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Lets Talk Skullgirls: Rule 34's Effect on Skullgirls

Is Rule 34 good for Skullgirls

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But it doesn't really hurt them within the competitive scenario because they're already big enough to simply ignore that, since the skullgirls community is so small, when you're starting to get involved it may seem like you end up in the middle of a bunch of artists that only play the game casually (which includes R34), and that makes people less motivated to put effort into the actual game.
 
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CaioLugon said:
Well these games have been out for 20 years, of course there's gonna be porn of it. And the problem is not even the porn, if you look at it relatively, Skullgirls has a LOT more fanart, and still, I'd be really impressed if for Street Fighter there's more people drawing fanart than playing the game at any level that's above casual. For a game that had 2000 entries at EVO finding people that are interested in the actual gameplay is not hard at all
You shouldnt be impressed. 2000 is a lot of people but relatively, youll probably find 1000x the fanart. Im sure Juri has had more than 2000 unique artist draw her in fanart. There are street fighter comics that probably have people discussing them than competitively playing it (those comic book artist did fan art at some point to).
 
2000 players is a lot of competitors, but still smaller than the amount of casual players that bought Vanilla SF4.
 
CaioLugon said:
But it doesn't really hurt them within the competitive scenario because they're already big enough to simply ignore that, since the skullgirls community is so small, when you're starting to get involved it may seem like you end up in the middle of a bunch of artists that only play the game casually (which includes R34), and that makes people less motivated to put effort into the actual game.
A competitive players base starts at the bottom with a few people and expands. It sucks that excuses not to play outnumber the players. Still hate the not enough people play it so I wont.
 
I get around the "not enough people play so I won't" with incessant nagging and occasional baseball bats
 
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Rule 34 art is still art. I'd honestly rather have a fanbase full of sexy art than no art at all. At the very least, it shows that the fanbase is (for lack of a better word) healthy, just like it's healthy for a typical human being to look at porn every once in a while.
 
gotta love that healthy double tentacle porn
 
Chrono_Tata said:
To be fair, if you search for porn of Street Fighter or Guilty Gear or any other popular franchise, the number of artists that you find drawing porn will outnumber the number of people playing the game competitively. It's just life.
Mr. X said:
R34 of bigger fighters eclipses us. Street Fighter has live actor porn and theres knock off Ryu and Chun on condom packages.

Sure, they have more r34 crap, but my point was that the SG scene is so small that more attention is given to it's fanart, at least proportionally. Those games have a bigger player base, years of competitive play, and at least in SF's case, a real place in video game and pop culture that is wholly outside of whatever creepy fanart that comes from it. The game and competitive community keeps a shroud over that stuff to the general populace.

Compare this to Skullgirls, which already had a bad start with it's visuals, and that doesn't have enough of a "hey look at the actual gameplay" element, AND was given a second chance via Indiegogo that was funded in no small part to SG art/lore fans. It's a situation that is just not comparable. We have a smaller voice in the FGC and at large, so whatever bubbles to the top gets heard by everyone, instead of having different channels for fanart, tournaments, YT producers, w/e.

Take Reddit for example, if I go to the top 100 posts of all time in the SG sub, I will find ZERO full gameplay cilps. There are only one or two Let's Plays, and just as many "funny moments" type of clips. The rest is art, cosplay, and 2-3 crowdfunding announcements. Compare this to the SF4 sub, which is a healthy mix of everything, art, gameplay, announcements, w/e. It doesn't matter if those bigger games have more casual art lovers than people who follow the competitive scene. The latter is big enough that it warrants it's own channels of media and viewership that they are seen as separate.

The look of SG has dominated the discussion about it from day one. Maybe in the FGC the talk was about the gameplay at first, but I don't believe it has ever been the majority conversation. It's a real problem that the art of the game brings, and I believe that r34 fanart only compounds this issue.
 
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chickenwithtie said:
If parents are dumb they are dumb. It's their responsibility. It's their fault completely. Giving fault to the medias is lazy parenting.
Skullgirls and GTA both stay at the standard guidelines on rating, it's written on their covers clear that the game is not for the youngest audience. That's all they need to do, the rest comes to the costumer only.
If my kid is allergic to peanuts, I check the ingredients in food first to buy it. If my kid gets an allergic reaction cause I didn't bother to check his food, I don't blame the food industry for making food with peanuts. I don't blame people who like to eat peanuts. I just take my responsibilities and try not to kill my kid. It's that simple, really

Their fault and their responsability, sure (nice example with allergies btw, but I'd say that I blame the food industry for making some foods with contaminations = who is allergic isn't allowed to eat some "eatable food" at all thanks to that). And what I'm saying from my first post in this topic is: you might cut out some people by doing the porn stuff. You just have to think if you're going to lure more players with porns or more without it and going to please some players or not. My opinion on the matter is that it isn't going to lure more players on the game, but that's my opinion you don't have to like it. I was lured by skullgirls not for porn art but for being a FG with some familiar in-game mechanics as well as new mechanics. If you're making hentai stuff with my mains I'm not offended/interested at all, I'm just saying that there are people who might take it differently.
 
