As someone who's lived a double life for decades split between SFW and NSFW communities, I appreciate the idea of being able to hide adult-oriented games on my profile rather than have to try and...
As someone who's lived a double life for decades split between SFW and NSFW communities, I appreciate the idea of being able to hide adult-oriented games on my profile rather than have to try and explain them to people or have an alternate account. It's a feature I've wanted for years, hopefully Steam comes through with it.
The most obvious use of marking games as private is to hide NSFW stuff, but it has utility beyond that. I could see it being useful for hiding games that aren’t particularly objectionable overall,...
The most obvious use of marking games as private is to hide NSFW stuff, but it has utility beyond that. I could see it being useful for hiding games that aren’t particularly objectionable overall, but wouldn’t be approved of by parts of one’s social circle or might invite unwanted commentary from someone on their friends list.
I didn’t have that in mind specifically, but sure. I was thinking more of how for example playing SFW anime-styled games or the “wrong” popular shooter/MOBA/etc can bring scrutiny in some circles.
I didn’t have that in mind specifically, but sure. I was thinking more of how for example playing SFW anime-styled games or the “wrong” popular shooter/MOBA/etc can bring scrutiny in some circles.
This has historically been a can of worms for Tildes, and I don't think we need to open that one again. But to summarize - because of J. K. Rowling's influence and tremendous hatred for trans...
This has historically been a can of worms for Tildes, and I don't think we need to open that one again. But to summarize - because of J. K. Rowling's influence and tremendous hatred for trans people (specifically trans women) there are a lot of people that consider purchasing the game to be financial support for transphobia.
I personally feel like those people hating on the game never played it. There's literally trans characters IN THE GAME, I believe the devs did it to spite JK Rowling. One of the bar owners in...
I personally feel like those people hating on the game never played it.
There's literally trans characters IN THE GAME, I believe the devs did it to spite JK Rowling.
One of the bar owners in Hogsmead is so obviously male to female transition, all my friends noticed it independently. She comes up in a few quests and even the main questline I believe.
Honestly, very very well put. So well put that I don't even have anything to add. I wholeheartedly agree with you. Honestly I didn't like that she was profiting off it, but I had an amazing time...
Honestly, very very well put. So well put that I don't even have anything to add.
I wholeheartedly agree with you.
Honestly I didn't like that she was profiting off it, but I had an amazing time playing the game and after seeing the trans characters I felt somewhat redeemed. She's also wealthy enough that whatever she makes from this game really will have no difference in her power so to me in the end "she profits off it" was kind of a moot argument from all those band wagoners.
In regards to the combat, I agree! While I did have some fun, it was very repetitive and not very rewarding, though I went out of my way to kill everything and do every side quest searching for...
In regards to the combat, I agree! While I did have some fun, it was very repetitive and not very rewarding, though I went out of my way to kill everything and do every side quest searching for better fights.
This feeling was probably partially because I had not long before that had pretty much 100%'d Elden Ring CO-OP mod with 2 friends and the combat in that is much more challenging, so the combat in HL was a pretty funny but nice change.
I absolutely loved the graphics and level designs too. I think I spent like the first 3-4 hours of the game just exploring the castle and surroundings, not progressing any quests haha.
And yes some of the physics with the combat were pretty hilarious too!
I knew something was up when people went from being mad at her for pushing hateful transphobic rhetoric on Twitter to trying to paint the Harry Potter books as deliberately racist. I'm as angry as...
I knew something was up when people went from being mad at her for pushing hateful transphobic rhetoric on Twitter to trying to paint the Harry Potter books as deliberately racist.
I'm as angry as anyone at how she uses her clout to push TERF nonsense, but I feel like you have to completely misunderstand the whole point of Harry Potter to think it is intentionally racist. The entire antagonist faction is an allegory for white supremacy, what with their whole motivation being the pursuit of racial purity in their community...
Serious question: is referring to the game title with silly synonyms just a meme I’m unfamiliar with, or is there some more deliberate SEO/privacy/antipromotional reason for doing it?
