Porn games are ready for their big data money shot

Welcome to Porn Week, Mashable’s annual close up on the business and pleasure of porn.

Over the last five years, the adult industry titan MindGeek — best known as the parent company behind Pornhub, Brazzers, and a slew of other popular porn studios and tube sites — has gone all in on developing and promoting one of its most seemingly niche endeavors: Nutaku, a platform devoted to the development and distribution of hentai games, which are explicitly sexual and animated.

Some of Nutaku’s top-rated hentai games include: King of Kinks, an RPG in which players build a party of (at most) scantily clad fantasy heroines, then “stumble upon inhuman beauties, ready to suck you dry.” Booty Farm, a dating sim that the site promises will “get XXX very fast.” And Merge Nymphs, a puzzle game that rewards success with sexual tableaus featuring cartoon women that the game bills as both “eco-friendly and dick-friendly.”

Since its 2015 launch, Nutaku, with MindGeek’s backing, has notably invested millions in hentai game development, and organized numerous extravagant marketing gimmicks, like a New York arts exhibition titled Hentai Is Art, to build the brand — and get unfamiliar Western consumers a bit more comfortable with the concept of cartoon sex, long associated primarily with the Japanese porn world. The platform has also inserted avatars of some of Pornhub’s most popular performers into its biggest games, clearly connecting the venture to the wider MindGeek ecosystem, and all the clout and eyes that come with it. The cartoonified facsimile of porn star Asa Akira even wears a Pornhub-branded tank top during her appearance in the dating sim Booty Calls… briefly.

As of 2021, ads for Nutaku, or games it offers, are a common fixture not only on MindGeek sites, but also many other adult venues. The platform hosts “over 500 lewd games!” And announcements for new Nutaku titles or initiatives land in adult industry trade publications every few days.

“It’s readily apparent that a ton of money has gone into the platform,” said Geoffrey Celen of The Porn Dude, a prominent review site that ranks adult gaming platforms.

Nutaku claims that MindGeek has been willing to invest in it because the porn powerhouse simply wants to tap a huge, underserved market for hentai games. But a number of adult industry insiders and observers, as well as information security experts, suspect there may be another motive at play: the absolutely obscene amount of user data that companies can potentially mine out of porn games. Data is, after all, far better than cash in the bank for any modern digital company — but its rampant collection is extremely worrying for any modern digital consumer.

MindGeek most likely did need a uniquely compelling motive, beyond the mere glimmer of a potential market, to devote so much effort to Nutaku’s growth and visibility, because the platform poses a real risk to the company’s wider endeavors. The conglomerate has expended considerable effort over the last decade trying to garner mainstream cultural acceptance and social respectability. However, hentai games have a decidedly bad reputation among MindGeek’s core Western consumer base.

They’re often popularly associated with stilted and immature writing, cheap and disconcerting graphics, and gleeful depictions of sexual assault, implicit or explicit underage sex, and acts of rampant misogyny — all of which do crop up far too frequently in hentai content. Hentai games also have a history of deception and disappointment — like advertising the horniest content ever, only to deliver a half-assed clone of a game like Call of Duty with a splash of sexualized graphics or a few jerky NSFW cut scenes. Or a collection of sex mini-games that just involve button-mashing and stiff, repetitive thrusts and moans. Since at least the late 1980s, far too many hentai games have also been little more than trojan horses for computer viruses and credential phishing scams.

“There even seems to be a stigma [against porn games] from people who like traditional porn,” said Michelle Clough, chair of the International Game Developers Association’s Romance and Sexuality Special Interest Group.

Hentai’s historical reputation is so bad that some popular gaming platforms categorically refuse to even consider carrying porn games. Even Nutaku has openly and repeatedly acknowledged the genre’s entrenched image issue, and the challenges of working against it, in official statements.

