I won’t lie, a very big, very real part of me would like to start this post off with some variation of “Good fucking riddance to 2025” on account of it many, many shitty happenings. But that would run somewhat counter to the pride I feel at everything we’ve managed to accomplish in spite of it all. Like, it would not be inaccurate to call 2025 the best year of BP Games’s existence to date across basically every metric OTHER than “geopolitical climate regarding porn and free speech”. So, bearing in mind the admittedly-mixed feelings I have towards this year, let’s go ahead and celebrate what we managed.

Monstrous Liberation Release & Update

Obviously, this is the big one. More than 110 THOUSAND words of erotic fantasy sandbox visual novel released in one year, with plenty more on the way! Monstrous Liberation (available on Steam and Itch) was a big step up in ambition and complexity from our previous visual novel release, the sex-work-found-family-and-Millennial-ennui-focused Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story (Steam, Itch, GOG). It was higher-resolution, moving up from Opportunity‘s 1280×720 to a mammoth-by-comparison 1920×1080. It featured a much larger planned cast of characters, most of whom were non-human. As a work of fiction, its ambitions went far beyond telling a tightly-contained slice-of-life story. It was considerably more fully-featured as a visual novel, and had a non-linear format to boot. Rather than being a broad-appeal contemporary romance, it was focused on a more niche genre of fantasy monsterfuckers. It was planned to be significantly longer when finished, and would take longer to get there. All of these represented not-inconsiderable risks for Pacha and I!

Happily, those risks paid off. The game had a very good launch, even managing to hold on to the top spot of Itch’s “Adult” chart for a couple days (commemorated above). Monstrous Liberation is on track to make as much in its first year as Opportunity has made across its entire lifespan, if not more. As Opportunity did not make very much money this is not an ENORMOUS amount, but it’s nevertheless represented a pretty significant increase in resources for us. For one thing, both Pacha and I are more financially-secure now, being able to afford to pay ourselves better. We’ve also been able to afford to bring on other artists like Dieselbrain, Julian, and Gil in order to take a significant amount of workload off Pacha’s plate, replace our blurred-photo backgrounds with hand-painted ones, and improve the overall quality of the game’s art. And the income gives us the latitude we need to spend longer working on updates, thus making sure that they’re both as long and as good as we want them to be.

Speaking of updates, I’m hoping to maintain our pace of pushing out two major updates per year, with the Scholar District Update hopefully launching in March/April of 2026. This will be followed by an update focused on the Central District in the fall of 2026, an update focused on the Catacombs & Outskirts in spring of 2027, and then finally a final big game-ending 1.0-launch update in fall of 2027. Assuming that all the updates are of analogous length to the first one (the Scholar District is certainly shaping up to be), that means the final-final version of Monstrous Liberation should be around 300,000 words long, with close to three dozen full-length sex scenes and who even knows how many mini-scenes. Not too shabby, content-wise!

I really am very excited for people to encounter some of the big narrative swings I’ve got planned for Monstrous Liberation‘s story in the coming updates. It’s been very fun to see people’s enthusiasm about some of the weirder things that crop up in the story from time to time, and I just want you to know that it’s only going to get weirder from here.

Adult Analysis Anthology

The Adult Analysis Anthology really seemed to hit its stride this year, at least in terms of its penetration into the overall zeitgeist (or, at least, the zeitgeist shared among people who actively seek out and read longform writing about video games). This is due almost entirely to a number of people actively championing the project – people like the folks over at Critical Distance, who have promoted a solid majority of AAA’s web essays, or like developer Zoquete, who did an entire art series promoting the 3rd issue’s fundraiser – for which I’m incredibly grateful. It’s one thing to believe in a project and want to see it realized for your own sake, but it really takes on a whole other level of significance once you see how much it resonates with your audience. More than anything else, AAA has vindicated my assertion that there’s an appetite for the kind of writing it contains.

I regret that AAA only released one issue in 2025, but there were a number of factors that led to that. The sheer amount of other work I had on my plate was the most significant factor, of course – besides the enormous amount of writing and programming work there is to do on Monstrous Liberation basically always, my hands are also kept full with less-glamorous tasks like keeping our newsletter and paysites updated, keeping the books balanced, planning for & promoting our various sales… and that’s not even getting into work I have to do on things that AREN’T BP-Games-related. There’s also a very real concern about fundraising fatigue; as much as people might appreciate AAA’s mission, I don’t know that there are enough people with enough free cash nowadays to be able to put together the $1000+ it costs to pay everyone for a new issue multiple times a year. The third major issue was the ramping-up of payment processor censorship that led to the whole deindexing situation on Itch, a situation that’s still ongoing and hanging over the heads of myself and everyone else who makes adult-oriented art. You might recall that whole business kicked off somewhere in the middle of the run of web essays for AAA3 being posted, which was a pretty bizarre experience. I think a lot of people appreciated that there was someone publishing writing about adult games at that time, which paradoxically might have helped our overall profile despite the obvious existential threat. That said, an event like that definitely throws one off one’s balance in terms of making long-term plans, and once all the dust had settled I decided I’d prefer to focus on non-AAA projects for a while. Honestly, the amount of other work I was dealing with while going through the essay editing process for AAA3 made me feel as though I wasn’t really doing as good a job as some of the pieces deserved, and I felt like I needed some time away from it to recharge.