Serious question: is referring to the game title with silly synonyms just a meme I’m unfamiliar with, or is there some more deliberate SEO/privacy/antipromotional reason for doing it?
I don't know if it is the case here, but sometimes people will do things like that on twitter to avoid people searching by keyword from harassing them.
I don't know if it is the case here, but sometimes people will do things like that on twitter to avoid people searching by keyword from harassing them.
Yeah now I can hide those EA games that I buy while still telling people to stop buying EA games. This really isn't me, but I'm sure it's someone. Seriously though, it's not me.
Yeah now I can hide those EA games that I buy while still telling people to stop buying EA games. This really isn't me, but I'm sure it's someone. Seriously though, it's not me.
Understandable. For me it's games with anthropomorphic (furry) characters. I've hung around with the furry community for over two decades now, I still have friends there and some of the games that...
Understandable. For me it's games with anthropomorphic (furry) characters. I've hung around with the furry community for over two decades now, I still have friends there and some of the games that come from the community are pretty good, but definitely mature territory. On the other hand, I have IRL friends from work, etc. on Steam as well, and I'd rather not explain why I bought an adult-rated furry dating sim game.
You don't have to explain. On theother hand, this is/will be welcomed feature, because I have some games of similar kind and I have kids that (will) have their own accounts...
You don't have to explain.
On theother hand, this is/will be welcomed feature, because I have some games of similar kind and I have kids that (will) have their own accounts...
I’m honestly kind of dying to know what you have in your steam library now. While I don’t consider myself to be “a furry”, I am a fan of the works that come out of the community.
I’m honestly kind of dying to know what you have in your steam library now.
While I don’t consider myself to be “a furry”, I am a fan of the works that come out of the community.
I just took a look and was surprised to find that you can actually get leisure suit larry on steam, along with space quest, quest for glory, king’s quest, and all the old sierra games. Might be...
I just took a look and was surprised to find that you can actually get leisure suit larry on steam, along with space quest, quest for glory, king’s quest, and all the old sierra games. Might be time for a little stroll down memory lane.
I've never played these games but I'll admit I was shocked when I learned you can't hide them. I have to imagine that everyone in the industry would love for steam to make this a thing. No...
I've never played these games but I'll admit I was shocked when I learned you can't hide them. I have to imagine that everyone in the industry would love for steam to make this a thing. No judgement on people who do like these kinds of games, but I totally understand not wanting to play one when your entire friends list (often including relatives) gets to know.
Yeah, the best you can do right now is make your entire game library private, which can be a pain when you want to use the "compare owned games" function to see if a friend has the same games you...
Yeah, the best you can do right now is make your entire game library private, which can be a pain when you want to use the "compare owned games" function to see if a friend has the same games you do (helps finding co-op stuff to play). I've been waiting years for such a feature, there's games I wanted to try but couldn't because the fact I bought it would be plastered all over my activity feed.
Honestly Steam desperately needs better features for managing your privacy and friends list. My profile is just set to private and I'm constantly set to offline because I don't really want people...
Honestly Steam desperately needs better features for managing your privacy and friends list. My profile is just set to private and I'm constantly set to offline because I don't really want people to know what games I'm playing and when. I don't really want to add coworkers or anything on Steam either because that just seems like a disaster waiting to happen, particularly in workplaces which don't understand or respect work/life balance.
I only add people who I would consider 'friends' outside work, so that's a pretty short list. Most of them are either admitted furries or other LGBT folks. I understand the desire for privacy,...
I only add people who I would consider 'friends' outside work, so that's a pretty short list. Most of them are either admitted furries or other LGBT folks. I understand the desire for privacy, though. I used to balance having multiple Steam and Discord accounts for different crowds, but it got to be too much of a pain. Discord at least allows you to have different names/avatars in different servers so it's easier to keep two sides of your life separate now than in the past. Steam adopting similar features is nice, though like you said, it could definitely use more in that vein.
