to see the links

It's pretty much a kickstarter for porn.

 

[daemonhany]

Re: thinking of starting a hentai game company

Hi, I am current attending do business college so can answer some questions from a entrepreneur perspective.
And in this tread I detected 3 main topics
How to sell
What to sell
And Piracy
How to sell: As spoken you can't go mass media on this, and as far as I know you can't count on steam, apple store or windows live because of the porn.
I would go with DLsite and donations for content request from the community and that offbeatr sounds really good too, to get some early money.
As for advertisement: here and every single porn forum you can get your hands on, "promo" videos on you tube, your very own site/blog/vlog/whatever, any free media will do.
What to sell: A porn game must be centered on porn, but it deliver the porn intelligently, trought gameplay and story, I believe mdqp's Tales of the drunken cowboy does so.
hxxp://mdqpgames.blogspot.it/p/about-tales-of-drunken-cowboy.html
It does not shove porn down your throat, it build a scenario were the porn has a meaning and a reason to the game.
Piracy: welcome to a pirate forum, 90% of the games here you can dowload full version for free and i am sure the autors are not very happy with it. but as pirates we found some honor among thieves as we do not distribuite full versions of games from people from the community. So talk to us give us demos and attention, we love attention.
I hope this help to give you some perspective and keep us posted!

 

[reddo]

Re: thinking of starting a hentai game company

What I find weird is how no one seems to be trying for the cash sharers. They obviously give enough money to support the blood-sucking parasites that keep uploading fake games.

Now, even if the money was small, with 1 update per week you could have all players downloading the file again. This could also mean that a "Projects are never truly finished" approach would work very, very well.

It's hard to say how much money could possibly come out of this and how well it'd work out. But I imagine it's not impossible for a good company to get a really big amount of (non-paying) players. The developer could then release the game in parts, instead of making huge content patches all at once, thus motivating the players to keep coming every now and then.

This would make piracy a no deal, too, since everyone can get it for "free" and the moneyshare's money goes to the developer, instead of a blood-sucking parasite.


I guess using these sharers is probably not good enough to sustain a big company, but a handful of developers should be able to get enough cash out of it after a while, when they get their following.

Making big multi-part archives would also help increase revenue per-player. All in all, should be a fun experiment.


EDIT: Giving the digital product for free while forcing ads down the consumer's throat is also where I think the future is going to be. We can already see it happening on Youtube and the like.

 

[azurezero]

Re: thinking of starting a hentai game company

as a standalone developer...I made £360.04 since october (end of september) this does include a few badge sales but it's still a relatively low number... there doesnt seem to be much need for another publisher though...everyone finds out about my games through here anyway

 

[giapwaye]

Re: thinking of starting a hentai game company

as a standalone developer...I made £360.04 since october (end of september) this does include a few badge sales but it's still a relatively low number... there doesnt seem to be much need for another publisher though...everyone finds out about my games through here anyway

Thank you so much for sharing...
How did you distribute and market your game? if you used dlsite, do you pay a certain percentage to them?

 

[Spastus]

Re: thinking of starting a hentai game company

if you used dlsite, do you pay a certain percentage to them?

Ha, they take like 50% of your earnings.

 

[omp1234]

Re: thinking of starting a hentai game company

First of all, you better know how to run a media distribution company and have a strong background in business in general, otherwise you're just blowing hot air and you're never going to get anywhere with this idea (which is most likely the case.) You can't just one day "make a company" with no initial product or even the faintest know-how on how to run one. It's like saying "I want to make a video game but I can't do art or program or make music or write professionally, but I have some good ideas, any advice?"

So do you have any education in business?

 

[Fast Forward Flux]

Re: thinking of starting a hentai game company

The main problem with starting up a COMPANY in America for this is just that there isn't a big enough market for it: individual game creators, or even small teams of 2-3 people can work, but spreading the profits amongst 10-20 people just isn't going to work with the market here.

 

[azurezero]

Re: thinking of starting a hentai game company

Thank you so much for sharing...
How did you distribute and market your game? if you used dlsite, do you pay a certain percentage to them?

you can see roughly what you get depending on what you set your price as here.

You must be registered to see the links

as for marketing, i basically just distributed the demo here and on other forums as i was developing it...i probably wouldve done a better job if i'd have made another demo upon completion