Online games replace monsters with sex

Success for the new games is far from assured, even though they plan to combine dating, fantasy worlds, sexual chat rooms and pornography — four things that have had enduring online popularity.

A few small companies started down this road a few years ago, but have only attracted a small number of users.

"SeduCity" began in 2001 with a simple two-dimensional graphical interface and has 1,500 users, according to David Andrews at Stratagem Corp., the company behind the game. By comparison, Blizzard Entertainment Inc.'s "World of Warcraft" has more than 5.5 million users.

Ren Reynolds, a British technology consultant and writer, believes that players may prefer to continue flirting in fantasy games that aren't explicitly sexual, or they may feel that three-dimensional environments don't improve on text-based chat rooms.

"It's true that you can do more things with text than you can with visuals," Reynolds said. "Why would I want to log on to a game just to have sex with people? It's kind of a nice idea, but I see it as difficult as a sustainable business model."

With the cost of game design increasing, it can be hard to recruit investors for a new type of game. Republik Games said last week it had been unable to close its latest round of financing, forcing it to suspend work on "Spend the Night," another sex-oriented online game that was to debut this year. The studio laid off its entire production team of 12 people.

In their favor, sex game developers point to the relative success of "Second Life," a three-dimensional online world that gives its participants freedom to do pretty much anything they want, as long as they can master the game's rather intricate controls.

The game is not designed to be sexual in nature, but about a third of the activity in its world, which has about 100,000 users, centers around adult encounters, according to its developers.

"Second Life," from Linden Research Inc., also is popular with women, something sex-game developers believe they will have to duplicate.

"At the risk of sounding incredibly shallow, if you have women in a game, the men will come," Brathwaite said. "A lot of the stuff that they're doing is directly targeting women."

Kyle Machulis, a technology consultant who runs Web journals devoted to sex in games, said developers are trying to draw inspiration from sexually charged fiction that has proven attractive to women, like Harlequin romance novels.

Another hurdle for sex-game developers is distribution. Most retailers won't sell games with the "Adults Only" or "AO" rating. Outrage and lawsuits followed last year's revelation that a sex scene was hidden in Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.'s action game "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas," which was rated less restrictively at "Mature."

Publishers can bypass stores by selling their games online, but exposure on store shelves is still an important part of game marketing. Specialist game stores will stock AO games that are already hits, Rued said, but will keep them behind the counter.

"I'm more interested in places where people are already being carded," Rued said. "We're trying to open up some really weird alternative channels, like liquor stores."

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