Starting today, users who have opted into the Steam Client Beta will see a new version of the shopping cart when checking out on the Steam Store. These users will also be able to mark games in their library as private.
Good change. I have a friend who has account on private because I gifted him a porn game as a joke (no clue why he accepted it). I'm sure he'd be happy to hear that he may finally be freed.
Good change. I have a friend who has account on private because I gifted him a porn game as a joke (no clue why he accepted it). I'm sure he'd be happy to hear that he may finally be freed.
And here I am out in the breeze buying NSFW games on my main account and not worrying about it. Glad that people who want to keep such things private will have that option.
And here I am out in the breeze buying NSFW games on my main account and not worrying about it. Glad that people who want to keep such things private will have that option.
Are porn games good? Like, in any sense of the word. Fun, good to jack off to, whatever. (this is not a trick question: I know absolutely nothing about them and they fascinate me.)
Are porn games good? Like, in any sense of the word. Fun, good to jack off to, whatever. (this is not a trick question: I know absolutely nothing about them and they fascinate me.)
There's enough variety out there that some porn games will scratch your itch, but let me talk about them mechanically, since the gameplay is what's going to actually distinguish them from other...
Exemplary
There's enough variety out there that some porn games will scratch your itch, but let me talk about them mechanically, since the gameplay is what's going to actually distinguish them from other forms of smut. Some are good as both games and porn, but there's a majority of them that are really poor games, since NSFW games don't get a huge amount of development time. A lot of them go for very simple mechanics, like card matching to reveal an image, or a platformer where when you run into an enemy you get a short cutscene, but at that point you would be better off just browsing an image board or video site. The best are actual fun games in their own right, and that makes the smut something where it feels like something you're actually choosing and doing. To me, that's what can elevate porn games above other forms of erotic media.
RPG's are a great format for smut. All of the benefits of player agency and growth, potential for narrative depth, and then smut on top. The best example I have of a good game that happens to be very smutty is Karryn's Prison, an RPG/city builder with a 20 hour campaign, a tech tree and variable character builds, well balanced combat, well balanced sex actions within the combat framework that means your active engagement doesn't stop just because sex starts... it's a technically impressive game and is fun and possible to play through entirely without engaging with the sexual content, which is high praise.
If you want to read more and look at pictures less, Fenoxo has developed a series of text-only RPG's with extensive storylines and side characters. These games have had content added to them for years, so there's a lot of reading to be done as well as game to play.
Below that is a wide band of RPG's with perfectly functional RPG Maker combat and a broad variety of themes. Whether these are worth playing will mostly depend on whether the smut matches your personal tastes, but coming from a perfectly functional game engine there's something of a floor on how bad it can be, gamewise. It's never a bad idea to read the reviews for mentions of it being fun to play. Mango Party and Kagura Games are major publishers of games in that vein. Variable quality, but a decent place to start looking. A special nod to Odyssey of Gianna, which has that sort of old-school early 90's JRPG vibe, where there are way more mechanics than you'd expect from a simple RPG, and the whole thing goes weird. Really weird. Too weird for me. But from a gameplay perspective it's a really clever set of mechanics.
There's also some point & click adventure titles with cutscenes interspersed, with NLT Media being the top of the heap there. These are massive games, with hundreds of cutscenes, but for me, the lack of any choices to be made makes me feel like I could just watch a movie instead. If the gaming aspect isn't relevant to what I'm doing, why am I playing a game?
But all in all there's a huge body of art out there, tailored to whatever sort of interests you have. A lot of the smut is good even if the gameplay is bad. Turn off that NSFW filter on Steam and take a look. You can even do it secretly soon.
it's like the rest of the indie market. The vast majority are horrible and aren't worth the time it took to click on the store link. Some are decent or target a very specific niche and if you find...
it's like the rest of the indie market. The vast majority are horrible and aren't worth the time it took to click on the store link. Some are decent or target a very specific niche and if you find those you are truly set. A few are decent enough games even if they just tack on sex scenes (think most WRPGs in terms of tack on. Can you make fallout or Baldur's Gate 3 without sex? Sure. Does it help immerse? yes). And then there are a few unicorns that are truly great games and weave the themes of sexuality into every fabric of the game.
the net is squeamish and this stuff is constantly pushed underground, so you need to dig and find the right circles for yourself. And of course, find youself. No point in recommending the best furry game if you do not enjoy furries.
