Eroge with photographs instead of drawings

[Hagya]

Hello,

I wondered, why isn't there eroge with photographs instead of drawings. I only know one and the pictures are clearly stolen from other sites.
I know it might not work for a lot of genre but a VN with photographs should work just fine and the price should be about the same I guess moreover, it makes it easier to do "animated scenes".

Sorry if the question has already been asked :s

 

[ragm54]

Re: Eroge with photographs instead of drawings

You mean japanese porn games with photos? I don't believe they exist. But, if you are not that finicky there is a quite big, rather 2 western communities that make games with RAGS, and quite a number of those games use real photos instead of drawings or 3D models. They are TFGames and Hypno Pics Collective.

 

[Hagya]

Re: Eroge with photographs instead of drawings

Thanks, I didn't know about them. Still, it looks like they are using stolen pictures too.

 

[rtkamb]

Re: Eroge with photographs instead of drawings

I'm not a professional, but if you want original pictures, you are going to need actors, and those are (probably) very costly. Unless them, and their extremely attractive girlfriend, feel like doing it and releasing it to the public.

 

[DragaX]

Re: Eroge with photographs instead of drawings

There are tons of games that are using real photographs.
Most of them are RAG games or HTML games made with twine.
And yea they all use pictures from the Internet, or what else do you mean with stolen pictures? I'm pretty sure no one would hire himself a pornstar and take some pictures for a game or even use some pictures of themselves

 

[Hagya]

Re: Eroge with photographs instead of drawings

According to this :

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a pornstar is paid $1000 for a movie. Therefore I think that for a thousand bucks you can get like 50 pictures and some animated scenes. On the other side, for the same price, I don't think you can get more than 5 high quality CG.

 

[stuntcock42]

Re: Eroge with photographs instead of drawings

a pornstar is paid $1000 for a movie.

Yeah, but that's not the full cost to the producer. The producer also needs to hire a photographer, rent a studio (or arrange appropriate furniture and backdrops in their own home), setup lighting, buy costumes, maintain insurance in case of on-set injuries, etc... In most cases, you'll also need to hire someone to airbrush the resulting images.

And the $1000 number applies to the San Fernando Valley - where there's an abundance of local talent willing to do a quick "day job". If you're living in Bumfuck, Nebrasklomoha then you'll need to either offer higher rates (to attract talent from a wider area, and cover their transportation costs) or hire a proxy agent in San Fernando to handle the whole photoshoot for you.

 

[Scherzo]

Re: Eroge with photographs instead of drawings

There are a few that exist, but to be honest they don't look appealing at all to me.

The ones I've seen tend to be very vanilla, use typical stereotypical porn models, and the gameplay is usually just some simple stripping game of some sort. Or of the "play this minigame, earn a picture gallery" variety.

Real life models are a bit of a dead end in game design. (Hentai or otherwise) Because they're completely non-interactive by nature. There's no functional advantage to using photographs over drawings unless it's a pure artstyle decision, and even then you're stuck basically making a visual novel or something.

The only real strength of real life models is that they're much cheaper to "animate" and you can easily have cutsceenes, but it's difficult to make loops and sprites and 'gameplay" animations, so at that point, you're basically making a movie anyways.

Once you have the budget for hiring actors, equipment, lighting, costumes, photographers and such, if a game is your goal, then you're better off putting that budget into high quality 3d models and animation for a more interactive experience.

And when it comes to porn, if you're just in it for the money, once you have the photo and video that's all you need for a viable product. Turning those materials into a game is more work, less profit, and SHRINKS your prospective audience because the market for straight-up porn videos is much larger than the market for games, so why would you bother? Not to mention, most of the audience for eroge is actually going to prefer art anyways.

And if you want to make an h-game with the same budget constraints as something like an amateur webcam model you basically still have the same problem. Okay, so you have one girl/guy, a camera, and whatever clothes and sex toys they own. How are you going to make a game that's more compelling than simply letting them masturbate or fuck on camera and just selling the video?

I'm not saying it can't be done, it certainly can, but you need to put a bit of effort and creativity into making it special, and have more motivation than simply wanting to make a quick buck.

 

[HentaiWriter]

Re: Eroge with photographs instead of drawings

Yeah, but that's not the full cost to the producer. The producer also needs to hire a photographer, rent a studio (or arrange appropriate furniture and backdrops in their own home), setup lighting, buy costumes, maintain insurance in case of on-set injuries, etc... In most cases, you'll also need to hire someone to airbrush the resulting images.

And the $1000 number applies to the San Fernando Valley - where there's an abundance of local talent willing to do a quick "day job". If you're living in Bumfuck, Nebrasklomoha then you'll need to either offer higher rates (to attract talent from a wider area, and cover their transportation costs) or hire a proxy agent in San Fernando to handle the whole photoshoot for you.

^ This.

Also, two other things to consider;

1) CGs for games generally allow you to direct EVERY PART of it, doing stuff that would cost tens of thousands of dollars in real life (woman in sci-fi outfit getting gangbanged by 100 tentacles floating around her while a starship explodes in the distance as she's channeling electricity through her body, for example), and generally doing post-processing on photos of real people to do special effects of that level looks horrible or awkward unless you're a master at the craft, which would also cost a lot of money to hire someone like that.

2) The biggest reason; shooting straight up pornography is illegal in every state in the USA except for California, and debate-ably parts of New Hampshire. So this drastically cuts down the number of people you can find to do this job if it's penetrative man on woman pornography. Alternatively though, you could just edit in the penetration... but then that leads back to point #1.

 

[Hagya]

Re: Eroge with photographs instead of drawings

Thanks, I think I understand why pro don't bother making this kind of games. If I had tons of money I would have tried though