I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn when I say that AAA has become something of a prestige project for BP Games. It’s not EXACTLY a loss leader, as every issue since the first hasn’t technically cost us any money due to the up-front fundraising (as long as I practice a kind of wilful fiscal blindness towards how many unpaid hours I work on coordinating, editing, research, and writing my own essays), but it’s also not exactly a money-maker, either. The real value of AAA (other than the quality of the writing it contains, of course) is that it makes people think a lot better of us – a lot better than they’d think of a single regular-degular fuckass opinionated game developer, that’s for sure. The fact that hardly anywhere is publishing ANY kind of thoughtful long-form writing about ANY kind of video games any more, let alone PAYING people any amount for doing so (an essay for AAA pays, like, three times as much as a piece for VICE Games. Lol. Lmao) lets us chalk up a pretty easy rhetorical win on the ole public perception front. If I can indulge in a bit of favorable comparison for a moment, I’m reminded of how PLAYBOY Magazine, in order to sell itself as not merely a titty mag but a respectable periodical, paid out extraordinarily competitive rates for a dizzying array of essays, interviews, reporting, and short stories, making “I only read it for the articles” actually somewhat plausible. While we don’t exactly have the budget to attain that level of cultural capture, I think the overall effect is similar.

By the way, did you know that pitches for the 4th issue of AAA are open right now, and will be open until January 18th, 2026? If not, well, they are! If you’ve got a kickass essay about adult games bubbling and brewing inside your noggin, I’d love to hear about it!

Tourney of Tyranny

This’ll be a somewhat-shorter section as I feel like I already said quite a bit about the experience of making Tourney of Tyranny and what the project means to me in this recent post, and I don’t want to retread that ground. Go read that post! It contains a lot of Thoughts! (As a bit of a follow-up, since making that post the number of sales for ToT has nearly doubled, which is still a pretty low number of overall sales but it’s nice that my whining was good for something. If you’d like to support the project, you can sample the first volume completely for free here, or purchase the full version outright here (you don’t have to subscribe! You can just do it as a one-time purchase! Although subscribing is cheaper!))

All I really feel like adding is that I’ve found it very fun to write in a prose style and that I’m really looking forward to getting to do more of it in 2026! Tourney of Tyranny lived for so long as a feverishly-long list of characters and plot beats that it was honestly a complete surprise that when I started actually writing the thing it quickly turned into something I was truly proud of and excited to keep going with. Writing for Tourney of Tyranny is just EASIER than writing for games, or for the anthology, or even for the blog – it feels like there are hardly any restrictions on what I can and can’t do, barely any formatting or research to worry about. I can truly just let ‘er rip in a way none of my other projects afford me.

Opportunity Retrospective

Speaking of self-indulgent projects, you might have forgotten that earlier in this year I wrapped up the 10-part, 35,000-odd-word series of retrospective essays about the development, philosophies, and legacy of Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story. I still intend to collect it all as a proper PDF and offer it as a bundle bonus on Itch one of these days, it’s just one of those things that keeps slipping priority because let’s face it, this was always something mainly being created for my own benefit. If anyone else wound up enjoying it, well, that was largely incidental. All joking aside, I’m very glad to have done it, for much the same reasons that I’m glad to be writing this very round-up. There’s so much pressure to make and make and make and release and promote and post and it’s so easy to let everything melt into the formless slurry that is The Past. It’s a great relief to know that I’ve actually recorded as many of the thoughts & feelings I had about Opportunity as I could into what I hope is an attractive, digestible format – who knows how much I might’ve just plain forgot if I’d left the writing of such a thing even another five years. If you’d like to revisit the retrospective, you can start with the first part here, or pick whichever part you’d like from the archive post here.