Steam is so inconsistent with what it allows that I only buy them on Steam as a last resort. When I had Evenicle on Steam (and still do) and Evenicle 2 was blocked, it was pretty clear the lines...
Steam is so inconsistent with what it allows that I only buy them on Steam as a last resort. When I had Evenicle on Steam (and still do) and Evenicle 2 was blocked, it was pretty clear the lines behind the scenes were blurrier than my eyesight when I wake up
Fair enough. I buy on Steam because it's easier, but I should expand my horizons. Do you have recommendations for other places to find good NSFW games aside from running across good recommendations?
Fair enough. I buy on Steam because it's easier, but I should expand my horizons. Do you have recommendations for other places to find good NSFW games aside from running across good recommendations?
Itch.io has one of the more friendlier interfaces for discovering games and a bustling NSFW community for indies. Maybe the largest storefront for that stuff outside of Steam itself. Really good...
Itch.io has one of the more friendlier interfaces for discovering games and a bustling NSFW community for indies. Maybe the largest storefront for that stuff outside of Steam itself. Really good filtering/categorization, decent curation for if you want to check what's hot, its own community forum for more intimate curation and to give feedback to the store owners (who's decently active. Or at least, was some ~3 years ago when I last browsed). Community IMO was on the friendlier side.
I'll also emphasize as a dev (well, professional dev hoping to go indie one day) that it's pretty friendly on that front too, since you can name the rate you give to Itch, down to 0% (I believe the default slider is 10%). Many NSFW stuff there is free regardless, but it's an interesting footnote.
For more professional stuff, I'll usually try and check DLSite. It has many stuff but nowhere close to all. But it's GOG esque in that every thing I've bought there so far was no nonsense DRM-free downloads, so that's huge points in my books.
Many Japanese games (many "visual novels", but some VNs end up having more gameplay than console games) also have some publisher that distributes for them overseas so you'll see a few names pop up constantly in that scene:
Mangagamer
Jast USA
Kagura Games
Denpasoft
IME none of these are particularly good at discovery nor curation, but if you know exactly what you're looking for you can go straight to the source.
And while I don't personally condone piracy, I can't ignore the community of F95zone. It's pretty obvious what most people are there for, but it's at least polite enough to link to official sources. It's an old school forum format, so I find it easy to navigate around. It's most helpful for discovering some stuff only directly distributed, or exclusively behind Patreon (which I'd never personally search directly on). And of course there's plenty of curation if you search around the comments or post your own discussion (there's decent tagging and a "trending games" section as well).
But like any community, YMMV a lot. I won't say most of the conversations I've read there are 4chan levels, but you'll see that. More like reddit levels most of the time. I've only lurked there, personally.
Wow, thank you for the plethora of options. I really appreciate the rundown. I can tell I'm going to be referring back to this comment for a good while when I want something new.
Wow, thank you for the plethora of options. I really appreciate the rundown. I can tell I'm going to be referring back to this comment for a good while when I want something new.
I would assume they might, because they're still on your account, just hidden from other users. I do recall being able to exclude games from recommendations, but I may be mistaken.
I would assume they might, because they're still on your account, just hidden from other users. I do recall being able to exclude games from recommendations, but I may be mistaken.
It's a good question. As it is right now they'll show up in your discovery queue, and even on the front page in the "Featured & Recommended" page, so if someone is looking over your shoulder they...
It's a good question. As it is right now they'll show up in your discovery queue, and even on the front page in the "Featured & Recommended" page, so if someone is looking over your shoulder they may still get a NSFW eyeful.
