I know, I'm slow.. but maybe you're slow too and didn't see this news pop up a couple weeks back: An adult MMOG that was in the works by Republik has been suspended. Spend The Night (here is an interview with the CEO from Oct.'05) was highly anticipated as one of the first big online games/worlds focused almost entirely on adult relationships and, well... sex. Mostly sex for a lot of people, I'd guess. They wanted to target female players (and not just players claiming to be female... REAL females) who were interested in the emotional side of character interaction. Ultimately, the big drive for the game was to be the acting out of sexual fantasies with other avatars in a graphically rich world.
Well... we'll have to wait a bit longer to see if anyone else comes out with a game like this. Republik ran out of funds and places to secure new funds. The game was fairly far along, even though most of the released screenshots looked rather limited. I would think someone will find a way to sweep through and pick this property up for further development. They have had a huge amount of traffic to their site this year. You know it's a matter of time before a major product shows up on the market, don't you? If you hadn't thought of this yet, you're just not paying attention... or you're too young to worry about such things, in which case, go back to a safer game and forget you ever read this.
Now, I know some of you are going to point out other games that are highly sexual already, but many of them are more emergent sexuality rather than part of the game itself. Second Life is a giant emergent sex playground, but it's all from the players who want to introduce that element to the world. Games like Furcadia are (arguably?) based roughly on real-world fetishes -- "furries" in this case... don't ask, you can research that one yourself! They don't all have blatant sexual overtones as a part of the game's designs.
I'll add real quick here that I don't have a lot of experience playing Second Life or Furcadia, for instance, so I can't comment more than what I've heard from other players or read. If I'm wrong about these games, by all means, post a comment and clear up the discussion! :)
I'm pondering how to best handle the issue of adult MMO games on MassMOG.com and I haven't concluded that ponder yet. Once I do, I'll be posting more info about the genre in a slightly "protected" part of the site. It's very interesting and I think someone will unleash a massive hit when they dial in the concept and implement it solidly... like Spend The Night was looking to.