It’s always hard to pin down one definitive explanation for a big decision like MindGeek’s seemingly bold bet on Nutaku — in large part because they usually stem from multiple distinct motivating forces operating in parallel. However, the appeal of the type and level of user data hentai games stand to offer may pack enough appeal for a company like MindGeek to overcome a fair amount of apparent reputational risk.

What’s more, MindGeek has built abundant permissions for data collection and dissemination right into Nutaku’s privacy policy. Nutaku reserves the right to collect information on pretty much everything a user does on the site or app, share all that info with other MindGeek sites for “customization of content, advertising, and analytics,” and send aggregated data, sans personally identifiable details, to anyone, “without restriction.” The policy adds that this data “may be used to develop content and services that we hope you and other users will find of interest.”

It’s The (Adult) Economy, Stupid

When asked about the potential appeal of data derived from hentai gaming for a company like MindGeek, Nutaku communications manager Jay Acevedo avoided offering a direct answer.

He claimed MindGeek decided to launch Nutaku because it noticed “massive consumer demand for adult games in the West.” The Nutaku team has also seen signs of cultural change, he added, that may portend an erosion of the stigmas around fusing adult content and gaming that made it tricky to serve this market in the past.

Acevedo seemed confident that he and his team can “do the necessary pushes to help break that stigma,” although he acknowledged that “there is still so much to do.”

Adult and video game industry observers say there is certainly something to this explanation.

“There’s always been some desire for sexual content in games among gaming fans,” Matthew Wysocki, a professor of communications at Flagler University, a liberal arts college in Florida, who studies both porn and video games, said. Notably, the early explicit dating sim Softporn Adventure (1979), sold about 25,000 copies — to an apparently eager market of about 100,000 Apple II home computer owners.

“There’s always been some desire for sexual content in games among gaming fans.”

However, once video games started to become a proper industry, major U.S. retailers made it clear that they would not sell adult content, both to appease censorious cultural forces and to lean into the initial trend of marketing video games primarily towards children. For decades, this has made it hard for most consumers to encounter any porn games, much less well-produced content, or to feel safe when buying them off of some rinky-dink retailer in a seedy back alley of the internet.

Yet the persistent supply of cheap, crappy hentai games — and even their use as a consistent, and thus presumably moderately successful, vehicle for scams — speaks to an unyielding underlying demand. As do intensive fan efforts to mod mainstream games to add sexual content like basic nudity into them.

Then, over the last decade major mainstream games, like entries in the Baldur’s Gate, God of War, and Witcher series, started to feature increasingly explicit sexual content, in recognition of the maturing demographics and desires of video game consumers. Simultaneously, the democratization of game development tools and tutorials, and the rise of crowdfunding platforms, enabled a burst of no-holds-barred indie game development, Wysocki explained. A fair number of these indie producers found success creating openly NSFW games, attracting loyal followers, and avoiding censorship on these platforms in the mid-2010s. These developments sent clear signals of cultural change.

Still, many digital retailers remain reticent to embrace adult games. And game developers complain that many of the mainstream retailers and crowdfunding platforms that do in theory allow explicit adult content seem to place opaque caveats around that permission, leading to sporadic and seemingly capricious crackdowns on select hentai games.

This heady combination of unleashed creation and demand, yet uncertain marketplaces, all but demanded the creation of new hubs — like Nutaku — that offer a secure haven for creators, and a well-curated one-stop-shop for consumers to browse without worrying about scams, their privacy, or egregiously awful content.

Nutaku has notably voiced a commitment to keeping depictions of violent, underage, and incestuous sex off of its platform through proactive pre-release review processes. (However, critics argue that the site has featured plenty of games that involve sexual pressure or duplicity, characters who appear worryingly young, and absolutely rampant misogyny over the years.)

“It would be leaving money on the table for big adult companies to stay out of this,” Celen noted.

Porn’s data drive

But companies leave theoretical gobs of cash on proverbial tables all the time. So, simply establishing why MindGeek could in theory viably explore the hentai gaming space does not necessarily say anything about why the company would take the gamble inherent in doing so.

