Hey there, naughty news fans.

This has been an incredibly difficult post to write, and I’ve pondered what to do for a long while now. After almost three years, 98 numbered issues, and 138 published posts in total, this will be the last Naughty List News post. I know this may come as a surprise to you, but it’s been a long time coming for me, and it’s time to face the music.

Here are the reasons I’m quitting the newsletter, from what I think ar the least to most convincing arguments.

I’m in a different place

Both physically and mentally, I’m in a different place than I was three years ago. I was feeling quite unhappy at my job as a middle manager in a AAA gaming company, and it was causing a lot of stress. Starting this newsletter was a way to channel that energy into something positive and to try something entirely different from my day job.

I met many cool people doing this newsletter, and I’ve learned a lot about how to write compelling non-fiction. Writing for you has proven to be an extremely valuable experience, even in my regular work. But I’ve since changed jobs twice, moved countries, and bought a house. It feels like the moment has shifted for me.

It’s a huge timesink

I work full-time as a programmer in the AAA video games industry. My regular job is from 9 AM to 6 PM, and then I also try to work on the newsletter. That often means scrambling to put something together on the weekend, as it is often almost impossible to pull myself away from my duties at work.

But writing this newsletter is a huge timesink. It’s writing the words, editing the words, finding the links, summarizing the links, putting together the graphics, and promoting the newsletter. On and on it goes. It’s why I never do game reviews, and I’ve stopped posting summary images on Reddit; I had to make time somewhere.

And yet, I already have not just a job but a successful career. Is this really what I want to keep spending my limited free time on?

Journalism is hard

I never intended to become a journalist. I studied game development in college, not journalism. I was never interested in the profession, yet all of a sudden, I was doing journalism for this newsletter every other week. And what I found is that it’s really, really hard work.

It’s not enough to just find an interesting story, which is hard all on its own. You then have to build up a case around it with facts that are backed up (publicly available) evidence. You might have to interview multiple people with their own agenda and try to gauge what’s real and what’s just PR. And you’ll never get the full story, so you’ll catch a lot of flak regardless.

Even after almost three years of doing this newsletter, I’m still unsure if I have the stomach for actual journalism. I’ve had multiple offers over the years to either buy out the newsletter or become a contributing member on another website, and I’ve always had to turn them down.

I just don’t think journalism is a career I want to pursue actively.

My game isn’t getting done

Although one of the main reasons I started writing this newsletter was to build up an audience for my game Up There They Love, I’ve never actually shown you the game. That’s because progress has stalled, partly due to spending most of my limited free time on the newsletter, ironically enough.

Although I’ve been making games for almost twenty years (I shipped my first title when I was just fourteen), I still underestimated this project's required time and effort. UTTL is an incredibly ambitious game, and because it is my first adult game, I’ve had to redesign it from scratch several times. But I’ve been working on it for close to seven years, and I don’t feel like I have much to show for it.

I have an incredible amount of respect for the people making adult games, and I hope that comes across in my writing. Just imagine making a game that isn’t only fun to play, but makes your players horny as well. I’ve dabbled in other types of game design, made a combat mechanic here and there, but there’s truly nothing like the impossible complexity of adult game design. That’s why I want to ensure I get my own game right, and I’ll admit I’m a perfectionist.

The money was never there

First things first, every sponsor I’ve worked with on the newsletter has been fantastic. It takes a lot of guts to trust some guy with a glorified blog with your brand and your public image, and every one of the companies and individuals that I’ve approached for sponsorships has been fantastic.

But at the same time, there are 1127 (lovely, wonderful!) subscribers to this newsletter right now. That’s an amazing number of subscribers for the incredibly niche topic of adult gaming, but it’s not nearly enough eyeballs to fill up sponsorship slots every week. And that’s after me pushing hard on Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and wherever else I’m not banned yet.

You might be thinking, but what about direct member contributions on sites like Patreon, SubscribeStar, or even Substack directly? The problem with that approach is I’m barely able to push out just the newsletter as it is. I can’t make time to offer any kind of premium content on top of that. It’s not a good deal for you, and doing it properly would be another huge timesink for me.

But without a consistent income, I can’t treat this venture like a business. I can’t hire actual journalists to do the reporting, or an actual community manager to take care of places like Reddit and Discord. There is a huge opportunity cost to providing a free newsletter every week.

What’s next for me

I’m taking a two-week break from everything, including my day job. I’m not one to sit still, so I will still write my weird little think-pieces on Cohost, but they won’t be as consistent as this weekly newsletter.

Besides that, I’m working with a client on the marketing for their adult game. I have several ideas for advertising on a zero dollar budget I’m keen to try out. Whether those ideas pan out or not, I want to compile my thoughts into a resource to help people bring their own adult games to market. Because I still believe in adult games as a medium, and I want to try a slightly different approach to talking about them. If that resource ever comes to fruition, I will be sharing that with you as well.

The site itself isn’t going anywhere. I will continue to pay for the domain out of pocket, and all the hosting is taken care of by Substack. And if you’re still hankering for adult gaming news, I can recommend my competitors LewdGamer, SpicyGaming, the blogs BlerdyOtome, NookGaming, Otome Kitten, and adult industry news sites SexTechGuide and XBIZ.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading the newsletter over the years. I sure as hell had fun writing it. ❤

-Mr. Hands

NaughtyList.News is a free weekly publication about adult games, sometimes supported by advertising. If you’d like to buy me a coffee, please check out my Ko-Fi!

Hey there, naughty news fans!

This week's biggest news is that after 22 years, the Japanese adult games maker Illusion is sadly closing its doors next month. The studio did not explain this sudden announcement.

I wrote about the illustrious company last year:

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

• A demo for card-collecting RPG AURA: Hentai Cards is playable on Itch.io. A young farmer is blessed by a goddess with the magic of love, allowing him to greatly increase his power through lovemaking.

• Mystery RPG The Claws of Blood is now available on Itch.io. An elven priestess investigates the brutal devastation of her hometown and is frequently abused by her enemies.

• NTR Simulator Seijin Shiki of Elves is now available on DLSite. Unusually low libido has put elves at risk of going extinct unless adults pass a month of active sex with humans to develop a potent sexual drive.

• Baldur’s Gate 3 will let you have sex with a bear. Now that’s what I call “listening to the fans.”

• BlerdyOtome reviews Charade Maniacs. “The biggest draw of the game is the overarching “who’s the traitor” mystery, so this is a game that you want to go into blind, because knowing too much will spoil the set up.”

• Republican lawmaker behind age verification law calls adult content “not normal.” “Stanley, an attorney and politician with no professional expertise on human sexuality or psychology, shared his notions about porn with local outlet WTOP News.”

Artist spotlight 💡

Thanks for reading this far!

-Mr. Hands

NaughtyList.News is a free weekly publication about adult games, sometimes supported by advertising. If you’d like to buy me a coffee, please check out my Ko-Fi!

This week, we saw yet another hopeful contender enter the ring to knock Twitter’s crown as “The World’s Town Square” off its head, with Mark Zuckerberg encouraging the 500 million active users on Instagram to try Threads (an Instagram product). According to him, 30 million people did on its first day. (Threads is currently unavailable in the EU due to non-compliance with regulations about tracking users.)

There’s only one problem: The content produced on the platform so far is completely sterile. And it has everything to do with trying to be as advertiser-friendly as possible out of the gate.

You can’t even post ass

The main advantage of Threads over Twitter is that users with a sizable Instagram following don’t have to start from scratch. The products are seamlessly integrated, so the followers transfer as well.

This also means that posts on Threads must follow Instagram’s guidelines on nudity or sexual activity, which means there is absolutely no adult content on the platform. Sex workers have complained for years about Instagram’s discriminatory policy against sex-positive accounts, and now Threads users are operating under those same terms and conditions.

But there’s no party on the Internet without porn, and this shows in the type of content that was popular on Threads’ first day: The most boring and asinine posts you can think of rose to the top. That these posts happened to be completely “advertiser safe” as well was surely a happy coincidence.

But a platform will never be engaging if users aren’t allowed to be dirty, get into mud fights, and, well, act a little bit unhinged. And I’m not the only one to make this observation. Vox writes in “Threads won’t kill Twitter if it’s boring”:

Logging onto Threads is like logging on to the internet roughly a decade ago. I have now seen two strangers share their “hot take” that actually, pineapple on pizza is good, a sentiment copied and pasted from all the world’s most boring Hinge profiles.

TechCrunch put it even more poignantly in "You can’t post ass, Threads is doomed":

Casual ass posting was paramount to shaping Twitter culture, as were the unhinged shitposters, the hordes of stans and the discourse stirrers. Even when platform was rife with conflict, the chaotic brand of posting made users want to come back to Twitter.

Mark Zuckerberg can force all Instagram users into his Twitter clone if he wants, but that doesn’t mean those users will actually stick around in the long term if the posts aren’t any good.

Follow the youths

Culture columnist Taylor Lorenz argues in The Washington Post that figuring out which platform is poised to replace Twitter doesn’t matter anyway because TikTok has already won (paywalled):

Daniel, 17, a rising senior in a Philadelphia high school who asked to be referred to by only his first name because he’s underage, said Twitter is simply “not the spot” anymore. “People my age are going to Instagram and TikTok before they go to Twitter,” he said.

She also argues (correctly) that Twitter, as a concept, is starting to feel like a relic of a bygone era. TikTok works with a purely algorithmic feed that shows your video creations to anyone interested, irrespective of how many followers you have. You can go viral on TikTok with your first-ever video if it happens to find an audience immediately. Conversely, it takes a lot of hard work to build up a following on Twitter or its many clones, and if your tweet happens to go viral, that can almost always be traced back to an account with an outsized following giving you the light of day. If those posters don’t outright steal your content, that is.

