Subverse, the game that raised £1,668,626 on Kickstarter for its promise of a kinky combo of Mass Effect, XCOM, and rather a lot of sex scenes, will no longer have an Early Access release.

In the latest Kickstarter update, Studio FOW explain the decision by pointing out  narrative games don't often do well in Early Access, they already have 4,500 potential testers for their closed beta (which will be going ahead unchanged), and they don't believe that releasing it unfinished, chapter-by-chapter, would be good for momentum. "We feel it would be a disservice to you guys and the project to release it before the quality you deserve can be achieved throughout the game", as they sum up.

Those who backed at the Big Bang Theorist level will have access to the closed beta from September 28. The update also explains how Subverse's "Pandora Points" system will work: "Every time your waifu levels up, you get one PP."

The following discussion and images are NSFW. 

Update: As of May 7th, GOG has come back to me with a statement in response to DC's comment in the below article that the retailer "wouldn't even return our emails". I've edited the article below to contain the statement, but for ease of reading, I'll put it here too. "Unfortunately, we haven’t found a single email coming from FOW Interactive, be it on our publicly shared inboxes or Bizdev people personal ones. We’re going to check with whom the devs were trying to contact, to understand what happened."

Edited story: FOW Interactive's Subverse, a pornographic genre hybrid game that will probably remind you superficially of Mass Effect, ended its Kickstarter campaign with over £1.6 million this week. How do I put this? It's not my sort of thing—but it's made so much money and generated a strong response from a certain type of player (15,000+ comments on the Kickstarter page and counting). Reaching 58,730 backers shows some obvious demand for what Subverse offers. 

It's described as "a tactical RPG/SHMUP hybrid that takes place in a fully explorable galaxy where you get to be the Captain of your very own ship... which is crewed by the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit." There will be 10 'waifus' total in the game, and as well as earning their loyalty and having sex with them, the shoot-'em-up part is set in space, as you control a ship called the Mary Celeste. The tactical element, meanwhile, with its isometric-style camera, made me think of XCOM. Collectively, the game should take at least 30 hours to finish, according to the Kickstarter FAQ, and the first episode is aiming for a summer release.

"I've heard many people say this is an extremely ambitious project but it's not really," creative director DC tells me via email. "It's a simple and stylish little tactical game with sex elements thrown in as the reward so we are trying set ourselves up for a smoother development cycle."

From movies to games

StudioFOW's background is in CG pornographic movies, many of which are parodies involving game characters. For example—and for the love of god, do not search for these at work—there's BioShag: Trinity and Lara in Trouble, which feature familiar female game characters in scenarios I won't describe here (here's a great Kotaku piece that touches upon both videos). I can't say I was comfortable sitting through snippets of them to write this piece. 

I ask DC why he thinks the Kickstarter campaign has made so much money. "I'm not sure I can pinpoint a single factor to be honest. I think we had a really positive and confident pitch that grabbed a lot of people by the balls and then our existing fanbase (which is pretty massive) came out in force to help snowball the Kickstarter. The surprise factor in all this was that Subverse became a kind of symbolic pledge for many first-time Kickstarter supporters who are unhappy with the current state of the gaming industry... but that's totally not what we set out to do, we just wanted to make dick lasers and big bouncy anime titties."

In the Kickstarter pitch video for Subverse, the voiceover begins with "From the studio that was banned from Patreon...", before describing the reason why, which is a werewolf performing a sexual act on a woman. I ask about the background behind the Patreon ban, which was communicated to backers in late 2018. "Patreon's ironically named 'Trust and Safety Team' seems to have a problem with werewolves," says DC. "Apparently 3D pornography featuring werewolves is totally against Patreon's newly updated terms of service, so our comedy movie 'Mila Red Riding Hood' landed us in hot water with them." Patreon's policy on nudity has a separate paragraph on pornography, which is not allowed on the platform. 

I reached out to Patreon to ask for a response to DC's claim above, and it provided this statement. "StudioFOW was removed for violating our Community Guidelines as we don't allow glorification of sexual violence, including bestiality."

With StudioFOW's film background, I'm curious about its team's collective experience making games. "We've been making 3D movies since 2014 and have been quite successful with those. We've also made a few small interactive titles within our core team that have been big hits on Newgrounds. 'Queen of the Jungle' for example has over 7 million views. But we were lacking serious programming know-how in the team so we added some developers with Unreal 4 experience, and started working on Subverse late last year. The developers would prefer to remain anonymous for now so I can't cite their prior portfolios at this time." The profiles of the team on the Kickstarter page, rife with pseudonyms, make for interesting reading. As do the FAQs, for that matter ("Can I get my desired waifu pregnant?"). 

