The “Adult Gaming” market is booming but Steam isn’t keeping up

The “Adult Gaming” industry sure is an interesting one. Combining sexual, adult content with video games has been a common practice for decades. Although these pornographic games have always struggled to find their place on mainline platforms and within general gaming discourse. Even Steam, an incredibly open gaming distribution platform on the PC seems to be uncomfortable with Adult Gaming. Although that isn’t stopping the industry from going from strength to strength.

Steam’s approach to Adult Gaming has been to ban it or have it censored. That is up until recently when their stance on the topic changed to be slightly more accepting. Although with that said you still won’t see an influx of Adult Games on the service because whilst Steam is open to the idea, they first want to implement systems that would allow users to have better control over their storefront and filter out unwanted or inappropriate titles. Makes sense. A developer for Adult Game ‘Love in Space’ is one of many who are currently sitting in limbo awaiting for Steam to implement these new features. Although who knows how long that could take.

Unfortunately we’ve not been able to get a timeline on this but we’ll continue to keep you all informed once we have new information as well as any other decisions we make in the meantime. [2/2]

— Love in Space (@Love_In_Space) July 12, 2018

Whilst Steam is happy to wait before allowing these games onto their storefront, other outlets are seeing a huge boom in the industry. The world’s largest porn and adult gaming platform is Canadian based Nutaku who claim to host “over 70 million sessions a month”. That’s a lot of horny gamers. “Nutaku is growing at fantastic rate… it’s a lot to keep up with, who knew people liked porn and gaming so much??” [source].

The website hosts a huge array of primarily hentai games. They aren’t hiding in the shadows either, in fact they are gearing up to host the world’s first Adult Gaming eSport event in the near future. The event will see competitors playing a game of “Tits n Tanks” for a $25,000 prize pool and all contestants earning themselves 12 months of YouPorn Premium membership.

So what is the future of Adult Gaming? With Steam looking to embrace the industry and the industry beginning to step out from the shadows I can only see things becoming more fertile from here on out. For those who may take a look at the Nutaku website and be disappointed by a complete absence of sexualised men and queer content, Nutaku have stated that they are “in the process of working with several developers right now to bring on more games that are inclusive to the LGBTQ+ community. This is a big focus of ours in the upcoming year. We want to offer games to everyone!”

Whether you’re a fan of Adult Games or not, it seems to be an industry continuing to grow more and more potent, especially in Western countries.