But TikTok is even worse than other platforms regarding adult content, where sex workers and other adult content creators can’t talk about their work candidly. To avoid being deranked or even delisted by the almighty algorithm, creators must refer to “spicy eggplant” (vibrator), “nip nops” (nipples), and “le dollar bean” (lesbian). Otherwise, their content might be deemed advertiser-unfriendly, which is what TikTok wants to avoid at all costs. Ms. Lorenz wrote a great piece in April 2022 on how so-called “algospeak” is affecting our ability to express ourselves, but sex workers especially:

Sex workers, who have long been censored by moderation systems, refer to themselves on TikTok as “accountants” and use the corn emoji as a substitute for the word “porn.”

And it’s really not very sophisticated tech under the hood:

“The reality is that tech companies have been using automated tools to moderate content for a really long time and while it’s touted as this sophisticated machine learning, it’s often just a list of words they think are problematic,” said Ángel Díaz, a lecturer at the UCLA School of Law who studies technology and racial discrimination.

It’s concerning how much human expression we’re willing to trade in for a little piece of mind. Because it always starts with sex work before they come for the rest of us.

Go where the sex workers are

Every platform struggles with what to do with sex workers broadly and adult content creators specifically. Most start out with lofty ideals about “free speech,” only to run headfirst into the reality of laws like FOSTA-SESTA. This American legislation has made platforms criminally liable for adult content if it has been found that it depicts underage persons or non-consensual activity. In response, many platforms overshoot and simply don’t allow any adult content at all. But this doesn't make sense if you think about it for more than a minute. Adult content is raucous, fiery, engaging, and interesting. Banning it from your platform leaves you with, well, whatever Threads is offering right now.

And that’s precisely why I’m not putting money down that Threads, BlueSky, or even Substack Notes will end up replacing Twitter. None of these Twitter alternatives have an active community of sex workers, not because of a lack of users but most likely because sex workers don’t feel safe there. But many adult content creators are congregating on Cohost, even if the platform is comparatively tiny right now with a confirmed 12,000 active monthly users. Check out Bigg’s Cohost Porn Creator Masterpost to see the platform's breadth of adult content on offer. I’ve got a horse in this race myself as I’m paying for Cohost Plus, which gives you some nice bonus features, but mainly helps to keep the website afloat as it’s completely funded by subscriptions, with no ads on the platform.

I strongly believe that listening to sex workers is not just the morally right thing to do but also the best way to keep the party going. To close you off, I will leave you with the wise words of Mistress Olivia Snow:

Calling sex workers “the canary in the coal mine” is almost a cliché at this point. I myself have used the metaphor in my own writing to discuss algorithmic surveillance of sex workers. But here is where the metaphor falls apart: The canary is only effective if the miner listens to it. Put plainly, due to societal stigma against sex workers, the general population is more likely to perceive our silence as making their world safer, not less so.

(Emphasis mine)

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

• Mystery visual novel NULL [Remastered] is now available on Steam. Eight people have been kidnapped and imprisoned in an old mansion, and forced to play a game with deadly consequences.

• Action RPG Last Town: Fall of Felixia is now available on Itch.io. After a succubus takes over a kingdom with her demonic charms, a fearless female knight risks her life to strike her down.

• Erotic otome Speakeasy is looking for funding on Kickstarter. During the Prohibition era in the 1920s, a young woman runs away from home and into the arms of the owner of an underground bar filled with jazz, illegal liquor, and general debauchery.

• Apocalyptic puzzle adventure NOIR:NOAH is out now on DLSite. A young girl wakes up in a laboratory and struggles to remember anything but her name.

• NookGaming reviews Queen Of The Otaku: There Can Only Be One. “[It] puts forward an interesting idea, takes it to a dark place, and caters well to certain fetishes.”

• PCGamer writes about deep-faked AI voices used in NSFW mods angering the voice actor community. A member of the Skyrim modding community painstakingly put together a list of voice actors who had their voices copied without their consent in fan-made adult content for the game.

• French senate approves rules to “complicate the lives” of adult content producers. The lawmakers added provisions that would mandate warnings if adult content simulates an illegal act.

Artist spotlight 💡

Thanks for reading this far!

-Mr. Hands

NaughtyList.News is a free weekly publication about adult games, sometimes supported by advertising. If you’d like to buy me a coffee, please check out my Ko-Fi!

Hey there, naughty news fans!

It’s been a busy week for me once again, but the most important news is that Twitter is now completely broken. In practical terms, I can’t access my Twitter favorites right now, and I can only rely on my RSS feeds to compile this newsletter. (Remember RSS feeds? They still exist!)

I’ve tried my hardest to wean myself off the platform for the past few months, but the truth is that there was no better way to discover random interesting stories and perspectives. And now everyone is scattering into the wind:

• BlueSky could be a viable Twitter alternative, but it’s invite-only, and I’m not cool enough to score an invite. It also doesn’t allow NSFW content.

• Cohost is fantastic and filled with exactly my kind of weirdos (NSFW/queer/tech/both), but it’s tiny.

• Mastodon is fine but federated, meaning there’s no single The Mastodon, but everyone is on their own little server.

People are also retreating to Tumblr, dusting off their Facebook, and maybe starting up a Blogspot again. All of which is to say that I’m eternally grateful that I can reach you directly with this newsletter! ❤

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

• LIP! Lewd Idol Project Vol. 2 - Hot Springs and Beach Episodes is now available. After the misadventures of LIP! Vol. 2, the idol trio takes some time to unwind.

• Deck-building game Take Me to the Dungeon!! is now available on Steam. After being transported to a fantasy world, you are recruited by a swordswoman to explore a dungeon inhabited by a mischievous demon lord.

• Love simulation game Secret with Sophia is now available on DLSite. When you get snowed in a cabinet with your maid, you can’t help but develop feelings for her.

• JAST USA kicked off their Hot Summer Sale. Around 224 games are currently discounted on their storefront.

• NookGaming reviews Nukitashi, a dystopian (?) visual novel about an island where happily having kinky sex whenever they want to. “Nukitashi could easily be dismissed as an overly-sexual visual novel meant to be played one-handed. Those playing it will instead discover plenty of adult scenes, but a surprising depth of story behind it.”

• Apple warns UK government of serious privacy risks if “Online Safety Bill” passes. “End-to-end encryption […] helps everyday citizens defend themselves from surveillance, identity theft, fraud, and data breaches. The Online Safety Bill poses a serious threat to this protection.”

• Maryland legalizes oral and anal sex. The state of Maryland has repealed the Unnatural or Perverted Sexual Practice Act, which criminalizes any sexual act outside of vaginal penetration.

Artist spotlight 💡

Thanks for reading this far!

-Mr. Hands

NaughtyList.News is a free weekly publication about adult games, sometimes supported by advertising. If you’d like to buy me a coffee, please check out my Ko-Fi!

Hey there, naughty news fans!

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had an absolute nightmare of a week at work. I had to put out fires left and right because of issues flagged at the last minute by our Game Director, find and fix bugs in third-party packages, and take over the work from a coworker on holidays. But that’s why they pay me the big bucks, of course. 😅

The good news is that it was also Steam Next Fest this week, so I did manage to play a few demos of upcoming games! One of my favorite demos was Starlight Oddyssey, which is sadly not a lewd game, but has a vibe very close to what I’m trying to hit with my own game Up There They Love.

Let me know what you played in the comments!

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

• Turn-based RPG Tits and Shadows is now available on Steam. After dying, the angel Gabriel has summoned you to defeat the demon queen Putana, and beautiful women will aid you on this adventure.

• BDSM simulation Slave Lord: Elven Conquest is out now on Steam. When a duo of elven assassins attacks a Dark Lord, he puts one in a secure bedroom and the other in the dungeons with the goal to turn them into his concubines.

• Yuri visual novel Sakura in Paris is now available on Steam. When Tokyo-based columnist Sakura finds a box with a photo of her mother with her estranged father, she takes a trip to Paris to confront him directly.

• Blerdy Otome asks whether Charade Maniacs is worth playing. “If there is one thing Charade Maniacs has going for it, it has to be it’s off the walls premise. I can honestly say there is no other otome game quite like it.”

• Writer and former performer Jessica Stoya discusses censorship of adult content. “Tumblr was the place for people to learn and process together. Now, how are we even supposed to get that information out? That’s not going to rise to the top of the Pornhub algorithm.”

• New Playboy Pleasures toys focus on ‘shallowing,’ according to SexTechGuide. This is where you insert a sex tech device partially into the vagina to stimulate the front wall.

• The Bible was exempted from Utah’s anti-porn law. One parent complained that the book contains “Incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide.”

Artist spotlight 💡

Thanks for reading this far!

-Mr. Hands

NaughtyList.News is a free weekly publication about adult games, sometimes supported by advertising. If you’d like to buy me a coffee, please check out my Ko-Fi!

Hey there, naughty news fans!

Summer is officially warming up around these parts, by which I mean it’s been consistently 28 degrees Celcius in my office all week. 🥵

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to make much time for lewd gaming because I’ve been very busy at my real job. But I’ve at least made a serious effort to promote my previous story about the Queer Games Bundle:

Have you been playing anything naughty? Let me know in the comments!

Leave a comment

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

• Action RPG The Kingdom of the End & The Witch of the Beginning was released on Steam. Six days before the collapse of the Lidenhardt Republic, the sorceress Frayn desperately pushes back against a gauntlet of enemies with her spells and melee combos.

