Oh I'm not arguing horny games don't exist or can't be popular. That's the thing with being dishonest with yourself and maybe with regressive attitudes towards sex in general: it's not that people are any different biologically than they used to be, it's just the social climate that people are living in. People will happily parrot on about how everyone is "pornsick" nowadays and then open an incognito window right after. I've experienced the whiplash of witnessing people like this personally. I'm sure it's not literally everyone... but I think in general it's underestimated just how two-faced the average person will happily be.

I don't really know a ton about gacha games, but players of gacha games have certainly developed a ... reputation on the Internet, and media coverage of this has not been very kind either. If social norms hadn't been shifting so much, I'd imagine that micro-transactions and a cutesy art style would be the things people lambaste the most about games like Genshin Impact and their playerbases. Instead, it has taken an oddly dark turn.

In 2023 I can play mainstream "AAA" games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3. These games have non-trivial systems designed to gamify human sexual behavior, including such features as "configure your genitalia" during character creation and choose-your-own-adventure-style romantic coupling complete with nudity, intercourse and full voice acting. I would guess that these games would have been banned or classified as pornography for being too sexually explicit if they were released when I was growing up (90s kid).

If anything, the trend I've noticed over time is a reduction in the conspicuous objectification of women in mainstream game titles. But even still: there seems to be an ever-longer-tail of borderline-pornographic content entering mass-market outlets like Steam.

All of this just to say: I don't think "sexually repressed" is how I would describe the relationship people have with games in 2023. Then again, I never found Lara Croft's outsized, rectangular bosom to add much to the story.