One obvious explanation for MindGeek’s foray into this space would be that it expected a hefty payout for taking risks and making investments. Nutaku registration is free, but users have to pay to purchase around 90 percent of its games.

However, the majority of Nutaku titles cost between $1 and $10, and many of its top games are free-to-play. Its games do lean heavily on micro-transactions, which always have the potential to net tidy sums. But we do not have any good information on Nutaku’s raw profitability now, much less what MindGeek made of its earnings potential in 2015 — around the same time Wysocki says making money on games mainly via micro-transactions was just starting to gain acceptance in the gaming world overall.

However, we do know that rich and robust data always appeals to the adult industry. Strongly.

Although they don’t broadcast the fact, pornographers are incredibly hungry for user data. Just like other media companies, they want to use it to guide content creation — to shoot photos and films that will keep people glued to screens as long, and coming back to a site as often, as possible.

Data also helps porn companies put the right videos in front of each consumer, driving up subscriptions, sales, and other site transactions as well as time spent on the platform. Increased page engagement times can boost a site’s appeal to advertisers, and their willingness to pay for space. And selling data itself, or insights drawn from it, to companies eager to best tailor and target their own products and marketing can potentially net particularly tidy profits.

This potential income is all especially important in a porn world that has been economically devastated over the last decade — largely by the advent of free porn sites, including many of MindGeek’s.

“Porn is merely a strategy for collecting user data.”

“MindGeek is a web development company first and foremost. Porn is merely a strategy for collecting user data,” said Brandon Arroyo, a porn researcher and host of the podcast Porno Cultures.

Yet the adult industry has not always been great at accumulating robust, actionable data. That’s partially because viewing porn is a very passive experience, Celen points out. Consumers “type in a keyword or browse a little, do their business, and they’re done in five to seven minutes.”

At best, sites can look at all the search and browsing activity connected to one IP address, device, and browser to build up a dossier on a user. Notably, most sites in theory have the capacity to track how long an individual lingered on a page, what parts of a clip they watched, whether they were actively on a page while the clip played, and a host of other ancillary details. Then they can aggregate this sort of user data, and fill it in with some best guesses about demographics, to develop the broad-level insights they so desire. But the brevity of active engagement with porn, as well as the active efforts some consumers make to confuse or mislead adult sites especially in bids to safeguard their sexual privacy, mean that this data has some hard and fast limitations.

Porn companies may try to supplement these basic insights with richer, and more definitively demographically pegged survey data. Brazzers periodically puts out a blitz of aggressive ads asking consumers to fill out its questionnaires. But people tend to lie on surveys, even when they’re anonymous, and especially when they cover taboo topics. And there’s likely a degree of selection bias in who, even among porn viewers, is willing to fill out an entire survey on the topic. So, even this seemingly heartier source of potential data is likewise hobbled from the get-go.

How your games can watch you

Gaming is a much more active, engaged digital activity, with players constantly making subtle choices that, when played online — as most hentai games are — can all in theory be monitored.

“Every gaming choice is effectively like a survey question,” Rob Shavell of the data security firm Abine said. But it’s a question answered, typically, without the belief that anyone is in fact watching, and may therefore be more honest, on average, than a standard survey response.

“Some groups have begun designing games specifically for market research,” Shavell noted.

In adult games, users constantly make decisions, whether by creating an avatar or selecting the dating sim character they want to pursue or picking a kink from a list in an RPG, Wysocki points out, that add up to comparatively massive sexual data troves.

“There’s a lot of data to be gotten just from watching people mash buttons,” concurred Chris Ling, CEO of Sekai Project, a video game publisher whose sister company, Denpasoft, has licensed, translated, and published adult games from Japan for a Western audience since 2014.

He added that, since Denpasoft focuses on visual novels that don’t involve many active choices, “that’s not our business.” However, he wouldn’t be surprised if tracking decision-making is core to other companies’ profit strategies.

