Adult game dev reveals annual gamer 'kink survey' results: 'Monster Girls' are on top, but 'Tentacles dropped out of the top 25'

Sexy games have been around for as long I can remember: I played Strip Poker on my Apple IIe way back in the '80s. But Steam's hands-off curation policy, the arrival of indie-friendly marketplaces like Itch.io, and the rise of monetization platforms like Patreon have led to a proliferation of adult games that means it's not unusual to see them sitting next to big-budget mainstream games on virtual shelves these days.

And like their contemporaries making non-adult games, the developers behind this burgeoning category are asking for feedback and input from the community to find out what players want to see in their games—their questions are just a little different.

HotPink is a game developer who makes "cute lewd games" on Patreon and Itch like The Endless Stream, a twin-stick shooter where your reward for surviving hordes of zombies is sex with the game's cast of heroes, and River City Girls parody Lewd City Girls, a side-scrolling pixel beat 'em up where you can also, as the dev puts it, "beat 'em off."

Since 2020, HotPink has been polling players and fans about their kinks and preferences to help them decide what sorts of sex acts to put in their games. The polls present a randomly sorted list of kinks—shower sex, BDSM, femdom, cosplay, food play, body swap, just to name a few of the over a hundred kinks listed in the survey—giving users a chance to rank each from 1 to 5, with 1 being "I don't want to see this in a game" and 5 being "please include this in a game."

The results from the 2025 kink survey are in, and they're pretty interesting: gamers are apparently really, really into "Monster Girls."

Yes, Monster Girls has become the number one gamer kink among HotPink's players, fans, and followers, with a tiny but critical +1 bump over last year. I'm going to refrain from mentioning most of the other kinks by name, but Tights/Leggings placed third, Goths are up two points over last year, while Tomboys has slid a few spots compared to 2024.

NSFW warning—there aren't graphic images of any of the kinks in the following link, though HotPink's logo is a butt in pink panties. You can see the full survey results on Bluesky here. HotPink ran through the numbers to analyze the rise and fall of various kinks and speculate on the reasons for their changes in the standings.

"Glasses and Cosplay big jumps into the top 10!" HotPink reported on Bluesky. "Swimsuits also a big jump not too far behind. Clothed Sex and Uniforms also got big boosts this year. Y'all like your fashion and attire. Roommates also went down. Maybe y'all getting out of the house more?"

The real shocker: "Tentacles dropped out of the top 25 for the first time. Times are a changin."

Poll takers were also given a chance to include "write-ins" on the ballot, which includes fetishes like "Stealth/hidden sex," "Brat-taming," "Scissoring, woo!" and "a moth girl," which I'm guessing is a very specific sub-genre of Monster Girls. Some suggested kinks are quite nice, like "wholesome kisses after sex," though HotPink gently objected to one particular write-in: "'married sex'- yeah sounds great ????" they said.

I wouldn't mind seeing these kinds of ultra-specific preference surveys by devs of non-lewd games, too, by the way. I can easily envision poll results like "escort missions are still in last place with zero points," "Ctrl is and always should be the default key for crouching" and "in 2025, absolutely no one has a kink for waiting for shaders to compile."

You can check out HotPink's games on itch.io and visit their Patreon.