I'm just saying that there are people who might take it differently.

People always take things differently from one another for the most simple reason that is: tastes. You really cannot satisfate everyone, no matter how hard you try. There are different reasons people dislike Skullgirls. Be it because it has lewd designs, or most of the cast is female, or the style is too anime, or its not enough anime, or the mechanics are too complicated, or the game offers nothing new, or it works just like Marvel VS Capcom, or just because its a fighting game.

I think the reason Skullgirls fanbase is made mostly of dirty casuals is because, in comparision to other fighting titles, the art is almost too good.
I can say by personal experience that many people interested in both 'art' and videogames avoid fighting games like the plague because the designs tend to be very generic and bland. Which is fine, since videogames don't have to be pretty to be good videogames.
Skullgirls is very pretty, tho. Well, except for the memes.
 
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To me, it doesn't matter.

If someone wants to look at R34, then go ahead. If you don't, then don't. Simple as.

Saying anything else would just be retreading what others have said.
 
chickenwithtie said:
People always take things differently from one another for the most simple reason that is: tastes. You really cannot satisfate everyone, no matter how hard you try. There are different reasons people dislike Skullgirls. Be it because it has lewd designs, or most of the cast is female, or the style is too anime, or its not enough anime, or the mechanics are too complicated, or the game offers nothing new, or it works just like Marvel VS Capcom, or just because its a fighting game.

I think the reason Skullgirls fanbase is made mostly of dirty casuals is because, in comparision to other fighting titles, the art is almost too good.
I can say by personal experience that many people interested in both 'art' and videogames avoid fighting games like the plague because the designs tend to be very generic and bland. Which is fine, since videogames don't have to be pretty to be good videogames.
Skullgirls is very pretty, tho. Well, except for the memes.

This is of course subjective, but I feel as though most fighting games tend to have pretty crazy & interesting character designs since the characters are the most prominent part of the experience. Other than maybe Street Fighter, Tekken, and Virtua fighter (And I honestly feel as though those three have their share of pretty great character designs); can you really say that Guilty Gear, Blazblue, Arcana Heart, Cyberbots, King of Fighters, Vampie Savior, Soul Caliber, etc. have a slew of bland or generic character designs? In fact in my experience many casuals and artists play the games I listed solely specifically because they like the characters in them, rather than out of a desire to improve and be competitive.

Don't get me wrong, I do absolutely agree that Skullgirls has some of the best character designs I have seen in games, but I totally disagree that fighting games are significantly behind other genres when it comes to quality of character designs. Juri, Q-bee, Zappa and Taokaka (just as a few examples) are anything but bland and generic. For every generic "karate guy" in a fighting game there's a generic "spiky haired hero" in an RPG or a generic "gruff middle-aged guy" in a shooter.
 
Most characters in fighters are generic dolls with weird stuff put on them and nothing else. Quite bland. It works in fighting games and it's the standard, but on other medias it's kind of weak, epsecially western medias.
Try to compare the casts of good fighters with the ones you find in good animation(where designs speak everything about the character), like FLCL or Steven Universe.
I'd die for a Steven Universe fighting game

In the end though, many people have shit taste anyway and there's nothing I can do to fix that.
 
chickenwithtie said:
Most characters in fighters are generic dolls with weird stuff put on them and nothing else. Quite bland. It works in fighting games and it's the standard, but on other medias it's kind of weak, epsecially western medias.
Try to compare the casts of good fighters with the ones you find in good animation(where designs speak everything about the character), like FLCL or Steven Universe.
I'd die for a Steven Universe fighting game

In the end though, many people have shit taste anyway and there's nothing I can do to fix that.

My point was that fighting games aren't behind other Video games and that I don't feel that a large amount of artists avoid them because of their designs. True, a majority of them can't compare to some of the better designs in animation but then again the same can be said about most video games (A Steven Universe fighting game would be godlike, Pearl all day everyday).

Consider Darkstalkers, there's just as much conveyance in BBhood and Jedah's design as there is in Naota or Ninamori's. Fighting game characters are designed by artists, not programmers and conveyance is just as important in good fighting game character design. Chipp looks like he's fast, Potemkin looks he's powerful and slow, Faust looks like he's insane and unpredictable, Sol looks like he's aggressive and violent. And even if you disagree with that, are their designs so far behind the video games that these artist supposedly don't avoid?