As someone who's lived a double life for decades split between SFW and NSFW communities, I appreciate the idea of being able to hide adult-oriented games on my profile rather than have to try and explain them to people or have an alternate account. It's a feature I've wanted for years, hopefully Steam comes through with it.
The most obvious use of marking games as private is to hide NSFW stuff, but it has utility beyond that. I could see it being useful for hiding games that aren’t particularly objectionable overall, but wouldn’t be approved of by parts of one’s social circle or might invite unwanted commentary from someone on their friends list.
Hogwarts Legacy?
I didn’t have that in mind specifically, but sure. I was thinking more of how for example playing SFW anime-styled games or the “wrong” popular shooter/MOBA/etc can bring scrutiny in some circles.
wait? I have been ignoring this game ... why would people hide it?
This has historically been a can of worms for Tildes, and I don't think we need to open that one again. But to summarize - because of J. K. Rowling's influence and tremendous hatred for trans people (specifically trans women) there are a lot of people that consider purchasing the game to be financial support for transphobia.
I personally feel like those people hating on the game never played it.
There's literally trans characters IN THE GAME, I believe the devs did it to spite JK Rowling.
One of the bar owners in Hogsmead is so obviously male to female transition, all my friends noticed it independently. She comes up in a few quests and even the main questline I believe.
Honestly, very very well put. So well put that I don't even have anything to add.
I wholeheartedly agree with you.
Honestly I didn't like that she was profiting off it, but I had an amazing time playing the game and after seeing the trans characters I felt somewhat redeemed. She's also wealthy enough that whatever she makes from this game really will have no difference in her power so to me in the end "she profits off it" was kind of a moot argument from all those band wagoners.
Thanks for your awesome reply!
In regards to the combat, I agree! While I did have some fun, it was very repetitive and not very rewarding, though I went out of my way to kill everything and do every side quest searching for better fights.
This feeling was probably partially because I had not long before that had pretty much 100%'d Elden Ring CO-OP mod with 2 friends and the combat in that is much more challenging, so the combat in HL was a pretty funny but nice change.
I absolutely loved the graphics and level designs too. I think I spent like the first 3-4 hours of the game just exploring the castle and surroundings, not progressing any quests haha.
And yes some of the physics with the combat were pretty hilarious too!
Oh dang, it's been a long time since I've seen a ribbonfarm link. Thanks for that.
I knew something was up when people went from being mad at her for pushing hateful transphobic rhetoric on Twitter to trying to paint the Harry Potter books as deliberately racist.
I'm as angry as anyone at how she uses her clout to push TERF nonsense, but I feel like you have to completely misunderstand the whole point of Harry Potter to think it is intentionally racist. The entire antagonist faction is an allegory for white supremacy, what with their whole motivation being the pursuit of racial purity in their community...
Serious question: is referring to the game title with silly synonyms just a meme I’m unfamiliar with, or is there some more deliberate SEO/privacy/antipromotional reason for doing it?
I don't know if it is the case here, but sometimes people will do things like that on twitter to avoid people searching by keyword from harassing them.
Yeah now I can hide those EA games that I buy while still telling people to stop buying EA games. This really isn't me, but I'm sure it's someone. Seriously though, it's not me.
I hadn't thought of that, but you're right.
cough hogwarts cough
Finally my complete collection of Leisure Suite Larry can be played in private.
Understandable. For me it's games with anthropomorphic (furry) characters. I've hung around with the furry community for over two decades now, I still have friends there and some of the games that come from the community are pretty good, but definitely mature territory. On the other hand, I have IRL friends from work, etc. on Steam as well, and I'd rather not explain why I bought an adult-rated furry dating sim game.
You don't have to explain.
On theother hand, this is/will be welcomed feature, because I have some games of similar kind and I have kids that (will) have their own accounts...
Have any game recommendations?
Depends what kind of game you want recommendations for. ^^;
I’m honestly kind of dying to know what you have in your steam library now.
While I don’t consider myself to be “a furry”, I am a fan of the works that come out of the community.
