Judging from all the links posted here, I suspect that the prevalence of piracy is greater among hentai game than among normal games. There are several reasons I could think for this, though the major reason is really that for a given price, hentai games offer very little gameplay.
What is the problem
A typical hentai game selling for $10-15 usually has under 3 hours of gameplay, while for the same price, mainstream games in this price range usually offer at least 30 hours. You could even pick up occasionally really good ones like Space Engineers that's can keep the player engaged for a thousand hours.
This leads to a situations where anyone who's bought the typical hentai game will finish it in one sitting (fap to it once) then get bored of it on the same day. This leads to a psychological negative reinforcement, and makes people less likely to dish out money the next time around.
There are obviously other factors, such as a the lack of a distributor that's well trusted by a North American audience. DMM and DLsite may be the Steam of Japan, but I get the feeling that most Americans feel an unease when giving their credit card information to a Japanese site.
Analysis
The common argument for the lack of content is that hentai games are developed by small teams. This isn't a right argument, since plenty of non-hentai games developed by small teams have great content, it rather seems that most hentai developers are less capable or have put less effort into their products.
For example, Starsector developed by a team of two, a programmer and an artist, and has good art, good gameplay, and a good progression system, sells for $15 and is good for ~15 hours.
Or Factorio, developed by a team of 5?, has last-gen art but gameplay is very good, sells for $18 and is good for 100 hours.
What most hentai games out there, really seems to be in their alpha stage. They make their final release with about the same quality and quantity of content as non-hentai games in their early access. I feel that if they advertised it as alpha early access, then put in some extra work on game after the initial release to improve game balancing and better graphics, they would probably be more appealing, and pick up come-back customers on their subsequent games as well.
What could be done?
I am no expert on this, but I just had a thought. What if hentai games do early-access model? After generating initial content, release it as early access and continue to work on it to improve breadth as quality.
By selling early access, the developer could gain a initial capital could be reinvested on artists to improve graphics, add new sex positions, as well as additional programmers to develop new game mechanics.
I think the aforementioned Starsector and Factorio are great examples of how many problems with small developments could be approached, and both game's main pages have development blogs recording each game's development process.
These two games also offer good examples of a payment system that does a decent(though not overtly strong) job of deterring piracy. I am not totally sure on this, but I think the early-access versions of these games use BMT micro web-authentication system based on with passcodes. So, while the game files could be downloaded freely, they need to be activated and authenticated everytime they run on a new computer. The possibility of the authentication being cracked the further mitigated by the games' frequent updates, making it so that searching for a crack is needed for every update, which is not really worth the effort for most people than just dishing out a couple of bucks.
What is the problem
A typical hentai game selling for $10-15 usually has under 3 hours of gameplay, while for the same price, mainstream games in this price range usually offer at least 30 hours. You could even pick up occasionally really good ones like Space Engineers that's can keep the player engaged for a thousand hours.
This leads to a situations where anyone who's bought the typical hentai game will finish it in one sitting (fap to it once) then get bored of it on the same day. This leads to a psychological negative reinforcement, and makes people less likely to dish out money the next time around.
There are obviously other factors, such as a the lack of a distributor that's well trusted by a North American audience. DMM and DLsite may be the Steam of Japan, but I get the feeling that most Americans feel an unease when giving their credit card information to a Japanese site.
Analysis
The common argument for the lack of content is that hentai games are developed by small teams. This isn't a right argument, since plenty of non-hentai games developed by small teams have great content, it rather seems that most hentai developers are less capable or have put less effort into their products.
For example, Starsector developed by a team of two, a programmer and an artist, and has good art, good gameplay, and a good progression system, sells for $15 and is good for ~15 hours.
Or Factorio, developed by a team of 5?, has last-gen art but gameplay is very good, sells for $18 and is good for 100 hours.
What most hentai games out there, really seems to be in their alpha stage. They make their final release with about the same quality and quantity of content as non-hentai games in their early access. I feel that if they advertised it as alpha early access, then put in some extra work on game after the initial release to improve game balancing and better graphics, they would probably be more appealing, and pick up come-back customers on their subsequent games as well.
What could be done?
I am no expert on this, but I just had a thought. What if hentai games do early-access model? After generating initial content, release it as early access and continue to work on it to improve breadth as quality.
By selling early access, the developer could gain a initial capital could be reinvested on artists to improve graphics, add new sex positions, as well as additional programmers to develop new game mechanics.
I think the aforementioned Starsector and Factorio are great examples of how many problems with small developments could be approached, and both game's main pages have development blogs recording each game's development process.
These two games also offer good examples of a payment system that does a decent(though not overtly strong) job of deterring piracy. I am not totally sure on this, but I think the early-access versions of these games use BMT micro web-authentication system based on with passcodes. So, while the game files could be downloaded freely, they need to be activated and authenticated everytime they run on a new computer. The possibility of the authentication being cracked the further mitigated by the games' frequent updates, making it so that searching for a crack is needed for every update, which is not really worth the effort for most people than just dishing out a couple of bucks.
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