I'm keen to know more about the tactical element of Subverse, since that's the kind of system I've seen imitated a lot, but rarely done that well. "It's not really similar to X-Com, it's a much more simplistic combat system," DC says. "For example, we have no cover or overwatch mechanics. It's much more fast paced, despite being turn-based. A typical mission in Subverse takes around 3-5 minutes tops to complete, and in X-Com for example it can take upwards of 30+ minutes. It's still challenging to build however, because we're learning as we go. It's only our first game so we're trying to not overcomplicate things too much when it comes to combat."

I ask how the different components of the game are connected. "Your waifus can be used in both Shmup and tactical portions of the game. Their overall level determines their combat effectiveness in both portions, and it also determines how loyal they are to your cause. It's all tied together rather nicely, and the great thing about our game is that when you level up you not only get some standard RPG stat increases but also a talent point to spend on a love scene of your choice. The stats also don't get too complex, there's just enough under the hood to keep things ticking along nicely without bogging the player down."

The Kickstarter campaign shied away from expensive physical rewards—instead focusing on adding elements like an extra 'waifu', animations, and a digital manga. "We were extremely conservative with our stretch goals, only adding features that we were 100% sure were scalable. We even stopped adding stretch goals after a certain point altogether, but the pledges kept rolling in despite there being no more rewards. I think people appreciated our conservative approach to the campaign."

The tone of the Kickstarter page says a lot about who the game is aimed at, and I won't pretend I didn't raise an eyebrow a few times while reading it. Even knowing it's deliberately outlining itself as a comedy sex game, I ask how much the developers think about taste, tone or how they portray sexuality, which doesn't get a particularly satisfying response. "For me it's all about just having fun. Life is short, so you might as well bang some alien babes before you get put six feet under."

Selling on Steam

I'm interested to know what kind of content restrictions developers of games like this have to be aware of, since the game is planned for a Steam release. "We want to avoid the super extreme fetishes and darker themes, as they don't mesh with our creative vision for Subverse. It's a very satirical and lighthearted game so we have to maintain that tone with the sex as well." DC is pretty confident the game's audience is "around 90% men and 10% women, based on prior statistics from our website, analytics and surveys." That's pretty self-evident from the Kickstarter page. 

I ask DC if he thinks it's important games like Subverse are sold on Steam—it's listed as 'adult only' when you visit the game's page. "I think Steam and Valve need to be commended more for their open approach to their storefront. In contrast, GOG love to champion themselves on social media as gamer-friendly and paragons of free speech, but they wouldn't even return our emails." GOG responded to that with this statement. "Unfortunately, we haven’t found a single email coming from FOW Interactive, be it on our publicly shared inboxes or Bizdev people personal ones. We’re going to check with whom the devs were trying to contact, to understand what happened."

"Meanwhile we've had zero problems with Valve even when we used their Source Engine for some of our previous movies. Sure there is a lot of shovelware on Steam as a result of the 'anything-goes' policy but there are filters and tools in place for consumers to make informed decisions on what they are buying." 

Compared to the range of other porn games that are out there, I ask DC what he thinks sets Subverse apart. "We have a space station shaped like a giant butt. And also, an alien with six testicles." Now that I think about it, I've never played a game with those things on PC. 

Images in this article are NSFW.

Subverse, a videogame created by a developer you've probably never heard of, passed $1,900,000 raised on Kickstarter on Tuesday, with 24 hours left to go. Unlike the names behind some of Kickstarter's biggest gaming successes—Double Fine, Obsidian, Yu Suzuki—Subverse creator FOW Interactive is only famous in the circle of people who watch CG porn of game characters on Newgrounds. But compare Subverse's haul to the $1.43 million that veteran Myst creators Cyan Worlds were just able to raise for their new game, and it's clear there's a very real, very hungry audience for Mass Effect meets Mass Erect.

The Kickstarter page describes Subverse as "a tactical RPG/SHMUP hybrid that takes place in a fully explorable galaxy where you get to be the Captain of your very own ship...which is crewed by the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit." It promises a story, grid-based combat reminiscent of a simplified Shadowrun, and women designed by "world-renowned art director and squidgirl-titty enthusiast Dzung Phung Dinh."

FOW Interactive clearly has ambitions to make a full game here, but the focus is most definitely going to be on having sex with your crewmates. Where Mass Effect's relationships were mostly about the talking, capped off with a brief PG-13 sex scene, Subverse is taking the porn parody approach. All the talking and the sci-fi trappings are there to set the tone for the hardcore sex scenes that follow. It's basically the Pirates of porn games.

Out of the 12,868 videogame Kickstarters since 2012's Double Fine Adventure, only 18 have pulled in more money than Subverse. In its last day, it has a good chance of surpassing Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Star Citizen. Subverse likely isn't going to raise another $200 million post-Kickstarter like Star Citizen has, but it's also a narrower pitch. Star Citizen promised the most immersive space game ever, from the creator of Wing Commander. Subverse says: You can have sex with a bunch of women, and also play some SHMUP and RPG combat segments. But mostly it's about the sex.