I guess I'm just not seeing this mass avoidance of these so-called shitty designs in fighting games. But hey, if your counter argument is "whoever disagrees with me probably just has shit taste" I can't really respond to that, which is a shame because I really enjoy discussing character design.
 
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chickenwithtie said:
Most characters in fighters are generic dolls with weird stuff put on them and nothing else.

Maybe if you only play SF4.

Go play Darkstalkers or something.

*edit* On topic: Every series has rule 34. Isn't that the point of rule 34? That it exists for everything? Skullgirls art might not be for everybody, but that's just a sign that some people have shit taste and take themselves too seriously.
 
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I'm not very experienced in fighting games, but the main reason I've avoided getting too deep into them is because of Street Fighters bland designs.
 
Ok, I would like to thank everyone for commenting and keeping to the topic thus far, and now that I have finished fixing/upgrading my PC I am going to start making the video soon, so continue the topic and I'm gonna get started on it soon....hopefully.
 
MysteriousJ said:
And I see fanart of felicia and morrigan more often than any other fighting game characters. :P
Yep, a Buxom Succubus and Voluptuous Practically Naked Anthromorphized cat will spark some art that's going to appeal to your most Carnal desires.

But there's also a gigantic amount of.. just fan art of those characters. They practically give you their life stories in animation alone.

Tons, to the point it (Vampire Savior) received a fan artbook. And it's still plenty popular in Japan

Heh, writing this basically cements how little discussion you can get out of discussing "is porn good for your bottom line". Now discussing whether or not "Whales" keep things alive would be interesting ... or not
 
I voted Doesn't Matter, but really, with all the points being made about R34 GT-R's exposing Skullgirls to a potential audience member, I guess I could say it matters a tiny bit. It's not marginal, however; for example, I actually see anything related to Skullgirls in general more often when casually surfing the Internet, not even looking for SG-related things. I even saw a fan picture of Peacock in 8chan once. I'd say any art gives more exposure to Skullgirls than just R34.
 
It's bound to happen, really. You can't stop the torrent of porn that will come from any game, and that applies to Skullgirls too. Like, seriously, there's probably Rise to Hell rule 34 out there in the filth that the internet inherently is. I, however, believe that rule 34 is taken from a very....imaginative group of the fanbase, who one day simply thought, "What if....?" It should in no way affect the community as a whole, so it doesn't matter. Unless you are making hand to genital contact while the rule 34 is on your screen, it really won't affect you. And as for it making a bad impression of our community to the outsiders and beyond-dwellers, the only way to find this stuff is to search for it. One does not simply encounter upon Skullgirls porn, unless they have safe search off of course.
So, in the end, I say we let the separate parts of the community keep to themselves, whether it be the neckbeards, the lore geeks (myself), the hardore, the casuals, the Waifu and Husbando lovers (Again, myself), or, indeed, the Rule 34 makers and connoisseurs (Not myself. Yech. Weird.)
 
I never look at r34 as a thing that affects a given work. Rather, I see it - as with all fanart - an indicator of how popular a thing is. The more popular something is, the more r34 of it you see. Simple as that. Granted, there's probably some variation based on how the characters actually look, such that a game with characters that are already kinda sexed up is more prone to get r34. But I don't exactly have cite-able research data when it comes to the aesthetics of individual characters and how they effect opinions on a work as a whole. I could ramble about my personal opinion on that matter, but that's really neither here nore there.

In the case of SG though I will say this: If some of the designs and animations for certain characters don't bother you in SG but you find fanart porn of those same characters "weird," that's maybe a bit incongruous of you.
 
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How people feel when ToDDaBeLL@ steps into the r34 picture defiling their favourite waiifus.

tumblr_mog609PyTZ1sv56ndo1_400.gif
 
ToDDaBeLLa said:
How people feel when ToDDaBeLL@ steps into the r34 picture defiling their favourite waiifus.

View attachment 7606
I'm sure no one would actually say that to you. I hope not at least.
 
FunkyHellboy said:
I'm sure no one would actually say that to you. I hope not at least.

Actually I just saw it yesterday. Some random sent an ask note. It was kinda nasty but I didn't rely. You know the internet, people will hate others for doing something you don't like. Peopel are crayayayayaaazee!

tumblr_mood6rAEMS1r9zy3co1_500.gif
 
So am I supposed to assume you're trolling the thread, or did someone actually mention your name in this thread
 
i think it would be hilarious if this years evo champ got into the game because of the porn.

people wouldnt know what the hell to think lol.

on another note though, hentai or rule 34 stuff or whatever is just another form of fanart. if the artists didnt find anything appealing about your game then they wouldnt do the art.

so yay appreciation!
 
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ToDDaBeLLa said:
Actually I just saw it yesterday. Some random sent an ask note. It was kinda nasty but I didn't rely. You know the internet, people will hate others for doing something you don't like. Peopel are crayayayayaaazee!

