This story about the videogame producers developing porn for Microsoft's Kinect sure has...legs.
I heard from Brad Abram of ThriXXX (pronounced "Tricks"), the company creating the Adults Only sex game which Microsoft says it doesn't condone and won't license.
ThriXXX will make it anyway.
In the game, Kinect players can move their hands virtually over the body of a virtual woman (or man, I suppose).
The company is looking for Kinect systems hooked up to PCs. ThriXXX believes it can sell 500,000 units once the game launches next year. It wouldn't give sales numbers for its current games, only saying they are in the millions of dollars and growing 40 percent this year.
"This is really probably bigger than the sum of its parts, not only on the Kinect front, but 'Sex in Videogames' in general," ThriXXX's Abram tells me. "Sex in games to us is the final frontier in the storytelling that is what Role Playing games are all about."
He points to the sex scenes in Bioware's line of Mass Effect games, where very little is left to the imagination. Players can have sex with teammates or even with aliens ("Mork does Mindy!" jokes Abram).
Here's an example of such a scene in Mass Effect, a game which can be played on multiple platforms. (WARNING: this may not be safe for work.)
Abram wants to take the storytelling a step further, leaving, well, nothing to the imagination.
"Yes, sometimes sex is best left to the imagination, but we as men and women are both fascinated with it, all got here via it, and the pursuit of sex is probably the most interesting and intriguing game mankind plays between sexes," Abram says. "Why not digitize it and make it into a RPG multiplayer videogame!"
Abram says ThriXXX's demo video kept getting pulled off YouTube over the weekend, but others kept reposting it, and he estimates it's been viewed up to one and a half million times.
He's also the chairperson for the Independent Game Developers Association "Sex-Sig" — whose mission is "to so advocate for the responsible introduction of sex into videogames."
So far, ThriXXX is producing games with short scenes, partly due to budget constraints, partly due to user feedback. "Our members say they like short episodic fantasy content anyway."
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