Notably, many of the games on Nutaku seem to involve ample active decision-making.

What’s more, Shavell points out that almost every adult game platform requires registration and age verification — often including credit card details for games that involve micro-transactions. This allows them to potentially collect more detailed, reliable user demographic information than they could in most circumstances, “under the auspices of being compliant with regulations.”

According to Acevedo, as of 2021 Nutaku has over 60 million registered users, and continues to experience exponential growth. Past analyses of hentai gamers have suggested that the majority play games every day.

Whether or not data collection played a key role in MindGeek’s development and promotion of Nutaku, that is an obscene fuckton of ever-growing, ever-enticing user information sitting there, waiting for the analytics-happy company to make free use of it.

More data, more problems

It’s easy to accept the data collection potential inherent in Nutaku and other hentai gaming sites as just another neutral fact of the modern digital world. After all, we’re constantly smearing data around the internet in implicit exchange for almost every digital product or service we enjoy. And adult sites actually tend to have an unusually strong interest in protecting user data, given the PR crisis they’d face if any of that prurient content leaked out into the world unintentionally.

But there are always risks associated with heavy data collection.

“Attacks against game platforms are common,” Shavell said, as fraudsters are eager to access personal data on them. For example, recent research from the cybersecurity firm Akamai showed that, between 2018 and 2020, American gaming platforms suffered upwards of 10 billion “credential stuffing” attempts, in which scammers try to plug username and password pairs they’ve picked up from prior leaks across the internet into a platform to find accounts to invade.

Nutaku’s policies also acknowledge that, like most sites, it uses third party services, which independently collect information on user actions — each of which has its own policies on what it collects, protects, and shares. As is likewise standard, Nutaku does not vouch for or meaningfully restrict how those sites handle information that they collect from site users.

Beyond personal privacy concerns, we already know that when adult content creators get their hands on even a smidgen of consumer data they don’t necessarily use it to make content that better represents the full spectrum of human sexuality, learning about and filling every reasonable unmet niche and by so doing ideally helping us all explore our identities and desires. They’re businesses, ultimately driven by their bottom lines. So, they typically use data to gain a more refined sense of who their most lucrative consumers are, current or potential, and of the types of content that best attracts, engages, and retains these folks. Then, they double down on that content exactly. At its worst, this can artificially amplify some niche trends or desires, while suppressing other broad ones. The accumulation of more robust data troves, like those hentai gaming platforms potentially offer, may risk accelerating this warping, homogenizing tendency.

Subtle biases in datasets can also lead to significant errors in judgment or action. And rich as it may seem, data drawn from hentai game sites will likely contain plenty of biases. Notably, while Nutaku has made conscious efforts to increase its female and queer user bases, it is still largely male and straight — mirroring traditional video game consumer target demographics. (Clough of the International Game Developers Association, suspects this is because, to her eye, most of the site’s ostensibly female- and LGBTQ-friendly content feels like it was made by heterosexual men, filtering their best guesses at what other groups might want through their own perspectives and desires. It’s also, she added, still buried under a mountain of far more aggressively made-for-a-male-gaze hentai content — which can be very off-putting to outsiders.)

Nutaku users also often interact with, and make decisions within the context of, games that still reflect some of the field’s worst misogynistic tendencies: They frame women as collectibles to catch and ogle. They treat sex as an inevitable prize for following a proper sequence of actions. They all too often guide users towards aggressive, coercive, or otherwise simply shitty decisions to obtain their desired prizes. This overt priming and choice funneling introduces more potential subtle biases, which may be much harder to catch and control for than simple demographic skews.

And those unchecked biases could end up helping to drive the creation of content that reinforces these toxic tropes — not just within the relatively narrow and self-reinforcing ecosystem of one hentai gaming site but throughout the wider porn world.

Keep reading

• A beginner’s guide to the best porn games

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• How to watch VR porn: Everything you need to know

• Porn ushered in a golden age of TV dicks

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