Update 49 - What's with all the Hentai games on the Nintendo store?

Long Answer: Nintendo as a company has always had a very family-friendly public image. Many titles were not allowed to be ported to Nintendo systems over the years due to their strict rules against sex and certain types of violence on their platforms. Their attitude has relaxed somewhat over the past ten years, not for the sake of abandoning their moral posturing, but for the sake of good old fashioned commerce.

Shovelware used to be much harder for people to produce. I define shovelware as video games produced at the lowest cost possible to reach as many people as possible, in order to maximize profits. The most memorable examples of these from my childhood were movie tie-in games, titles meant to be released about the time a film was hitting theaters, so kids would go out and buy the game. Quality of movie tie-in games did vary, but most of them could be charitably described as “rather disappointing”.

Times have changed for the shovelware industry however. Consumers got wise to the cesspool quality of movie tie-in titles, and those same titles started to fill bargain bins. It started first with Valve, whose platform Steam was one of the most prevalent of the early online game retailers and is still widely used today. Similarly to Nintendo, Valve stopped caring quite so much about what they allowed on their platform once they had more money than a third world country. Shovelware, asset flips, bad reskins, and rake-to-the-face efforts at “so bad it’s good” games have flooded the steam new release page for years now.

With a wider global market and more people playing video games now than ever before, all of these companies, Valve, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft’s Xbox Team, see it as their responsibility to make the line go up. The ESRB exists for the gaming industry to self-regulate content in the United States, but there is no such organization for the quality of games or the “crunch culture” of the larger studios, like whatever ship Randy Pitchford is currently steering into the ground.

So we come to another lovely blossoming garden of late stage capitalism: The same titles rereleasing every few months with new “editions” (Looking at you, One Night Burlesque), and shit quality ports that the teams who sell them just kind of shrug at after the first couple patches. A dozen variations on Hentaigirls with a different subtitle, and as many keywords (Hentai, Ecchi, Waifu, etc) as you can find to get people to spend $8 to maybe jerk off to cartoon girls of questionable age. Because hey, $2.40 of that $8 could be funding the next Mario title.

I’m not here to crusade, but to try and shift perspective when it seems important. People with a lot of money pay people with very little money to pick up their trash in the real world. Sometimes the trash pickers find something of value, but mostly its a slog, and wouldn’t be necessary if the people they served weren’t as wasteful. This feels the same, like online retailers that used to have some quality control are appealing to as low a common denominator as possible. Please, for the love of God, don’t buy suspiciously cheap low quality titles without reading up on some reviews of the title and the developer. More importantly, if you find an independant game creator who crushes a coal into diamonds, support them as best you can. Talk to people, get recommendations online if you have to. You’re worth more than sifting through garbage.

Short answer: Shovelware + Sex Sells