GDC 2026, Room 3005, West Hall. Talk starts at 16:30.
NSFW Games Variety Hour: Adult Games Microtalks
Presented by HotPink, KiwiBoxers, Colin McInerney, and LewdLogic

Adult Games have a naughty reputation, and we have dirty secrets that need exposing! Secrets like how to boost your wishlists with nontraditional marketing. Or even dirtier: how we've built a sustainable and inclusive studio when times have never been more harsh. Come to our microtalks to learn how developers in the NSFW space wrangle the same tricky issues as everyone else, while also navigating challenges unique to our work. This session will help demystify the Adult games industry as we share a wide range of tips that we've learned through our productions. You can even use these tips as a typical SFW dev. With times more challenging than ever, we promise you can't help but learn something naughty from us.

Notes:

• It's Just Anither Niche by Colin
  • VR is a niche, worked at Owlchemy making VR games
  • Strange Scaffold makes weird games, which is also a niche
  • These experiences prepared them for working on adult games, which is also just another niche.
  • Similarities:
    • Every game has design goals
    • Remote work is the norm
    • There are boundaries, you can't be a creep
    • Same skillsets
  • Differences:
    • You will learn a lot about your coworkers due to the nature of the work
    • Not everyone is comfortable talking about the work
    • Always concerns about hosting adult content
    • Open source is the way to go, because self hosting gives them more control over distribution
    • off-topic channel is full of porn
  • They use Godot, Dialogue Manager
  • Custom editor for editing and visualizing events
  • Passive trigger system
  • Folks making adult games have been doing it for a long time.
  • There's not necessarily more money, but it is still hard to make high quality stuff.
  • Adult games are not great for specialists.
  • Adult games industry is full of passionate people
  • Stability is still hard
  • You need to be adaptable and ready to learn
• Down in the Lewd Mines by Kiwi
  • Common for self-taught artists who do adult work to get into this industry with no gamedev background.
  • Industry looks for people who are already comfortable and familiar with adult content
  • Damage to clothing doubles all of the assets in a 2d game
  • Large number of assets needed for 2d games
  • You need to check if there are things the artists do not feel comfortable to do.
  • Find out what artists like to do, and see if they are a good fit for that job.
  • Self-taught people might have weak spots or bad habits
  • Rigidity is not good, flexibility is needed.
  • Make sure an artist is available for each part of the pipeline
  • Need to unify artstyle, artists need to be trained on this
  • Switch artists between steps to help learn the style
  • Need guides and examples for artists to learn from
  • Being open to feedback and having a group that is willing to give it is very important.
  • Embracing feedback
    • Give a heads up before feedback arrives
    • Show wips often, so you dont need to go all the way back to the beginning after the drawing is done.
    • If it looks off, say something! dont let the problem grow.
    • keep aware that you do not want to pile on someone for the same mistake
  • Biggest challenge:
    • Onboarding artists who are new to the scene
• Exploring Adult Games Marketing
  • You sell adult games on Steam, itch.io, GOG, DLsite
  • There are not really investors in this space
  • Patreon and SubscribeStar for raising money
  • SubscribeStar seems more strict now, after the recent changes
  • Lots of limits on adult content on many platforms
  • Some degree of success on Twitter or Bsky
  • Reddit is very supportive, surprisingly
  • Can comission other adult artists to make art of your game
  • There is no real alternative to Twitch. Kick doesnt allow it either. There are a few smaller options
  • Some youtubers will cover adult games despite the restrictions
  • You need to think outside of the box for marketing, but if you do anything exploity don't get caught.
  • 20,000 games released on steam in 2025, 1,000 of those adult. You have a lot of competition with both SFW and NSFW games
  • You need to make a store page and collect wishlists. Steam cares more about wishlist consistency, how many wishlists you are getting per day
  • you need good tags and nice hooks.
  • Set up a good franchise page
  • Do tag cleanup at least twice a week. Keep an eye on tags. Detrimental tags ruin association with similar games.
  • You can still get drowned out by bigger releases
  • Reschedule your release if a big game is coming out, like how devs rescheduled because of silksong
  • It used to be true that just being a nsfw game was enough, but the quality bar consumers want is much higher now.
  • The shotgun strategy, try to use quality on as many things as possible to get a fan for life
  • You will not have the budget like no man's sky to release a bad game and then make it good
  • overwhelmingly positive gives you a huge bump in attention on steam
  • You dont want people to say "that's pretty good for a porn game". You want them to think "damn, that game is great and it has porn"
• Turn your Design Upsidown by HotPink
  • Make the game about sex
  • You may need to find a new perspective on conventional mechanics to make the sexy content make sense
  • Reverse escape room, reverse stealth, etc
  • This happens in SFW games too.
  • People remember hard and weird things
  • Trust your new ideas
  • it used to be common to only get game over rewards, but they wanted to make it so that you get rewarded for playing well
  • wabi sabi, find beauty in incompleteness or imperfection
  • Watch out for polishing too much
  • Glitches and tricks help for word of mouth
  • Don't tell your players everything while they play -- balatro doesnt tell you your hand value right away, pokemon has a numberless health bar