In private, we know that adult entertainment takes in between 4 billion and 10 billion annually, domestically in the US only (the large variation depends on what you include in that figure, our links archive has articles about the business side of adult entertainment detailing all of the unexpected players in this market, including hotel chains, major mainstream media companies, cable and satellite companies, major ISPs, and server center hardware manufacturers as adult media continues to push internet growth). The market is online, spending money, screaming for attention from new media companies but few are attending to this lucrative mainstream market segment, held back by the veil of American hypocrisy about sex that when pierced by common sense and sales figures reveals a majority of American households purchasing some type of adult entertainment on a regular basis. If we were able to factor in "free" sites and file-sharing online this estimate would be even higher, debunking any public assertions that Americans don't want adult content and that "community standards" find such materials obscene. The consumption of adult materials indicates otherwise.

So now the mainstream games industry has a truly adult title where sex is not just a dirty joke, a hypersexualized female character, or simply a level set in a strip club. Playboy: The Mansion presents sex as a fun, natural, and necessary part of its virtual world (in the tradition of The Sims franchise which treated sexual relations with a kitschy innocence but still tipped its hat to the importance and inclusion of romantic love and affection in a people simulator). They were cautious to keep the sexuality onscreen restrained because they understood that the point of their game was not to shock or to push the envelope, but to translate the Playboy brand into a tycoon simulation. Playboy is not a hardcore adult brand, and to show "only" women fully nude while the men remained in their underwear would have been tactless (the Playboy brand does not deal with full frontal male nudity in its magazine, the subject of the game). So I think Cyberlore struck a nice balance with their design decisions, and represented sex appropriately for their title's genre, scope, and brand license.

Will Playboy: The Mansion pave the way for more complete simulations of sex and eroticism in mainstream gaming? Has the "line" been nudged over a bit allowing more designers the freedom to include adult content in entertainment experiences for adult players? We hope so, and we salute Cyberlore Studios Inc. and ARUSH Entertainment for trying to put the mature in Mature game titles. We stress this because sexuality is a great part of being an adult... but most so-called mature content in gaming is arguably some of the more juvenile game content we've seen (BMX XXX bounces to mind). Cheers to developers who are addressing the erotic and sensual needs, desires, and fantasies of mature adult gamers.