• I want to have your babies! ~Long-awaited reunion! My childhood friend got sexy and horny~, is now available on Steam. A casual visual novel about a young man reuniting with his (sexy and horny) childhood friend.

• Adventure game Kneel Before The Demon Queen is out now on Itch.io. A hero’s destiny was to defeat the demon queen and save the world, but unfortunately, he failed and became a toy for her to torment.

• ManEaterGames is seeking funding for their Boys Love visual novel, The Frozen Kingdom. A barbarian hero is on a quest for revenge after the son of an evil sorceress has stepped in to wrestle control over his lands.

• BlerdyOtome reviewed high school romance otome Jack Jeanne on the Nintendo Switch. “I don’t typically self insert in my otome games, but with Jack Jeanne I really felt like I was a part of the journey. GO GET JACK JEANNE NOW!! “

• MangaGamer opens up hardcopy preorders for the incest nukige Namaiki Dark Elf Sisters ~Cocky Chicks Craving Creampies~. The game comes on a USB flash drive and a digital download card.

• French adult company Dorcel is testing a “double anonymity” age verification solution in France. Paris is expected to pass a new bill to force adult platforms to implement age verification.

Artist spotlight 💡

Thanks for reading this far!

-Mr. Hands

NaughtyList.News is a free weekly publication about adult games, sometimes supported by advertising. If you’d like to buy me a coffee, please check out my Ko-Fi!

Every week I strive to lift interesting voices in the adult gaming industry. And if there’s one thing I know, it’s that LGBTQIA+ people tend to make the most interesting adult games of them all.

So when the Queer Games Bundle 2023 was announced on Itch.io, you can bet your ass I was on that immediately. Because the other thing I know about queer creators is that they can always use a little more promotion of their hard work.

I scoured through every game in this bundle (466 items!) to find 23 excellent games by queer creators about love, sex, and romance. And all of these games can be yours for the low, low price of a single AAA video game if you get the Queer Games Bundle in the month of Pride.

Because there are still many video games to get through, I categorized them based on audience appeal. I hope you can find some to your liking!

Girls who love girls who love girls

Does your heart flutter at the sight of girls? Does your face flush at the prospect of actually talking to them? Perhaps the cure for your ailment is a solid dose of brooding and pining.

• Ladykiller in a Bind - Forced to pretend to be her twin brother on a cruise ship full of his classmates and enemies, the Beast finds herself thrown into a game of complex social manipulation, as well as literal bondage.

• Night Cascades, a paranormal detective romance - After a series of occult-themed fires, Diane Carter is called in as an expert on esoteric religion and forced to work together with a beautiful and cocky detective to find the culprit.

• Yearning for Spring, a visual novel - A city girl who loves snow hikes in a serene winter landscape when she wanders off the trail and meets a regal woman with an air of mystery.

• Coquette Dragoon, an animated visual novel - The trajectory of the rabbit-eared Xio’s life is changed forever as she’s thrust into the prestigious role of a dragoon pilot, but can she adjust to a new life of status?

• Good Morning Hon, a black-and-white visual novel - Ash can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong on this perfectly normal morning waking up next to her lovely fiancé.

Orcs and bears need love too

Sometimes, what you really need in life is a big burly man to hold you as you fall asleep on his chest. Unfortunately, I’m already taken, so you’ll have to make do with these games instead.

• Bara Blackjack - Play blackjack against a handsome orc blacksmith and gradually strip him of his clothes as you win.

• Barachoda Bloom, a dating sim - Try to make friends in your home country and attempt to get past your desire to simply bang and forget them.

• Rinse and Repeat, a first-person showering simulator - Give a hunk a helping hand under the shower and find out if he’s really into you or just can’t reach that one spot on his back.

• Acolytes of the Chrystal, a visual novel - Andrew is an aspiring writer when he finds himself whisked away to a world of magic where he has lots of gay sex with people of all colors and creeds.

• A Tavern at Night, a visual novel - Strike up a conversation with a somewhat terrifying orc mercenary in a tavern while you shelter from the storm raging outside.

• Dwarven Destiny, a visual novel - Discover the origins of a mysterious artifact recently unearthed in the Dwarven Kingdom of Stonepeak.

Trans Witches and Non-Binary Sorcerers

What if your gender identity lies somewhere between “try again later” and “what are you, a cop”? Here are several games featuring trans and non-binary characters, and some of them are even human instead of robots!

• Full Service Shop, a sci-fi visual novel - In this kinky and futuristic health clinic, sapphic humans and cyborgs can switch out their naughty bits.

• DemiDato, a monster dating sim - Welcome to the set of DemiDato, (name and pronouns pending), where you try to win over one of twelve dateable monsters.

• Travellers Road, a fantasy visual novel - Romance a non-binary sorcerer or a male fighter on your quiet journey transporting goods while the two squabble over everything and nothing.

• Trans Goetia, a femdom visual novel - A demon endlessly pesters Circe as she becomes soft and squishy from supernatural hormonal replacement therapy with absolutely zero demonic downsides.

• SEX! At Alexanderplatz, a dating sim in Early Access - Crank the lever and let the slot machine spin on your dating app and into your heart.

• Knife Sisters, a dark erotic visual novel - Go back in time as the non-binary Leo to piece together what happened last night as the mysterious artist Dagger drags them into a world of rituals that become increasingly demanding.

• Meaning, a kinetic visual novel - Trans woman Sol Fitzroy lives a happy domestic life with her boyfriend until she learns the family business wants her back.

Kink & Demons at Pride

Sometimes you simply must release your inner demon or make time for some recreational CBT. For those on the kinky side, here are several games to tickle your fancy while you hang upside down from the ceiling.

• Understuffed, a BDSM-themed romance about plushies - Timothy’s forays into BDSM lead him into an intimate encounter that he could never have predicted.

• Nightmare Temptation Academy, a graphic visual novel in every sense of the word - Seduce your classmates while the world around your crumbles and become a decadent slave to your desires.

• A Bit Tied Up, a free visual novel - Thalius is unsure what happened last night as he finds himself tied to the dungeon wall of an evil wizard.

• Grade-A Bully, a femdom visual novel - Dia is alone in a classroom with her school bully when she finds they’ve been accidentally locked inside together.

• doomsday dreamgirl, a violently lesbian kinetic visual novel - Surely, the end of the world is hardly worth crying about, but the tears from the stranger in your home said otherwise.

What did I miss?

There are 466 games, books, and other media in the Queer Games Bundle 2023. While I tried to select the best games about sex, love, and romance, I doubtlessly skipped over some gems. Please let me know in the comments what I missed!

Leave a comment

P.S. I miscounted and actually listed 24 games, but I couldn’t just go and delete one of these recommendations!

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

• Winter Wolves releases Save The World on Steam. A young woman is going through a tough time when she gets abducted by aliens, which inadvertently affects the fate of the entire world.

• “I can be quite explicit”: AI girlfriends based on real people are now ‘a thing’ A wave of AI girlfriends has emerged as creators tap into a fresh way to engage their audience.

• SexTechGuide writes how mixed reality headsets could transform our sex lives. The new headsets could open up new avenues for intimacy and connection.

• Spanish anti-porn activists demand laws to match Utah and China. A tech journalist wrote an editorial in a major newspaper advocating for laws to block adult websites unless they implement age verification.

• XBIZ dives into the web of laws and controversies surrounding age verification. “Even if [adult platforms] do want to comply, their ability to do so is constrained,” Mike Stabile explains. “Because it’s expensive. It’s complicated. And they have to come up with different protocols for each state or country that they’re operating in.”

• Pornhub releases video urging action against anti-porn legislation. Cherie DeVille urges viewers to contact their representatives that are coming for their porn.

Artist spotlight 💡

Thanks for reading this far!

-Mr. Hands

Hey there, naughty news fans!

It’s June already, which means I get to wish you a happy Pride Month! Although I do not fit anywhere in the LGBTQIA+ acronym myself as a cishet man married to a cishet woman, I believe the struggle for human rights is universal. But perhaps that’s a bit heavy, so let’s just say I defend everyone’s right to be as much of a perv as they want to be in private, yeah? Up to and including (shivers) hetero sex in the missionary position for the purposes of procreation.

In other news, there’s a Queer Games Bundle on Itch.io right now with 446 items on sale for the low, low price of $60! Next week, I’m planning to dive into this bundle and help promote the best games about love, sex, and romance in there to your lovely eyeballs. 😘

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

• Hack & slash platformer Dreamcutter releases on Steam. A college girl finds herself trapped in a dream with a friend until she finds a mysterious scythe that promises to help her escape and reward her for her efforts.

• Femdom RPG Temptation Coliseum is now available on DLSite. Hoping to find new and capable warriors, a princess organizes a tournament with a massive gold price for the victor.

• 3D hack & slash action game Dungeon Slave was released on Steam. When a teenage boy addicted to masturbation gets transported to a fantasy realm, he discovers that only his semen can be used to defeat a demon king.

• Otome game Finally, in Love Again is out for the Nintendo Switch. A career-oriented pastry chef adores her job but has let her love life decline until she attends a party and piques the interest of five gorgeous men.

• Publisher NekoNyan released a censored version of Lorena and the Lands of Ruins at the developer's request. The developer no longer wished to include 18+ content, patched or otherwise, and even the Japanese version will remove all adult content.

• BlerdyOteme is excited about the queer noir visual novel Call Me Under. The first full chapter of the game is now available on Steam.