Ditto
The closest to "furry" games I have are:
But like Sonic, I don't consider these "furry".
Nothing shocking; I never bought any of those kind of games for fear people I knew IRL would see them.
I just took a look and was surprised to find that you can actually get leisure suit larry on steam, along with space quest, quest for glory, king’s quest, and all the old sierra games. Might be time for a little stroll down memory lane.
Leisure suit Larry is on GOG as well. Not sure about the rest of the games you mention.
I've never played these games but I'll admit I was shocked when I learned you can't hide them. I have to imagine that everyone in the industry would love for steam to make this a thing. No judgement on people who do like these kinds of games, but I totally understand not wanting to play one when your entire friends list (often including relatives) gets to know.
Yeah, the best you can do right now is make your entire game library private, which can be a pain when you want to use the "compare owned games" function to see if a friend has the same games you do (helps finding co-op stuff to play). I've been waiting years for such a feature, there's games I wanted to try but couldn't because the fact I bought it would be plastered all over my activity feed.
Honestly Steam desperately needs better features for managing your privacy and friends list. My profile is just set to private and I'm constantly set to offline because I don't really want people to know what games I'm playing and when. I don't really want to add coworkers or anything on Steam either because that just seems like a disaster waiting to happen, particularly in workplaces which don't understand or respect work/life balance.
I only add people who I would consider 'friends' outside work, so that's a pretty short list. Most of them are either admitted furries or other LGBT folks. I understand the desire for privacy, though. I used to balance having multiple Steam and Discord accounts for different crowds, but it got to be too much of a pain. Discord at least allows you to have different names/avatars in different servers so it's easier to keep two sides of your life separate now than in the past. Steam adopting similar features is nice, though like you said, it could definitely use more in that vein.
Update to this: https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/3901870709962551196
Good change. I have a friend who has account on private because I gifted him a porn game as a joke (no clue why he accepted it). I'm sure he'd be happy to hear that he may finally be freed.
And here I am out in the breeze buying NSFW games on my main account and not worrying about it. Glad that people who want to keep such things private will have that option.
Are porn games good? Like, in any sense of the word. Fun, good to jack off to, whatever. (this is not a trick question: I know absolutely nothing about them and they fascinate me.)
There's enough variety out there that some porn games will scratch your itch, but let me talk about them mechanically, since the gameplay is what's going to actually distinguish them from other forms of smut. Some are good as both games and porn, but there's a majority of them that are really poor games, since NSFW games don't get a huge amount of development time. A lot of them go for very simple mechanics, like card matching to reveal an image, or a platformer where when you run into an enemy you get a short cutscene, but at that point you would be better off just browsing an image board or video site. The best are actual fun games in their own right, and that makes the smut something where it feels like something you're actually choosing and doing. To me, that's what can elevate porn games above other forms of erotic media.
RPG's are a great format for smut. All of the benefits of player agency and growth, potential for narrative depth, and then smut on top. The best example I have of a good game that happens to be very smutty is Karryn's Prison, an RPG/city builder with a 20 hour campaign, a tech tree and variable character builds, well balanced combat, well balanced sex actions within the combat framework that means your active engagement doesn't stop just because sex starts... it's a technically impressive game and is fun and possible to play through entirely without engaging with the sexual content, which is high praise.
If you want to read more and look at pictures less, Fenoxo has developed a series of text-only RPG's with extensive storylines and side characters. These games have had content added to them for years, so there's a lot of reading to be done as well as game to play.
Below that is a wide band of RPG's with perfectly functional RPG Maker combat and a broad variety of themes. Whether these are worth playing will mostly depend on whether the smut matches your personal tastes, but coming from a perfectly functional game engine there's something of a floor on how bad it can be, gamewise. It's never a bad idea to read the reviews for mentions of it being fun to play. Mango Party and Kagura Games are major publishers of games in that vein. Variable quality, but a decent place to start looking. A special nod to Odyssey of Gianna, which has that sort of old-school early 90's JRPG vibe, where there are way more mechanics than you'd expect from a simple RPG, and the whole thing goes weird. Really weird. Too weird for me. But from a gameplay perspective it's a really clever set of mechanics.
