Erotic MMO Targets Female Audience
This is a mirror which it was originally published on Next Generation website. You can find a backup on Web Archive.
Original date: October 4, 2005.
Republik's Spend The Night is about sex. It's an online multiplayer game in which adults can meet other adults and act out their fantasies through graphically rich avatars. Next Generation spoke to company CEO Robert Coshland.
A game in which adults are encouraged to indulge their sexual fantasies is bound to attract the media's attention but, so far, Republik's Spend the Night has been keeping a low profile. Come the middle of next year, when it launches online, that'll all change. Details are scant at present, and Coshland doesn't want to give too much away, but the basics are simple. Players go online, choose a graphical identity, mooch around with other players, find someone they like, and find a room. Graphics claimed to be "cinematic" are promised, and a simple interface allows the action to proceed. "This is a fantasy multiplayer dating game," says Coshland. "It's not like the dating games that we've seen coming out of Japan where you try to win the favor of someone of the opposite sex. We're providing more of a game where two people can go on a date and interact in a 3D space." Target market The male-orientated game and pornography industries have something in common in their oft-attempted and usually woeful attempts to woo 'the other 50% of the market'. Coshland reckons he's found the key. Women will be the target market of the game from a creative and a marketing standpoint. "There is little to nothing with erotic content, that has been developed specifically targeted to women either in the game industry or in the adult industry," he says. "For whatever reason, women tend to be written off as people who have no interest in sexual content. We don't believe that to be true." "Women want to be a part of the experience"
He believes interactive erotic content will appeal to women in a way that passive erotic content doesn't. The theory goes that gawking at a porno mag or 'enjoying' a bad video may be okay for male consumers of erotica, but women want to be a part of the experience. It's the central theory that drives this development and is at the core of its success of failure.
"We have found, just in talking to people and focus tests, that women respond better to our concept than men. That's not so say that men aren't interested but women are truly intrigued by this idea because it's geared towards them and it involves them." He says "every marketing cent" will be spent on targeting women, based on the theory that "men will follow".
Dating games He says the point is emphatically not to find a date in the actual world. The point is to play with erotic fantasies that may not be available in humdrum old reality. "This is a fantasy. It's not there to hook up people in real life, although, for sure, we're not stopping anyone. We're giving people the ability to either play themselves or another character and then interact without the potential negative downsides of having to deal with people in real life." The business model is yet to be decided between straight subscription or pay-per-play. Republik, a small start up, is due to announce a partnership with a "very large media distributor" that will supply marketing dollars and expertise. This unnamed company has some experience in the adult market. Graphical realism No screenshots have yet been released, but Coshland says the focus is on graphical realism. Characters will be customizable, but not to an especially deep degree. Gameplay is based "on whatever the player wants to do". There are no character improvements although it may be that extended gameplay opens up new areas within the game. A game like this, though, is bound to attract a significant percentage of weirdos, oddballs, misfits, perverts and other social bacteria. How will the online world be policed? "We can't control what our community becomes, with the exception of prohibiting people from illegal activities, he says. "But we can control, in terms of our product, the settings because we are building it. We are trying to design this to stay on the high end. We're not supporting off-beat things." "We can control the settings because we are building it"
He says players can set their own preferences or limits and "can play the whole game fully clothed, if they choose". He adds that legal costs associated with the development of the title are an enormous expense. "We probably spend as much on legal as we do on development," he says. "It's something we have spent a lot of time focusing on." Another expense that'll kick in next year is publicity. Won't this product attract a great deal of fierce debate about the nature of games, of pornography, of sexual behavior? "We expect both negative and positive coverage," he says. "When you push the boundaries that's bound to happen and it's something we are prepared for. But we stand behind the design of the product and we think it's a good thing. There is no shame in it. We're proud of it." Gay content Gay content will be a part of the game, although the details have not been resolved. It's not clear if players are able to choose a gay experience or relationship within the main game. Republik says there may be a separate area. "It's something that we're working on and thinking about right now," he says.
Protecting minors Spend the Night will be sold as an AO (Adults Only) title, opening up problems of distribution. Traditional game retailers and family-based stores won't be lining up to stock the game, but Coshland is confident it will find broad distribution. But this mixture of a new game concept, masses of publicity and sex is also likely to attract a very different kind of audience - teens and kids. Coshland says, "We will do everything in our power to stop children accessing the game, to the extent that any adult product can. You cannot play this game by just picking it up. You have to connect to our servers and validate a credit card and any number of methods of checking age verification. We can only do what is available out there." Sex and the game industry Games and sexual content have mixed before and the result has almost always been either outright offensive or plain ludicrous. Next Generation recently commissioned a feature on overt sexual / pornographic (not romantic) content in games, and the results were too poor, or too tasteless, to bother publishing. "We're very up front about what our game offers”
The most recent example of sex in a game was Grand Theft Auto's Hot Coffee mod; a hidden episode that scandalized the nation and rendered a very violent game that was suitable for 17-year-olds and older, suddenly only suitable for 18-year-olds and older. It exposed both the fundamentally schoolboyish attitude the game industry has towards sex, and the ceaselessly amazing relationship the public (or at least the public's representatives) has with the notions of games and sex and, inexplicably, violence. For Coshland, GTA is irrelevant because Hot Coffee was hidden content and "we're very up front about what our game offers". He believes that multiplayer gaming, decent graphics and casual gaming have all come together to bring gaming and erotica together; and to open up a very large market. Still, we can talk about new markets and technology and demographics all day long. Doesn't this game, ultimately, make him a pornographer? "I guess that would be how you define it really. In a traditional sense pornography is a passive visual entertainment, but in this case the players themselves will be generating the gameplay and they can do what they want; we just provide the tools. The level of explicitness is determined what players choose to do."