• The United States Supreme Court declined to take up a lawsuit targeting Reddit. The suit was sponsored by the NCOSE and sought to create liability for Reddit over user-created content, specifically sexually explicit material.

• Texas orders all adult sites to post anti-porn propaganda. The new law compels adult websites to post pseudoscientific anti-porn propaganda disclaimers declaring that “pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses, and weakens brain function.”

Artist spotlight 💡

Thanks for reading this far!

-Mr. Hands

NaughtyList.News is a free weekly publication about adult games, sometimes supported by advertising. This week’s edition was sponsored by Private Dick: Lipstick & Lies

For the past few years, I’ve noticed a sharp rise in cheating in my games. And not the kind of cheating you’re thinking of, like peeking through walls in an online shooter. No, I’m playing games where your goal is to steal your neighbor’s wife and force her to fall in love with you instead.

What makes this fantasy so appealing? And why do they all seem to play from an isometric perspective, divide their days into segments, and emphasize the female character’s emotional toil?

What is NTR?

Netorare, often abbreviated as NTR, is a Japanese term translated as “to be stolen” or “cucked.” This genre of adult media typically revolves around a story in which someone’s partner is seduced or taken away by another party. NTR stories culminate in feelings of jealousy, betrayal, and emotional distress in the party being cheated on.

There are a few common character archetypes in NTR media:

• Protagonist - Typically male, they are depicted as emotionally invested in the relationship with their partner. Their journey focuses on the feelings of jealousy and betrayal caused by the cheating behind their back.

• Love Interest - The other half, and in a committed relationship with the protagonist. They are usually portrayed as attractive and extremely desirable. Their role in the story is to either decide to cheat on their partner themselves, or they are lured into doing so by the rival character.

• Rival/Bull - The character who steals the love interest away from the protagonist. They are often depicted as charismatic and emotionally manipulative. Their actions lead to the betrayal and infidelity that underlie the NTR storyline.

NTR is a controversial genre in adult media. While some people find it thrilling escapism, others find the themes hitting too close to home for comfort. After all, these are stories about emotional abuse that leave a protagonist feeling inadequate or worthless. As with all adult media, it's up to personal taste and preference.

What I find interesting about the NTR games that have cropped up recently is that you don’t play as the protagonist character in the story but as the rival.

NTR Legend sets the tone

NTR Legend (or NTR Densetsu) is a Japanese game by GoldenBoy that was first released on DLSite in July 2020. You play as the neighbor of a young couple who moved in next door. The woman of the couple needs money for her upcoming wedding anniversary, and she suggests to the neighbor that she can help him clean his apartment for a small fee. However, you have very different plans for her since you are well-known as The Family Destroyer.

Each in-game day is divided into morning, afternoon, evening, and night. Different activities are available during each part of the day, like working a part-time job in the morning and going to the sex shop at night. If there's nothing to clean, your neighbor won’t work for you, so you’ll need to spend time trashing your apartment to give her an excuse to come over. You use the money from your part-time jobs to pay for her cleaning services and to upgrade your apartment.

What’s notable about how you play the game is that you cannot move around the world freely; instead, you interact with specific points on the map. A lot of the game is controlled through a phone interface. For example, you can call your neighbor to ask her to come over and order food and other items through an app.

During the cleaning, you can sexually harass your neighbor by fondling her genitals and stroking yourself while she isn’t looking. There’s an arousal and a suspicion bar that are raised simultaneously by your actions. If you fill her arousal without alarming her, you will increase her lust and unlock more options for harassment. You’ll also be able to install a spy camera in your neighbor’s apartment, and you can eventually get invited for dinner. The goal is to put sleeping pills in the husband’s drink so you can have sex with his partner without being disturbed.

NTR Legend uses sprite graphics, an isometric perspective, and simple animations. However, a lot of work has been put into the facial expressions of the neighbor, which takes up a significant portion of the screen during sex scenes. NTR Legend was extremely popular on DLSite, ranking as the 18th most popular title in 2020. And although mainstream gaming sites never covered it, the game’s influence has reverberated throughout the adult gaming community.

NTRaholic takes inspiration

In the upcoming NTRaholic, you also play the bull in an NTR relationship, but the twist here is that you are the landlord of two apartments that are next to each other. When a young married couple moves into the other apartment, you decide to have some “fun” with the woman, but corrupting their true love will be extremely difficult, even for someone with your skills. You decide to get help from an outside contractor, i.e., the demon Lilith, who grants you her erotic powers for the next ninety days with your immortal soul as collateral.

There are a lot of similarities between NTRaholic and NTR Legend. Both games are about cheating and corruption, but both games have an isometric perspective, and you can’t move around the map freely. NTRaholic also has a super-charged phone interface through which you control the game, just like NTR Legend does. I’ve played both games, and they are so similar that it can be hard to keep them apart in my head.

However, I would not want to claim that NTRaholic is outright cloning another game. The makers on their store page say they are “inspired by NtrLegend,” which is an accurate distinction. For example, there are far more locations to explore in this game, the minigames are very different, and the corruption of your target is tracked as a womb tattoo.

NTRaholic is currently available on DLSite and will be available on Steam on June 30th.

(Sponsored) Private Dick: Lipstick & Lies

Private Dick: Lipstick & Lies ain’t a love story but a visual novel full of hard-boiled and erotic action. Step into a seedy modern world of deception, betrayal, and scheming, laced with a whiskey haze and lashing of joyful depravity.

The Red Tie demo includes one case from the full game and features unique hand-drawn art, an interactive sex scene, fully voiced dialog and narration, and an original soundtrack.

Check out the free demo for Private Dick: Lipstick & Lies on Itch.io.

Doom Clone vs. First-Person Shooter

There are actually far more games I wanted to cover here. There’s Handyman Legend and NTR Boy, which both seem heavily inspired by NTR Legend as they have an isometric perspective and UI elements very familiar to players of another game. A handful of games about cheating do not make a genre, but they do make for an interesting trend. These developers seem to be riffing on a shared game design and trying to give it their unique spin. And because of this, I think we’re witnessing the birth of a new genre of adult games.

Something similar happened after the original Doom came out. That game blew everyone’s minds when it was first released in 1993. As one of the first fully 3D titles for home computers, this was the first time many people experienced a shooter in a first-person perspective. Doom created a thrilling and immersive experience by centering the player’s perspective in the action. It was such an influential title that it set genre conventions and audience expectations for years that other developers found difficult to escape.

But at the time, that genre of games was simply called “Doom Clones.” If you look at posts on Usenet, a precursor to social media in the early 90s, it took almost five years for the term “first-person shooter” to gain traction from video game enthusiasts over the term “doom clone."

I suspect we’ll see something similar happen with the “NTR-but-you-play-the-bull” genre in the future. It seems to me that NTR Legend was so bold and innovative when it was released three years ago that it inadvertently set conventions for an entire genre.

And I, for one, can’t wait to see what comes next.

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

• Match-3 visual novel Tsundere Milfin is now available on Steam. The boss at your new job is extremely cute but very strict and religious, and you want to earn both her respect and affection.

• Boys Love visual novel Burning Secrets was released on Steam. An impish satyr is worried for the well-being of a wizard and ventures into the woods with a friend to search for him.

• Puzzle game Under Contract is now available in Early Access. A college dropout applies for every possible job he can find and signs a contract for a demon-run office job without reading the fine print.

• RPG Alice in Dreamland was released on Itch.io. Alice is looking for an escape from her dreary life when she finds herself transported into Wonderland after opening a book and flipping through its pages.

• MangaGamer has an NTR sale until May 29th. Now that’s what I call timing! (They did not sponsor today’s newsletter.)

• NookGaming reviews otome visual novel The Spanish Privateer. “Although the storytelling is dull at times due to too much telling and little showing, the story itself is filled with interesting and unexpected events that keep the momentum and curiosity going.”

• Visual novel publisher NekoNyan promises they won’t drop adult content going forward. The publisher addressed concerns raised by their latest release shipping without the adult content that was promised when the game was announced.

• SexTechGuide writes about romantic AI partners. “With its AI trained on [Snapchat influencer] Marjorie’s YouTube videos and using OpenAI’s GPT-4 for conversation, it already has over 1,000 subscribers.”

Artist spotlight 💡

Thanks for reading this far!

-Mr. Hands

NaughtyList.News is a free weekly publication about adult games, sometimes supported by advertising. If you like my work enough to support me directly, please check out my Ko-Fi!

Hello, naughty news fans!

This week, I’ve tried to be less of a grumpy old man and given these newfangled AI tools a fair shake. Of course, I’m already using Grammarly to clean up my writing (My most common mistake is “Missing comma in compound sentence“), but I have thus far avoided using AI tools for text generation.

And no, this newsletter isn’t going full Skynet any time soon, but I wanted to see if it lived up to the hype. I asked ChatGPT to give me a summary of the term “netorare” in adult media, and it actually spits out a half-decent explanation! And that’s your hint for what next week’s article will be about. 😉

How do you feel about these glorified text prediction algorithms helping is with our creative endeavors? Are they a boon or a menace thus far?

Leave a comment

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

• Breeding-themed visual novel Tamas Awakening is out now on Steam. A psychologist uses hypnotism to impregnate the women in his life in this linear story without any choices.

• Puzzle RPG Leveling up Girls in Another World is now available on Steam. A Demon Queen has learned from her previous defeat and made herself immune to all harm from men, and a hero must train women to fight her in his stead.

• Farming simulator VillageRhapsody leaves Steam Early Access. Grow your homestead and form intimate bonds with a town’s population of lonely women, including several monster girls.