There's also some point & click adventure titles with cutscenes interspersed, with NLT Media being the top of the heap there. These are massive games, with hundreds of cutscenes, but for me, the lack of any choices to be made makes me feel like I could just watch a movie instead. If the gaming aspect isn't relevant to what I'm doing, why am I playing a game?
But all in all there's a huge body of art out there, tailored to whatever sort of interests you have. A lot of the smut is good even if the gameplay is bad. Turn off that NSFW filter on Steam and take a look. You can even do it secretly soon.
it's like the rest of the indie market. The vast majority are horrible and aren't worth the time it took to click on the store link. Some are decent or target a very specific niche and if you find those you are truly set. A few are decent enough games even if they just tack on sex scenes (think most WRPGs in terms of tack on. Can you make fallout or Baldur's Gate 3 without sex? Sure. Does it help immerse? yes). And then there are a few unicorns that are truly great games and weave the themes of sexuality into every fabric of the game.
the net is squeamish and this stuff is constantly pushed underground, so you need to dig and find the right circles for yourself. And of course, find youself. No point in recommending the best furry game if you do not enjoy furries.
Steam is so inconsistent with what it allows that I only buy them on Steam as a last resort. When I had Evenicle on Steam (and still do) and Evenicle 2 was blocked, it was pretty clear the lines behind the scenes were blurrier than my eyesight when I wake up
Fair enough. I buy on Steam because it's easier, but I should expand my horizons. Do you have recommendations for other places to find good NSFW games aside from running across good recommendations?
Itch.io has one of the more friendlier interfaces for discovering games and a bustling NSFW community for indies. Maybe the largest storefront for that stuff outside of Steam itself. Really good filtering/categorization, decent curation for if you want to check what's hot, its own community forum for more intimate curation and to give feedback to the store owners (who's decently active. Or at least, was some ~3 years ago when I last browsed). Community IMO was on the friendlier side.
I'll also emphasize as a dev (well, professional dev hoping to go indie one day) that it's pretty friendly on that front too, since you can name the rate you give to Itch, down to 0% (I believe the default slider is 10%). Many NSFW stuff there is free regardless, but it's an interesting footnote.
For more professional stuff, I'll usually try and check DLSite. It has many stuff but nowhere close to all. But it's GOG esque in that every thing I've bought there so far was no nonsense DRM-free downloads, so that's huge points in my books.
Many Japanese games (many "visual novels", but some VNs end up having more gameplay than console games) also have some publisher that distributes for them overseas so you'll see a few names pop up constantly in that scene:
IME none of these are particularly good at discovery nor curation, but if you know exactly what you're looking for you can go straight to the source.
And while I don't personally condone piracy, I can't ignore the community of F95zone. It's pretty obvious what most people are there for, but it's at least polite enough to link to official sources. It's an old school forum format, so I find it easy to navigate around. It's most helpful for discovering some stuff only directly distributed, or exclusively behind Patreon (which I'd never personally search directly on). And of course there's plenty of curation if you search around the comments or post your own discussion (there's decent tagging and a "trending games" section as well).
But like any community, YMMV a lot. I won't say most of the conversations I've read there are 4chan levels, but you'll see that. More like reddit levels most of the time. I've only lurked there, personally.
Wow, thank you for the plethora of options. I really appreciate the rundown. I can tell I'm going to be referring back to this comment for a good while when I want something new.
I wonder if they will still affect your recommendations?
I would assume they might, because they're still on your account, just hidden from other users. I do recall being able to exclude games from recommendations, but I may be mistaken.
It's a good question. As it is right now they'll show up in your discovery queue, and even on the front page in the "Featured & Recommended" page, so if someone is looking over your shoulder they may still get a NSFW eyeful.
It's good to finally hide these games I got just for the medal