View attachment 7607
So since you do make Skullgirls Rule 34 and have had at least one bad experience that I know of I would love to see your opinion on how you feel the Skullgirls' community feels about you and your craft. And if you have a link to the offender's comment I would like to see it as well in order to gauge what exactly he has said and why.
 
ToDDaBeLLa said:
If this is directed to moi, I'm talking about tumblr. If not, ignore this
It was, and now I understand. I was extremely confused, heh.
 
Evilweevle said:
i think it would be hilarious if this years evo champ got into the game because of the porn.

people wouldnt know what the hell to think lol.

on another note though, hentai or rule 34 stuff or whatever is just another form of fanart. if the artists didnt find anything appealing about your game then they wouldnt do the art.

so yay appreciation!


I just with him and the entire NY scene on New Years Eve. They just like the game because of how it feels.
 
FunkyHellboy said:
So since you do make Skullgirls Rule 34 and have had at least one bad experience that I know of I would love to see your opinion on how you feel the Skullgirls' community feels about you and your craft. And if you have a link to the offender's comment I would like to see it as well in order to gauge what exactly he has said and why.

I can tell you, more or less.

I don't think that anyone in the community really notices me. Some of them follow my tumblr and don;t really pay attention unless its Skullgirls related. I don't want to be labelled as the guy "Who only makes Skullgirls" art. I play the game like any other person. And I been drawing way since this game's existence. But I also know, there are artists that are NOW just drawing because of the games art style and DON'T play the game. But when you enter the rule34 side of certain fandoms, you will always get your share of hate and share of praise. The praise of which people like what you do and hope you produce more of it. And you have the hate that wants you to abolish what you do because you are not fulfilling their personal pleasures, so they hate you. For example, I like A LOT of stuff and when I decide to step into rule34 bounds I pair them up and people call them "Crack pairings". Or at least I do.

But recently, I got an ask note. From some random. He said my work was an abomination so...what else can I do? If he hates me and my stuff then I can't force him too. He hates it. I just didn't answer it because it's a waste of time. However, I did get an ask note when I released the Feng image and he even reblogged it, to "expose" me. That I capped and shared awhile ago in my own thread. Speaking of, that place is dying LOL. Gotta rise from the dead there.

But yeah, if you draw anything, you'll always get two sides from fandoms: the hate and the love

umadcap.png
 
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Porn doesn't help a game positively/negatively in any way measurably, money does. You can look at a title like Dead or Alive and compare it to Skullgirls and see how both games have been received. Granted, Dead or Alive has been around much longer than Skullgirls but that series has long rated higher in the cheesecake factor with an infinitely larger pile of pornographic material related to its brand, even from the beginning. A common joke or perception is both games are wank material for foreveralones except one game gets treated with some level of respect as a fighting game and the other largely remains a joke in the FGC. So both games have had plenty of "advertisement" through porn and can still be seen as inconsequential. One game got corporate sponsored for marketing, put into venues like MLG and made a flagship/release title for a video game console. The other got hammered with legal redtape bullshit, required a crowdfund to make it this far in terms of development and delisted by it's publisher. It's easy to see how both games have been received differently despite the abundance or at least their infamy related to porn.
 
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Wow, de ja vu? I think this was actually one of the first topics that came up when this version of Skullheart was started a while back. I remember, because I had some long ass post in it contrasting Skullgirls porn to Sesame Street porn and whatever. Yeah, I guess this discussion is always bound for a retread.

Anyway, I think the bottom line is that offshoot porn has no real effect on its parent property, unless its presence is so profound that the media can no longer keep it tucked away in a separate cubbyhole. Since Skullgirls is already in a more mature niche, I think the only real issue would be if the porn somehow overshadowed the game entirely, and became the primary reason people bothered finding interest in the property anymore. I'm talking Lola Bunny/Animalypics level stuff, where you see new fans deliberately hating or ignoring the source material for the sake of the porn. Still, if such a shift was ever going to be an issue for Skullgirls, it seems like one that would have been crossed ages ago.

I guess it's hard to tell the future of a property if it stagnates for long enough, though. The release of the new KI revealed an amalgamated cult of people that had apparently spent years worshipping Orchid's ass, so I guess anything is possible.
 
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This is a great time to remember this game was nominated for an award due to it's sheer quality of animation. I want to say they got the award but at the moment I ain't looking it up
 
Midiman said:
This is a great time to remember this game was nominated for an award due to it's sheer quality of animation. I want to say they got the award but at the moment I ain't looking it up

Is anyone attacking the quality of the animation? I think even detractors have to admit that it's really good.
 
No-one is attacking it, but I bring it up to point out that the game has pretty impressive looks from a first-look perspective.
 
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