• Three futa visual novels from The Poundry have been remastered as Jenni’s DONG has got it GOIN’ ON: The Jenny Trilogy. Find out what’s happening with Jenni (and her dong) in the visual novels Jenni Wrong Number, Jenni’s New Friend, and Jenni Truth or Dare.

• Simulation game Alice in Cameraland is now available on DLSite. Help an adult actress film an erotic interpretation of the classic Alice in Wonderland story by choosing how to film the scenes.

• Searches for “VPN” soar in Utah amidst Pornhub blockage. Pornhub decided to block Utah after a new law required “reasonable” age verification of users, which means either uploading a government ID or verification by a third-party app.

• Tinder removes promotional bio links from profiles. The move means one fewer venue for sex workers to vet clients before meeting them or send them to subscription services like OnlyFans.

Artist spotlight 💡

Thanks for reading this far!

-Mr. Hands

NaughtyList.News is a free weekly publication about adult games, sometimes supported by advertising. If you’d like to buy me a coffee, please check out my Ko-Fi!

I attended the A MAZE 12th International Games and Playful Media Festival in Berlin this week, and it was ama- fantastic. It is, and always will be, an absolutely tiny festival with attendees measured in the low thousands. But that means that everyone who knows anyone in the indie games scene will be there, and it’s a great excuse to catch up with the friends you don’t get to see as often as you would like.

While you can play indie games in the exhibition hall, it’s never my main focus. I’m just not a fan of playing games in an exhibition setting, but I love engaging the developers who are brave enough to exhibit their games. Luckily, there are also plenty of interesting talks every year.

The organizers at A MAZE always take great care to invite speakers from a wide variety of backgrounds. You don’t just get to hear from interesting game developers but also from people with a background in contemporary art, historians who use a game engine to engage with their subject matter, and people doing what can only be lovingly described as “completely unhinged shit.”

Here are some of my favorite talks from this year’s event:

Critical Games

While speaker Jeremy Couillard originally wanted to talk about some tabs he had open in his browser, he changed his mind and used the time to talk about critical games instead. He borrowed this term from the book A Critical Cinema and noted that it’s different from the term avant-garde.

The way he describes it, avant-garde is where the artwork comes first, and commercial projects follow, while critical media is the other way around. The classic avant-garde example is fashion: The impractical designs you see on the runway at a fashion show trickle down all the way to the design of the €10 sweater you buy at Primark.

Critical media then, is art that cannot be understood without putting it in the context of the commercial projects that preceded it. Mr. Couillard points to Cruelty Squad as an example of a critical game, a bewildering first-person shooter that subverts the themes and conventions of games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Splinter Cell. I’ve played Cruelty Squad, and his description is spot-on: It is a very smart tactical shooter that intentionally hides behind a facade of ugly visuals. But the game is incomprehensible if you’re not intimately familiar with the genre.

I could probably write a thousand more words about this talk because it was something that really got the mental gears going for me!

Using transmedia for world-building

Disappointingly, this talk was not about transgender representation in video games but instead about using different types of media to build a shared world for your games. Igor Simic and his team at demagog studio built three games in the same post-apocalyptic world. They started with the golfing game Golf Club: Wasteland, then the puzzle platformer sequel The Cub, and finally, the turn-based strategy prequel Highwater.

These are radically different genres, yet the games share characters and are set in the same world. The same themes of loneliness, ecological collapse, and post-humanism are present in all three.

While making these games, the studio also released music videos featuring the post-apocalyptic setting. Mr. Simic has a background in contemporary art and wouldn't describe himself as a “gamer.” He said that music videos set in video game landscapes had helped him get into their worlds in the past.

This stunning talk showed the power of inviting people outside the games industry to think about games as well. It’s such a brilliant way to think about how games can be used to reinforce the same artistic message from different angles that I’m surprised other studios aren’t really doing this yet!

Frustrating the player, and why we love to do it

Although I unfortunately missed the opening, this was still a really interesting talk. Art director Goldie Bartlett and writer/programmer/designer Jason Bakker discussed their game Wayward Strand. They purposefully minimize the player’s power to allow other characters more agency. This means the player might be tasked to talk to an NPC who indicates that they really don’t want to talk to you. The question for designers is then: How do you give NPCs enough agency in the story while preventing them from becoming “puzzles” for the player to solve?

I’ve previously discussed adult games as power fantasies in this newsletter, and it was heartening to see that other people are having deep thoughts about player agency in games as well.

All Games Should Have (list of stupid things Gwen likes)

Gwen Foster spoke about what she likes to see in games, including cats, dogs, chickens, pizza, and chairs. Absolutely unhinged shit. No notes. You love to see it.

HYPERTALKS

The format for HYPERTALKS is straightforward and effective: We start with the official anthem, and then seven speakers are each given five minutes to talk about a topic of their choosing. Some talks are really interesting, and some talks are really not, but none of them are allowed to overstay their welcome. And it’s always a barn-busting good time.

Memorable talks this year were about the prophesized death of VR, how to find games to sign as an indie publisher, and decolonizing your mind by playing more games from Africa, the Middle East, and other regions not well-known for their thriving games industry.

If there’s one event you shouldn’t miss at A MAZE, it’s this one!

Inspiring the Youths™

While I am a AAA games programmer by trade, I also like to pretend I’m part of the indie games scene. I suppose this newsletter helps in that regard. I’m secretly a very outgoing person and have no issues initiating a conversation with a stranger if I’m in the right mindset. But whenever I talk to some extremely cool indie game developer at a conference, they’re always starstruck by my senior title and mostly want to hear about my work in AAA games. And I get it! I’ve been the awkward twenty-something who wanted nothing more than to work at one of the bigger game companies myself. But friends, I want to assure you that the grass is always greener on the other side.

It’s true that there’s a lot more money sloshing around in AAA and that it’s very difficult for indie game developers to get funding for their projects. But as an indie developer, you get complete ownership of your crazy ideas and can put your game in people’s hands relatively quickly. I’ve been working on the same AAA game project for 18 months now, and there are at least 18 months to go before this game is in players' hands.

So if you’re one of the people I spoke to at the conference, I want to assure you that I think what you’re doing is really cool and important, and I hope everything works out for you in the end. ❤

Leap of faith

I’ve attended this conference every year since 2016, and it holds a special place in my heart. When I was there for the first time, I had a job interview at a Berlin-based games company the same week, and it was at A MAZE I heard the good news that I would be moving to the city. It was at this event that I dared to make the leap to move abroad and further my career.

I think it’s time to make another leap of faith. Next year, I plan to give a talk of my own about adult games at A MAZE. I want to talk about why adult games are important and how I designed my own adult game from the ground up. At the very least, I will write this talk and find a way to get it out there if the organizers aren’t interested.

Hope to see you there next year! 😘

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

• Yaoi romance All Idleness and Ephemera is now available on Steam. A prince seeks love and understanding from his cousin after a lifetime of emotional neglect from his royal family.

• Arcade shooter Otoko Cross: Pretty Boys Breakup! was released on Steam. Destroy bricks with your ball and paddle to purchase sexy outfits and backgrounds for ten cute cross-dressing boys.

• Supernatural romance Seducing The Devil is now in Steam Early Access. A young man is in an open relationship with his girlfriend and her mother when he meets his online girlfriend abroad and has to choose between love and lust.

• Denpasoft is hosting a Spring Sale until tomorrow, May 15th. The sale includes many recent releases like Girls! Girls! Girls?! and Robolife-Days with Aino.

• BlerdyOtome shares more games that won’t blow your budget. “Every penny counts, and you shouldn’t have to go broke for your hobbies, so here are three games under $10 that you can add to your play list!”

• The Free Speech Coalition is discussing financial discrimination by adult businesses in Congress. Over a dozen in-person meetings with House and Senate offices are planned to see what legislators can do to help.

• Reddit will allow users to upload adult images from their desktop. Communities must be set to 18+ to allow adult content to be uploaded.

Artist spotlight 💡

Thanks for reading this far!

-Mr. Hands

Hey there, naughty news fans!

Thank you for the lively discussion regarding last week’s article; it was really great to read. I assure you this won’t be the last you’ll hear of this topic. I have to limit my reporting to publicly available sources, and there may be a lot more going on behind the scenes. In case you missed my article:

As usual, I’ve been really busy this week, but I will try to make some time today to get back to y’all. In the meantime, did you know that even more adult games were released this week? Sounds made-up, but it’s true!

Let me know if anything tickled your fancy this week. 😘

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

• Clicker game Webcum Empire Tycoon is now available on Steam. As the manager of a webcam studio, it’s your job to hire actresses, reinvest their earnings into your operation, and help them produce income even faster.

• RPG Nandemoya of Flower Street is out now on Steam. A retired assassin begrudgingly takes the woman next door as his disciple when the organization that trained him finds him in his remote hiding place.

• Card game EdgeLords is now available on Steam. In a dimension rich with magic known as the Edge, four sorceresses gather for a battle royale for the title of the dimension’s ruler, the Edge Lord.

• Business simulator Succubus Alchemist: Transformation, Orgasming Hell is out now on Steam. A succubus overhears goblins raving about fleshlight made out of attacking adventurers and decides to make capturing adventurers and transforming them into magical items her new business venture.

• SenseGlove Nova haptic VR gloves offer realistic touch. The high-end glove devices let you feel the “size, stiffness, and resistance” of VR objects.

• PornHub disables access from Utah in response to anti-porn law. Google searches for “age verification” and “VPN” are up significantly in the American state.

