Futa or futanari? How adult game developers split their own audience with tags

On storefronts where developers type their own tags, a tag is how players find a game. A player who browses one word never sees the games that used a different word for the same thing. We looked at the tags developers wrote themselves on every game in the catalog that has them.

Almost every slot, filled

Developers take tagging seriously. Most games carry eight tags or more, and very few make do with a handful.

Half the vocabulary is used once

The effort doesn’t add up to a shared language. Across 3,239 games, developers used 1,351 different tags, and 54.4% of them appear on exactly one game. A tag that only one game uses connects that game to nobody.

One audience, two words

The larger loss is on popular themes, where the audience exists but is split between words. Futa or futanari, ntr or netorare, lesbian or yuri: for each pair below, the bar shows the share of games with the theme that don’t use its most common word. A player browsing the common word never sees those games.

Some of these differ by a hyphen. Others are separate words from separate scenes, such as yuri and lesbian, or ntr and netorare. To the player it makes no difference: a game tagged with the other word is simply not there.

What a developer can do

• Check the neighbours. Before choosing a word, see which spelling most games like yours already use, and use that one.
• Spend a slot on the second word when a theme is split. On a split theme, one extra tag reaches the part of the audience browsing the other word.
• Drop the one-off tags. A tag nobody else uses finds nobody. That slot is better spent on a common word.