Blogging & Newsletter

If you include this post, over the course of 2025 this blog has updated 47 times. Here’s the breakdown of said posts:

• 17 newsletters, launch announcements, or other pieces of BP-Games-related news,
• 17 essays from the 2nd and 3rd issues of the Adult Analysis Anthology NOT written by me,
• 7 parts from the Opportunity retrospective series (the other 3 having already been posted in late 2024), and
• 5 other pieces of original longform writing from me, including my essays from AAA3

The newsletter’s a bit of a pain, particularly when it’s the 14th of the month and I realize I’ve yet again left writing it to the very last minute, but I’m glad I’ve kept it up. Again, it’s one of those things where it’s easy to let everything you’ve done over the past 30 days or so slip away from you, and being forced to sit down and run through it all is helpful for one’s self-esteem. Our subscriber numbers aren’t too impressive – as of right now I think we’re somewhere in the mid-80s – but honestly it’s nice to know that there’s a little core of people out there that I can reach even if everything else shuts down. If you’d like to count yourself among those people, feel free to sign up for free!

As I said above, this has been a good year for the attention our AAA essays have gotten, with several of the essays from the 3rd issue counting among the blog’s most-viewed posts. Going strictly by the numbers, the three most popular AAA essays this year were Morgan K’s “Bad End: The Seduction Of Game Over“, Liz Alfos’s “The Meet ‘N’ Fuck Saga“, and Zoquete’s “Yes, It Was Worth It: An Argument For Quality Porn Games“. Very proud to have published all of them!

I’ll admit to being a trifle embarrassed to have ONLY published a dozen pieces of original non-promotional writing to the blog this year, although hopefully reading through this round-up post makes it clear why that might’ve been the case. Blogging, for the most part, is only something I do when I feel as though I have a good topic in mind and can justify spending the time it’d take to write it. Which can be hard to do, sometimes! That being said, I’m pretty proud of what I did manage to get up on the blog this year – my favorite piece has to be the interview I did with Arden and Julian about The Vow. It feels really good to get to sit down and jaw about creative influences and philosophies, and those two are wonderful subjects. I’d love to do more of this type of interviewing in the future if I can figure out how to swing it.

Patreon & Subscribestar

I’ll be honest: I really wish I’d had our paysite pages up and operational prior to Monstrous Liberation‘s launch, which was probably when there was the biggest wave of interest in supporting us in such a fashion. Obviously it’s better having them up late than never, and we’ve managed to coax the beginnings of an alternative income stream out of them (presently we’re a little bit below $120/month between both sites, which isn’t NOTHING but there’s a long way to go before it starts feeling Significant) but it’s hard not to think about how much money that got left on the table. All I’ve got to say in my defence is that everything takes work. It takes work to get all the assets together to make a page look professional, it takes work to keep the pages updated regularly, and it takes work to promote the pages so that people realize that they can support you if they want to. I hate to keep harping on this point, but again, if you look at all the other shit that got done this year, you might begin to see why adding to that kind of workload might not have been SUPER attractive for us (and for me, the guy who has to stay on top of all of it). Please don’t let my bellyaching make it feel as though I don’t massively appreciate everyone who’s hopped on to the pages to support us since they’ve gone live, you’re all wonderful and I hope very much to keep earning your support going forward. If you’re a supporter, feel free to pipe up in the comments sometimes with questions, feedback, requests, or ideas! And if you’d like to BECOME a supporter, head on over to our Patreon or Subscribestar pages today! Everyone’s welcome!

BP Games In “The News”

This isn’t an exhaustive accounting, but I felt like it might be nice to list all the places throughout the wider web I’ve noticed our work being boosted or discussed this year!

• As mentioned above, Critical Distance has been tremendously helpful in bringing our Adult Analysis Anthology essays to a wider audience!
• The folks over at Anime Feminist have also been kind enough to boost several of the pieces from the blog in their weekly roundups!
• Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story was discussed at length by Nina and Gloria of Insert Moin’s “Random Encounters” podcast!
• Speaking of interviews, I gave my first-ever interview about the Adult Analysis Anthology, adult game development, and ongoing censorship movements over at Exalclaw!
• The Adult Analysis Anthology got a shoutout over on Chris Plante’s Post Games podcast & newsletter!
• Monstrous Liberation made it onto this list from PC Gamer about some of their favorite sex games!

Again, this is not exhaustive (or, at least, I don’t THINK it’s exhaustive). If you’ve done (or know about) any coverage of our work over the past year, please let me know about it and I’d be happy to add it to the list!

Wrapping Up

Y’know, I knew this post was going to be long before I started writing it, but I’m still kind of floored by how much we managed to accomplish this year. Fuck! Do YOU have a favorite BP Games Memory from 2025? I’d love to hear about them over on Bluesky! Feel free to drop a line to the official site e-mail, also – it’d be nice if that particular inbox was given a break from the various spammers promising to optimize our SEO. Our SEO’s fine, you little freaks! I hope everyone has a lovely New Year’s Eve, and may 2026 be better for all of us. See you there!

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