• Semafor writes about the big wins of anti-porn activists. “Anti-porn campaigners are gaining ground by warning about sexual exploitation and damage to young minds, rather than trying to brand material as fundamentally obscene.”

Artist spotlight 💡

Thanks for reading this far!

-Mr. Hands

NaughtyList.News is a free weekly publication about adult games, sometimes supported by advertising. If you’d like to buy me a coffee, please check out my Ko-Fi!

Earlier this week, adult game developers started panicking about the possibility of Itch.io banning their products from the online storefront. Reports were trickling in about multiple adult game developers receiving an email from the storefront saying their access to itch.io Payouts had been revoked.

The email to this adult games developer reads, in part:

We’ve recently reviewed your account, and unfortunately, we can no longer off our “Collected by itch.io & paid later (aka itch.io Payouts)” system for your account. To continue accepting payments, you will need to switch your account to the “Direct to you” mode. […] To provide uninterrupted service to as many users as possible, we can no longer facilitate payments for your account through our Payouts system.

Itch.io has made the full email they sent to affected developers available here.

What is the itch.io Payouts system, and why did the platform revoke access for this developer? And does this mean the storefront has started cracking down on adult games on their platform in general?

What is the Payouts system?

Itch.io Payouts is a system where the storefront becomes the listed Merchant of Record on the transaction to customers. This differs from “Direct to you,” in which developers must manually connect every payment provider they wish to make available. In that model, the payment provider account (i.e., the developer’s name or their company) will be listed as the Merchant of Record on the transaction.

Customer payments via the Payouts system go directly to itch.io, and developers are responsible for claiming their earnings from the platform. Earnings can be paid out after a seven-day grace period to account for payment processing issues and fraud prevention. After initiating a payout, it is hand-reviewed by itch.io staff and paid “at our earliest convenience.” Payouts are done via either PayPal or Payoneer.

The convenience for developers is that itch.io Payouts handles the complicated patchwork of rules and regulations for accepting payments via a third-party service. For example, European value-added tax (VAT) laws dictate that any business selling to customers in the European Union must collect VAT according to the rate the customer buys from. This means that information about each customer in the EU must be collected and stored securely.

The Payouts service provides another convenience for developers: it will mail them a tax form detailing their earnings on the platform at the end of the (fiscal) year. When using “Direct to you,” developers must request these forms from each payment provider individually. They are also responsible for collecting the aforementioned VAT from customers in the European Union themselves.

So why are some adult game developers reportedly banned from using the much more convenient Payouts service on itch.io?

What’s going on?

On Cohost, @lexyeevee wrote a blog post about the situation last Thursday. She claims to have identified six accounts for which itch.io has revoked access to their Payouts system. There are also unverified reports floating around that as many as 20 developers may be affected. Of the six developers that Eevee was able to verify as banned from the Payouts system, two of them provided a subscription model not endorsed by itch.io, one has published over 40 low-quality adult games in the past year, and three were banned for reasons that were not immediately obvious to her.

Digging into the details of the subscription model these developers provided bolsters the theory that these bans are more about accounting issues than their games' content. Each time the developer releases an update to their game, they duplicate the game’s page and hide the old one. Because each game’s page is treated as a “new” game on the platform, anyone who has purchased a previous build has to repurchase the game instead of receiving updates for free.

Subverting the intended purchase flow causes support issues for itch.io and is toeing the line very close to outright fraud. The convenience of the Payouts system is that all customer money first flows through one of itch.io’s holdings before it gets distributed to developers. But this means that itch.io assumes financial liability for these payments and is on the hook for any shenanigans pulled by the developers on its storefront.

Initial response from itch.io

In a reply to a topic on the itch.io Community forum from adult game developer HH Richards titled “Will adult games be forced into "direct payments" instead of "collected by itch.io"?”, itch.io CEO “leafo” replied, in part:

We haven’t made any global policy changes, but we have notified some developers individually through our support system that they are no longer eligible for our Payouts system, and that in order to continue accepting payments they will have to switch to “Direct to you”.

This means that while the affected developers can no longer use the Payouts system, they can still use itch.io as a storefront if they handle the payments directly through the different payment providers. Leafo also points out that itch.io takes on significant risk with the Payouts system:

When a seller uses our Payouts system, we take on the responsibility and the associated risk for the content they distribute. We strive to offer our platform to as many independent creators as possible, but, since itch.io utilizes multiple third-party services to facilitate its payment services, we have to be careful about the risk we take on.

One of the rumors floating around was the bans were related to the revenue share with the platform set by developers. The CEO denies this in no uncertain terms:

Changing your revenue share setting will not affect the decision on your account. At no time have we ever asked an account to set their revenue share to something specific. […] [T]here is no minimum revenue share requirement for accounts to have access to our Payouts system.

Eevee then contacted the CEO of itch.io on Discord directly and asked them the burning question on everybody’s mind, which is whether these bans are specifically targeting adult game developers:

Eevee: I know you can’t clarify the precise reasons for shunting accounts onto “direct to you.” But is it possible that, for comparable reasons, the same might be done to an account that had only ever sold SFW games?

Leafo: Good question, I can think of at least one developer off the top of my head in our past where we may have considered using this restriction if we had implemented it at the time. It’s the same justification, mitigating [our] risk. We assume a liability [and] cost with running accounts in our Payouts system, and sometimes we have to make [a] difficult decision for the greater stability of the platform.

Leafo: Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s appropriate to share who this is and why, as we do not make private account matters public.

Leafo’s answers seem to confirm the suspicion that the current situation is not related to adult games on their platform but that some developers are creating a headache for their accountants and/or lawyers.

Rumors swirl in an information vacuum

Instead of being wishy-washy about why certain developers were banned from using the Payouts system on itch.io, it would have been much better for everyone involved if the platform had immediately come with a strong statement saying they are trying to stop fraud on their platform and would continue to sell adult games on its storefront.

Unfortunately, itch.io can’t do that.

If it’s true that the current debacle is about preventing fraud on the platform and not banning adult content, then itch.io cannot tip its hand. One of the tenets of fraud prevention is that you shouldn’t let fraudsters know how you’ve detected their fraud because it might help them to, you know, hide their fraud better next time. This creates a frustrating situation for all parties involved. Itch.io cannot comment on individual cases for fear of leaking information about their fraud detection, and developers don’t know what they did wrong when they receive a vague email from the platform informing them they’ve been cut off from certain payment features.

This lack of information creates an environment in which rumors run rampant. Is itch.io targeting adult game developers in particular? Or is it because some developers had set their revenue share percentage with the platform to zero? Maybe adult games were always secretly banned, and it was only by the graces of the platform holders that they were allowed on the storefront.

To be clear, none of these rumors have been confirmed. As far as we know, adult games are still allowed on the itch.io storefront. But this panicked reaction from adult game developers is understandable if you look at the bigger picture.

Always waiting for the other shoe to drop

Itch.io, like any other store on the Internet, is beholden to payment processors who handle millions of transactions for them for regions with wildly different payment methods and regulatory requirements. To put it bluntly, even if itch.io wanted to, it would not be possible for them to take your credit card themselves and charge you directly when you purchase a game on their platform.

But this creates a problem for adult game developers, who are beholden to the terms of service for payment processors that often treat perfectly legal adult content as high risk or even adjacent to fraud. The requirement to conform to third-party terms of service is explicitly stated in the original email from itch.io to developers banned from using its Payouts system:

As a reminder, per our Terms of Service, your account’s activity must comply with the Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policies of any third-party payment processors you utilize through your itch.io account.

Sex worker and erotic game maker @boarlord points out that developers are right to be worried about violating the terms of service of payment providers, as they’ve seen a similar issue with adult content play out many times on other platforms. Everything was fine until it suddenly wasn’t. Sex workers have sounded the alarm about financial discrimination from payment processors for years, for example, during OnlyFans’ brief porn ban two years ago.

And there’s precedent for games stores to ban adult content suddenly. Last year, I reported that Game Jolt, another small storefront for indie games, dropped the sales of adult games on their platform without any prior warning:

Conclusion

No, itch.io did not ban adult games from their storefront this week. It is much more likely that the platform had to deal with developers who were abusing their payment systems for unsanctioned activities. The fact that this ban impacted adult games is an unhappy coincidence.

Nevertheless, adult game developers should remain vigilant about changes to the storefronts they use to sell their wares while keeping their heads cool about any rumors floating around, which is about as easy as rubbing your belly while patting your head.

A big shoutout to @lexyeevee, @boarlord, and @Bigg on Cohost, and everyone else who gave me tips about the rumors floating around the adult games community. Today’s reporting was only possible thanks to your hard work! Please check out the original posts I’ve linked. In particular, consider supporting Eevee on Patreon for her queer game development.

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

• Stealth game Embarrassed Shina-chan -the Naked Wandering College Girl- is now available on DLSite. When an eighteen-year-old college freshman wakes up the morning after a welcoming party, she lies naked in the middle of the city.

• Investigative dating sim Sewell Plaza has a free demo on itch.io. A young man aspires to become a detective and soon learns that his happy little community isn’t all it seems.

• Cross-dressing maids dating sim Girls! Girls! Girls!? is out now on Steam. Become the new manager of a café in deep trouble, handle unruly customers, and get to know your four adorable maids.

• Project Cappuccino 2 is looking for funding on Kickstarter. After the events of the first game dethroned the Succubus Queen, a tournament is held to choose the next Queen from one of the four domains of the underworld.

• Comedic arcade puzzler Mokoko X is now available on MangaGamer. Uncover lewd images by slicing your ship through the foreground while avoiding enemies and other obstacles.

