Why do so many games fail to offer a futa protag choice?

[Morally Purple]

I see, but it was more a direct response to the naive viewpoint of "I'll just add/remove something, and that will fix everything", nothing is that simple, if it was every dev would be making bank...

Let me elaborate a bit, before you stretch my comment out of proportion even more.

It's simple math, really.
If you have a bigger crowd, you will have more people willing to pay for your product.
Every developer already noticed that, when you try to extend your reach across the Interwebs.
"A new site posted my game? Oh well, will you look at that, new patrons!"

Now let's say we have a crowd of 1000.
But only 10% are into a specific fetish, that means you can only profit from 100 people.
And of course you could say, "Hey, they will pay more for their specific fetish!", but what if I tell you that there are probably at least the same amount of people in the bigger crowd who are also willing to pay more. :O

This argument that people don't pay for niche fetishes is always dumb, in fact usually they get paid more because people converge into the same creators for that stuff.

Not a great example, because this creator isn't playing by the rules, and has a lot more going on than futa alone.

There are many more factors that will dictate what becomes popular and gets paid more, for instance incest was surefire to gather a lot of support a few years back, then people oversaturated that market with many similar and generic games to the point that now people don't even care about new incest games as much unless they have something different...

Not true at all, it's still one of the most popular things to do, and will surely make you a lot of money if your game is halfway decent. The only problem nowadays is that your cashout options have become limited.

I have people begging me nearly on a daily basis to implement it, even so I said multiple times that it's never going to happen.

 

[Ambir]

Because there are not enough devs who care about offering a futa protagonist. Is there a reason they should care? If there was, then it is likely that more of them would do so. Although you'll always find people who just would rather do what they want and not have other people tell them what to do.

 

[Deleted member 4455120]

I would argue that attracting the niches, while not being super profitable, is safer in the long run, since maintaining a specific brand will save you from risking too much with every story update and you can focus on art and mechanics (which tend to change very little from first to last release if you didn't fuck up too much in the beginning). The problem is that not every kink will work the same way here. Since futa and ntr (among others) are very divisive, any mild inclusion of them risks making the game untouchable for a large number of players but gets you a passionate base from which you can start something stable. Incest is a weird case because it has become much more mainstream (at least for something so traditionally taboo), so people kinda come prepared to let it happen in the background while they enjoy other parts of the content.

In games with a translucent or invisible protagonist there could be a way to include a futa protagonist: a patch system like with incest. This is just a thought experiment, since there are very few games that could qualify here (Four Elements Trainer comes to mind), but that's precisely because the option is not contemplated in development as it is with incest patches (1 to 1 replacement of a couple terms is easier than erasing a whole dude or giving him breast implants). Ntr is fucked in that way, because it can't really be circumvented without changing the games completely, so they make it avoidable but still have to invest more work putting it in. This kind of patch system might only be a viable option for established or more ambitious devs, because of the sizeable risk derived from a less focused game. Also, for a system like this to work, the tags of f95 would need to be improved by adding labels like "incest-patch" or "avoidable-ntr", so devs can include (or just allow the inclusion of) a certain kink without scaring people away with the label (but I guess that must have it's reasons for not existing, since it's a pretty obvious, in my opinion). People with the kink would most probably check the game anyway to see how meaningful the patch or story bit actually is.

Just some thoughts, hope I've made some sense here.