The thing that makes Subverse's success even more impressive, when you look at the history of gaming Kickstarters, is that most of the biggest earners date back to a time before crowdfunding fatigue had settled in.

All-time champ Shenmue 3, with $6.6 million, started in 2015. So did runner-up Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (both will supposedly be out this year). Many of the other big earners are even older: 2012 for Wasteland 2 and Elite Dangerous, 2013 for Mighty Number Nine and every game that followed that initial wave. By 2016, almost no videogame was pulling in $2 million+ on Kickstarter anymore.

Subverse has proven to be a powerful exception. It's wild that the internet has made porn an infinite and free commodity, and yet in 2019, more than 50,000 people have paid about $2 million to support a sci-fi sex game.

Its only close contemporaries are Firmament, that new Cyan game, and another Cyan project from 2018, a Myst anniversary collection. And compared to most crowdfunding campaigns, those projects are sure bets. Before Firmament, Cyan Kickstarted another Myst spiritual successor, Obduction, which turned out well. And even if the Myst anniversary collection's promised tchotchkes ended up disappointing, well, the games themselves already exist—there's only so badly that one can screw up.

For videogame crowdfunding, years of late, MIA, and disappointing games have dampened the enthusiasm that Kickstarter once ignited. Some of the all-time biggest Kickstarters, meanwhile, have happened fairly recently. Critical Role pulled in $11.3 million this year for an animated series. Board games continue to do well, and one earned more than $5 million at the end of 2018. In fact, between 2015 and 2018 board game funding on Kickstarter has grown from $84.6 million to $165 million annually, while videogame funding has fallen off a cliff, from $41.5 million in 2015 to only $15.8 million in 2018.

The comments on Subverse are mostly unabashedly horny, but then you get the occasional question that would fit right in on any gaming Kickstarter, where fans are hopeful the game will include some particular feature.

"Divinity: Original Sin 2 used a similar system where enemies had physical and/or magical armor on top of their hit points… My question to you is: how exactly does your armor system work in order to avoid problems similar to those in D:OS 2?"

"Do you have characters like futa?" (If you don't know what it means, maybe don't look it up)

"An idea for ending mechanism, bear with my [sic], usually there are two flawed ways to end an game…"

"Tbh i don't give a damn about the game play. I just wanna see tits."

And of course, sometimes those two passions combine: 

"From a purely academic perspective, will any of the mantics be egg laying hand holders?"

Apparently "hand holding" is the project's codeword for sex, and you'll see it brought up again and again in the campaign's 13,000 comments. It's a lot of comments. For comparison, the last mega successful gaming Kickstarter, the MMO Ashes of Creation, has accrued fewer than 5,000 comments since its campaign in mid-2017. Maybe those fans are simply talking elsewhere, but it's clear there's enthusiasm for Subverse that no gaming Kickstarter has matched in years.

Maybe because, much like the Double Fine Adventure, it's the first of its kind—not the first gaming Kickstarter, but the first porn game to promise a big budget combination of actual game design and CG sex scenes. It's also launching on Steam, which is possible thanks to Valve's decision to let almost anything on the platform, and will surely be the highest production value porn game on the platform. The developers appear to be careful about not going too far, though. "All content in the game will adhere to Steam's Community Guidelines, so no dark content like [rape]," a developer answered in the comments, after a fan asked if you'd have "options to take a more assertive approach."

Subverse's Kickstarter asks backers to "Support the Revolution!" which seems a bit grandiose for a game about having sex with comically-designed fantasy women. It's no more revolutionary than a porn movie having a story, but it does, at least, have a sense of humor.

What is now one of the most successful Kickstarter game campaigns of all time leads with this pitch: "Turning our curious eyes toward the glittering stars speckled around our little blue planet, we have often asked ourselves the eternal question: Are we alone in this universe? What is out there? More importantly… can we bone it?"

The audience's answer appears to be a loud, emphatic yes.

Studio FOW, who have attracted controversy for producing CG porn starring videogame characters, have turned to Kickstarter to fund a game of their own. Called Subverse, they describe it as "a tactical RPG/SHMUP hybrid" where you're the captain of a spaceship called the Mary Celeste and have to assemble a crew. It sounds kind of like Mass Effect 2, only with more explicit sex.

At the time of writing it has raised the equivalent of over $1,200,000 in US dollars, and still has nine days left in its Kickstarter campaign.

Subverse will apparently be "at least a 20 hour game" with two different combat systems, one arcade-style for ship combat and the other a grid-based tactical system for squad vs. squad fights. It will also have "nine waifus" for you to romance. The fact that they use the word "waifu" about 15 times on the Kickstarter page probably tells you everything you need to know about Subverse's tone.