• Imgur will ban all sexually explicit content on May 15th, 2023. Imgur was one of the few popular social media sites and image hosts that allowed porn.

• NCOSE launches a campaign to ban all adult content from Reddit. The group calls for the platform to take action against “hardcore pornography and sexually explicit content.”

Artist spotlight 💡

Thanks for reading this far!

-Mr. Hands

Hey, naughty news fans!

I find myself at a bit of a crossroads. Although I want to keep writing this newsletter every week, I’m finding it harder and harder to make time for it. Most days now, I start working at 8 AM with the intention of stopping early but end up working until 6 PM anyway. AAA games are complicated software, and there’s just too much to take care of right now. As a UI programmer on this game, I write code in C++, JavaScript, Typescript, Sass, and Python. Yes, that makes me a unicorn, and I’m compensated accordingly. But I now find myself having to explain all our processes and workflows to the for four (!) new team members that joined in the past couple of months.

What this means, in practical terms, is that while the work I’m doing is very satisfying, it’s also pretty exhausting. I don’t feel particularly motivated to put more work into this newsletter after my day job ends since it is my third job after working on my own game.

You may have noticed that I’ve stopped updating Reddit, don’t hang out on Discord anymore, and I’m pushing the release of this newsletter back a few hours every Sunday. These are all time-saving measures. I want to do more interviews and write in-depth about Japanese erotic games culture, but articles like that take hours of research and sadly can’t be crammed into a Sunday morning.

I don’t have any good answers for how to deal with this conundrum, but I know I’ve come too far to quit now. As always, thanks for reading. 😘

P.S. I’m trying to kick my Twitter habit by posting more on Substack Notes!

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

• Fantasy visual novel SEX x HEX is now available on Steam. After a hero rescues three witches, they track him down to supposedly join his party, but soon their twisted motivations become clear.

• Orc Convenant: Gay Bara Visual Novel is looking for funding on Kickstarter. The heir to the throne is robbed of his birthright by his father’s rival and departs his elven homeland to seek the aid of the orcs, his people’s sworn enemies.

• Sandbox RPG Golden Legend -Harald Quest- was released on Steam. A mercenary-turned-warrior wants to start her own mercenary group, how she goes about doing that is all up to you.

• Visual novel A Summer in Mexico is available on Itch.io. A young man on vacation takes a trip to stay with his exceptionally wealthy aunt, who seems to run her sleepy town with an iron fist.

• German police ramp up their plan to eliminate all explicit content from Twitter. News magazine Der Spiegel devoted a feature to the authorities’ campaign to deter users from sharing sexual content.

• Arizona senator’s anti-porn bill questioned by party members. Several members of the Arizona Republican party raised serious concerns about the proposal to implement mandatory age verification for adult websites in the state.

Cheeky chuckle 🤭

Artist spotlight 💡

Thanks for reading this far!

Until next time,

-Mr. Hands

Hey, naughty news fans!

It looks like Twitter is really going down the drain. I can’t embed tweets into the newsletter this week because the new owner is having a public meltdown over Substack adding its own Twitter competitor. I’ve basically already stopped using Twitter except for sporadic retweets, but this is the final nail in the coffin for me. Although I’ve been saying that for a few months now…

I’ve been trying hard to make time to write an article this week, but I’ve found it impossibly difficult. Between my regular full-time job, I’m also juggling the development of my own game and a house where everything seems to break all the time. I want to write more, but I don’t know where that time should come from.

Regardless, thank you for reading. ❤

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

• Yuri visual novel Lovers in Playa Rosa is now available on Steam. After failing to turn a profit in her bar and being cheated on by her husband, Tina ventures to a resort to discover a new kind of love.

• Kinetic visual novel My Furry Dragon is out now on Steam. A hero is sent on a quest to save a princess from a terrifying dragon who turns out to be a beautiful scalie dragon girl instead.

• Forbidden Confessions: My Neighbor’s Daughter was released on Itch.io. Forty-something Mr. Jacobs is trying to get over his wife leaving him for another man when his new neighbors move in with their twenty-one-year-old daughter.

• Nukige Sex-Loving Family is now available on Steam. The abusive owner of a hot spring resort has set out to turn an entire family of guests into his obedient sex slaves.

• Lewd Games Reviewers looked at stealth game Mommy Milkers Miko. “The plot doesn't have much meat past its initial premise and the occasional twist, but it's serviceable.”

• A pro mountain biker and the cycling federation clash over an OnlyFans sponsorship. At the core of the debate is whether OnlyFans is considered a “pornographic product,” which is not allowed by the sponsorship regulations.

• The legislature in Arkansas succeeded in mandating age verification for all major social media platforms starting September 1st. Critics worry that the bill would expose sensitive personal information and hamper personal freedom.

Cheeky chuckle 🤭

Artist spotlight 💡

Thanks for reading this far!

If you want to help me compile the newsletter, feel free to poke me on Twitter.

Until next time!

-Mr. Hands

Hey, naughty news fans!

I must be honest; I spent too much time away from the computer this week to write an article. I’ve been trying my hand at woodworking by making a spice rack for my lovely wife, we found out our refrigerator broke, and I finally painted my office a lovely shade of green.

I know that none of that has to do with adult games or their development, but I’m afraid that’s just what my life looks like right now!

Yesterday was of course April Fools' day, and that means we have to tap the sign:

Did you see any fake visual novels being released this year? Please let me know in the comments!

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

• Management sim Idol Hands 2 is now available on Steam. When your star idol becomes an idol manager herself, she ends her contract and becomes your new rival.

• Fantasy Metroidvania Futas Valley is out now on Itch.io. A futanari wood elf is researching mushrooms when she gets lost in a mysterious fog and falls down a cliff into an underground world.

• NTR’d By Clumsiness is out now on Steam Early Access. Jeff is so clumsy that he ends up in compromising situations with his best friend’s wife.

• Post-apocalypse RPG Doomsday Robot Girl is now available on DLSite. After Earth has been devastated by a new world war, a soldier awakens in the middle of the desert to find a military robot in the shape of a young white-haired girl has taken him to safety.

• AI chatbot Replika performs erotic U-turn. Following backlash, the chatbot companion app restored its ‘erotic role play’ (ERP) mode for some users.

• The Bible was challenged in Utah for explicit sexual content. A parent is challenging the state’s legal redefinition of “pornography” by flagging the book for its numerous instances of sexual content.

• Digital rights and adult industry groups warn about “porn passport” laws. The groups point to potential breaches of privacy and expansion of state and corporate surveillance coupled with easy avoidance by bad actors.

Cheeky chuckle 🤭

Artist spotlight 💡

Thanks for reading this far!

If you want to help me compile the newsletter, feel free to poke me on Twitter.

Until next time!

-Mr. Hands

Hey, naughty news fans!

I’m starting to think that, as the Dutch say, I’m putting too much hay on my fork. I’ve been writing a small erotic story, which I plan to release as a visual novel, and I’m using a small custom game engine for it. But this is not the same engine as my other game project, which has been in development for over five years, so I’ll need to consolidate that at some point. Of course, I still work full-time on a AAA game title as a programmer because the bills don’t pay themselves. And, right, there’s the newsletter too…

Yet despite this busy schedule, I still managed to play some naughty games! I’ve been extremely enamored with the visual novel Tyrant Quest, which has some of the best and most intriguing writing I’ve seen in an adult game this year. And the art’s not bad either! I’d write more but ehh… see above. And the survivors-like action game Glory & Miserable Survivors DX has been an excellent podcast companion with sessions that last around twenty minutes.

How about you? What games have caught your eye this week? Let me know in the comments, which I’ve definitely remembered to turn on this time…

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

• Simulation game Handyman Legend is out now on Steam. A gig worker uses his practical skills to get invited to women’s homes and lay down some pipe, if you catch my drift.

• Arcade survivors-like Glory & Miserable Survivors DX is now available on Steam. Fight back against an onslaught of monsters with weapons and buildings as long as possible while preventing clothing damage.

• Roguelike zombie shooter ISEKAI FRONTLINE is out now on Steam. After being transported to a world where all men have transformed into mindless zombies, fight the hordes with your team of cute girl companions.

• Action game Futanari Dungeon Quest is now available on Steam. When an adventuring magician falls into a succubus’s trap, she is turned into a futanari and must maintain her sanity while escaping the dungeon.

• NookGaming interviewed Synstoria about their upcoming game Imperial Grace. “Besides game development, I am a full-time teacher, so it can be hard to balance everything sometimes, but I am very happy with everything we have accomplished so far!”

• Pornhub documentary Money Shot is the 4th most watched movie on Netflix. The movie offers a a well-rounded view on the porn website ranked ten spots above Netflix itself by Alexa through interviews with performers, activists, former employees and anti-porn crusaders.

• Bloomberg probes the financial discrimination facing adult performers. “If you don't have access to banks, you can't build credit. […] At any moment, we can lose access to everything."

Cheeky chuckle 🤭

Artist spotlight 💡

Thanks for reading this far!

If you want to help me compile the newsletter, feel free to poke me on Twitter.

Until next time!

-Mr. Hands

Hey there, naughty news fans!

I made a joke post on the ol’ Twitter about Steam’s latest update that makes it much easier to switch between accounts, and I inadvertently kicked a hornet’s nest. Now I want to ask you an important question:

Good arguments can be made for either case, so I’m excited to hear your thoughts!

