Does sex sell MMORPGs?

Adolescent boys feel a great curiosity towards the naked female body and depictions of sex. That is totally normal, a primal urge that goes back to a time where humans procreated with 15 and died at 30. Although video games generally have very little to do with sex, they often target a young male audience, and sex is an sometimes used marketing ploy to attract them. Just take E3 booth babes as example, although that practice has stopped with the reorganization of that video game trade show. Up to now there hasn't been much sex in MMORPGs, at least not officially, just some people having cybersex which is mostly text-based, with a couple of emotes. You can't even strip totally naked in a typical MMORPG, and the anatomy of avatars is of the Ken and Barbie kind. This is going to change when end of March Age of Conan comes out, the first MMORPG with a mature rating and naked female avatars as a major feature in marketing. Is that going to sell?

First of all, besides the marketing, there are perfectly good artistic reasons to have this sort of mature content in the Age of Conan game. The Conan the Barbarian stories and books of Robert E. Howard date back to the 1920's and 30's, and are sexist by modern standards, although they contain also strong female characters. A politically correct Conan would jar, you can't be both a barbarian and politically correct. But one man's laudable sticking to the source is another man's cheesy marketing ploy. By stressing the "mature" rating of the game Funcom obviously hopes to attract some people that are only interested in the mature parts of sex and violence.

But I have my doubts whether being the "MMORPG with boobs" is going to be such a strong selling point. If somebody under 17 wants to play a mature ratings online game, he obviously needs unsupervised internet access. And if he has that, Age of Conan might not necessarily be the most titillating content available. Why look at pixelated boobs of female avatars in AoC if the internet is full of free porn pictures and videos? While some people claim that social networks are now more popular than porn, the actual "percentage" of porn on the internet is disputed, as it depends on whether you count sites, visitors, or amount of data transfered. For example one study found porn to be 13% of all Bittorrent traffic, while another government study found only 1% of sites indexed by Google being pornographic in content. But I think we can all agree that there is plenty of pornography on the internet, and that an average teenage boy would have no problem finding it, even if his parents wasted money on some filter software, which never works.

So funnily enough it might be more the violence and gore part of the mature rating that will actually sell Age of Conan. The sex part will result in a couple of headlines and protests from attention seeking politicians, but I don't think it will actually drive the sales of the game. In the end much will depend on whether Age of Conan is any good, and not on how many naked pixels it contains.