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
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
As of 2021,
“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
They’re often popularly
“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
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),
“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
Yet the persistent supply of cheap, crappy hentai games — and even their use as a consistent, and thus presumably moderately successful, vehicle for scams —
Then, over the last decade major mainstream games, like entries in the
Still, many digital retailers remain reticent to embrace adult games. And game developers complain that many of the mainstream
This heady combination of unleashed creation and demand, yet uncertain marketplaces,
Nutaku
“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
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
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
“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
At best,
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
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
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
But there are always risks associated with
“Attacks against game platforms are common,” Shavell said, as fraudsters are eager to access personal data on them. For example,
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,
Nutaku users also often interact with, and make decisions within the context of, games that still reflect some of the field’s
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.
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