And, oh geez, I only just realized that I’ve been publishing posts for the past few weeks with the comments turned off! No wonder it’s been so quiet in here!! I’ve turned them on for last week’s post now. Thanks, Substack…

I hope you have a lovely Sunday!

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

• First-person adventure Halloween Harem was released on Itch.io. Help as many people around town as possible to get a goth girl to acknowledge after waking up with amnesia in her lap in the park.

• RPG Maiden Kingdom is now available on Steam. Use the unique abilities of five different maidens to kill monsters and level up their skills.

• Unluckily in Love is the latest BL visual novel from prolific writer ebi-hime. Yuel is finishing his last year of college when his father suddenly dies, and he seeks guidance from his older cousin.

• Fantasy RPG Belial Red is now available on Steam. A noblewoman is captured by an enemy kingdom and forced to join their army alongside other captured women.

• Fantasy visual novel Elfheim - Chapter 1 is out now on Steam. A couple of playful Elves aids an undeterred slime king-turned-human in returning to his kingdom.

• Kotaku writes about Starfield’s completely sexless 18+ rating. “So, no one fucks in Starfield, but everyone commits crimes and gets high. Yep, sounds like space.”

• Kinky Lemur Games is hosting a charity bundle on Itch.io. The money they raise will be donated to help the victims of the earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria on February 6th.

• SexTechGuide looks at sex therapy apps as the possible future of sexual healing.

Cheeky chuckle 🤭

Artist spotlight 💡

Thanks for reading this far!

If you want to help me compile the newsletter, feel free to poke me on Twitter.

Until next time!

-Mr. Hands

Almost a month ago, I received a newsletter from veteran game designer Jeff Vogel titled “The Heart of Gaming is the Power Fantasy.” His company Spiderweb Software has been surviving as a completely independent game developer for over 30 years, which gives him an extraordinarily rare perspective on the games industry.

Mr. Vogel is well-known for his at times controversial stances, but I think he opens this article in a very strong way:

Video games function best as power fantasies. This is a statement that can generate controversy, though fifty years of video game history show that it is true. […] Yet, relentlessly, through it all, the most popular and beloved games are almost universally about the exercise of power.

I’ve been thinking about this statement a lot and how it relates to adult gaming.

What’s a power fantasy, anyway?

In real life, you’re probably not a Gondorian Ranger who bonded with the wraith of the Elf Lord Celembrimbor, but you can play as one in Shadow of Mordor. And no matter your actual physical strength, your sword hits just as hard as everyone else’s when you press (X) on your controller. The game’s power fantasy then is being able to perform violent actions that would otherwise be frowned upon, like hitting orcs on the head with your sword until they die.

But games do not require violence for them to be power fantasies. Whenever you change your environment in a game, you fulfill a power fantasy. Whether that’s bonking orc heads in Shadow of Mordor, setting traffic policies in SimCity, or making characters kiss in Dragon Age.

Adult games as power fantasies

When you play an adult game, you fulfill a power fantasy as well. No matter your real-life physique, gender, or sexuality, you can make characters fall head over heels for you in Boyfriend Dungeon, and of course date multiple of the characters at once. Nobody bats an eyelash at these actions in the game; that’s the fantasy it provides.

In adult games, you have the power to forge relationships between characters in any way that you desire. There may be obstacles to overcome to keep things interesting, but you will likely be able to pick a route that suits you best.

That’s why polyamory is so common in adult games and why many characters are written as casually bi or straight-up pansexual; why deny players the opportunity to get off in a way that works best for them?

Designing around Sexual Vending Machines

Suffice it to say that I find Vogel’s lens of looking at games as power fantasies to be very useful. But what’s gnawing at me in the back of my head is the excellent book Passion and Play about adult game design. I wrote an in-depth review of the book last year, and one of the ideas the book brings forth is the concept of a Chemistry Casino design for romance and relationships.

The book draws a contrast between a game design that uses Kindness Coins versus one using a Chemistry Coins design. The first is your stereotypical dating sim game design: In order to get characters to like you, you keep doing nice things for them. First, you talk to them about their interests, then you give them gifts, and finally, you take them on dates. The criticism against this kind of design is that it treats characters kind of like Sexual Vending Machines: You keep putting coins in until your desired outcome rolls out, which is usually sex with hot women.

What a Chemistry Casino game design does then is do away with these types of “relationship bars.” It puts the desires of the characters in the game front and center. Instead of responding to direct stimuli, a character could respond positively or negatively to how you dress up your avatar or your actions during a mission.

From a game design perspective, this is very difficult to pull off. How do you make it clear to a player that their actions influence their relationships with other characters in such a subtle way? And how do you avoid player frustration when they can’t romance the characters they want? Worst of all, how do you communicate what’s going on to the player? The book does not dive too deeply into these questions because it’s ultimately about game design, not implementation.

If we apply Vogel’s lens to the question of why a Kindness Casino game design is so difficult to pull off, namely that all (successful) games are power fantasies, we can see what’s going on here. By making the player’s actions less direct, we are removing part of the player’s power fantasy of being able to steer characters and relationships to get what they want from them.

And this lens works for all kinds of supposedly more “innocent” games about relationships between characters, for example, The Sims and Stardew Valley. My wife will absolutely have her Sims chat with the new neighbor until they’re friendly, hug until they’re close, and finally, Woo-Hoo them. All in the same in-game day. That’s her fulfilling the power fantasy of controlling the social relations between characters.

Yes, there are awkward implications to being able to bludgeon NPCs into doing what you want at all times, but ultimately that’s what players are looking to get out of adult games. Jeff Vogel summarizes it this way for the action and strategy games he makes:

Steakhouses sell steak. Barbershops sell haircuts. We sell victory. It's not real, it's fantasy. But it feels real, and that's enough. There are other routes to profit making video games, but you have to work very hard to find them.

Life is already a complicated enough game for people to navigate; we game developers don’t have to make people jump through hoops to get their favorite blorbos to smooch. They’re here for steak; our job is to ask them how bloody they want it!

Conclusion

I don’t think Jeff Vogel’s idea that all games are power fantasies is immune to criticism. But this framing did shake some things loose in my head. I’ve been struggling to design and build my own adult game for well over five years now. That’s not just because I don’t work on my game full-time; it’s just really freaking hard. Adult games are a very interesting design challenge: How do you design a video game that is fun and sexy at the same time? I’ll let you know if I ever figure it out, but in the meantime, I will keep smashing my action figures together.

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

• Romance visual novel A Sex Slave’s Love Story is now available on Steam. A young woman raised in a brothel is used as a bargaining chip by her adoptive father to increase his influence.

• Training simulator The Dorm Is Yours! was released on DLSite. Take care of a dorm of mages during an unending trial period where you’ll have to please the students to keep your job.

• Yuri visual novel GOOD LUCK BABY! is now available on Steam. High schooler Hifumi wonders what she did to deserve unrelenting misfortune until she meets a sunny delinquent with a heart of gold.

• Blerdy Otome writes about My Alien Roommate. When an alien boy lands on your balcony one uneventful Sunday night, Riley’s world is instantly turned upside-down.

• Side-scrolling tower defense Murasakimori Ritual was released on DLSite. Collect sperm from the monsters that come in waves to prevent you from performing a ritual in the forest.

Cheeky chuckle 🤭

Artist spotlight 💡

Thanks for reading this far!

If you want to help me compile the newsletter, feel free to poke me on Twitter.

Until next time!

-Mr. Hands

Hey, naughty news fans!

I find myself, once again, writing the newsletter on the proverbial bus to school. I have many ideas for interesting articles swirling around in my head, but I’m finding it very difficult to sit down and actually write them down.

Work has been keeping me busy, in a good way. We have three new junior programmers throwing many interesting challenges my way. They’re challenging the status quo and asking the “dumb” questions, which is great for improving the team’s productivity but this means I spend several hours every day in meetings and over-the-shoulder code reviews.

Besides that, I’m still working on the monster that eats weekends, i.e. the house I bought two months ago. All of this is to say that it’s been fairly hard to make time for lewdness!

Nevertheless, I always want to make time for the Sunday morning lewds, which is why I’m writing this paragraph while the bus is turning into the schoolyard.

Until next time. 😘

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

• Tower defense Protect Harem City is now available on Steam. Become the guardian heroine of a small city attacked by hordes of marching monsters.

• Mystery thriller Senele ~Apoptosis~ is out now on Steam. A writer struggles with a project when he hears a banging in the middle of the night and finds a drenched catgirl standing on his porch.

• Tactical RPG Rance IX - The Helmenian Revolution is out now on MangaGamer. Did you know that the first Rance game came out in 1989? Same as me!

• Romantic monster girl drama Garden of Roses is available on Itch.io. A young man returns to his hometown, filled with humans and demihumans alike, for unfinished business and to reconnect with his father.

• Isekai adventure game NPC Rape! Survival life on a deserted island raping all female characters was released on DLSite. An avid video game player ignores the objectives of the game he’s sucked into and instead abuses the non-playable characters for his own gratification.

• Sweet & Spicy reviews otome game Olympia Soiree. “I walked away from Olympia Soiree both shocked and awed. […] I think that’s the charm in a game like this, where you can recognize that it isn’t all good but still appreciate the entertainment you got from it including the parts that were not to your liking.”

• UK parliament rehashes anti-porn myths and recommends crackdown. A report was released with phrasing identical to the talking points from anti-porn lobbying groups like the NCOSE and Exodus Cry in the U.S.

Cheeky chuckle 🤭

Artist spotlight 💡

Thanks for reading this far!

If you want to help me compile the newsletter, feel free to poke me on Twitter.

Until next time!

-Mr. Hands