At the close of 2020, VR Bangers, a leading VR porn studio, released Dezyred, a choose your own adventure-style (CYOA) game in which players basically step into porn plots and make choices about sex acts and positions that move them from one distinct scene to the next. The game’s first scenario, for example, turned users into porn star Lacy Lennon’s stepbrother, getting ready to spend a sexy weekend with her and her friend, fellow porn star Whitney Wright. It allowed users to discover up to nine different scenes, which added up to more than seven hours of content. “A lot of good things can happen to you this weekend,” the scenario teaser reads. “Friendly sunbathing, great party, intimate conversations, wild sex…what will happen is completely up to you.”
This was an ambitious project, not just in terms of its sheer length and depth when compared to your average adult industry content, VR or otherwise, but also in terms of its technological sophistication. VR Bangers shot the scenario in 8K, with “360 teleport movement,” which was a notable step forward for the quality of VR porn games. And it earned its fair share of accolades for the production value, use of big adult stars and quality acting.
But the game wasn’t the grand innovation VR Bangers made it out to be. Notably, their site claims, “we really hate bragging, but Dezyred is the very first choice for your own adventure in VR Porn experience in the world! It’s a one of a kind experience that will blow your mind.” However, soon after it launched, industry reviewers pointed out that several CYOA VR porn games predated it. They further described the first scenario as a bit bland, and the game was reportedly somewhat buggy at launch. It wasn’t clear at the time that it’d be a money maker for VR Bangers. People can sign up and test the game for free, but users have to buy “coins” in-game to unlock new scenes. While freemium models are common (if often unpopular with consumers) across the mainstream and adult game worlds because they can prompt incredible levels of consumer spending, they’re not reliably profitable; their success often hinges on factors like user base size and engagement. (VR Bangers did not respond to a request for comment on Dezyred’s profitability, among other matters.)
Which makes the time and resources VR Bangers apparently poured into Dezyred particularly striking: the game was reportedly in development for years and likely cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars to launch. In terms of sheer investment, that seemingly puts Dezyred up there with some of the most ambitious and expensive traditional porn projects ever made. This sort of big project is increasingly rare in the adult industry overall, where most creators focus on producing cheap, quick and reliable content to cope with heavy competition for paying users.
Still, VR Bangers continues to pump resources into Dezyred. (They’re about to release their eighth scenario, “Endless Blie with Jewelz Blu.”) They also have a reputation for regularly investing in similarly ambitious new projects and VR tech innovations. And although VR Bangers is certainly one of the most ambitious players in its field, several other VR porn companies have a similar track record for pumping tons of time and money into their products.
Why is it that VR porn companies like VR Bangers seem so eager and able to invest in ambitious projects like Dezyred while much of the wider porn industry has stepped away from big, pricey endeavors? InsideHook reached out to several VR porn industry insiders and experts, as well as porn industry analysts and observers. The answers they offered to this niche question shed light on the hype around and shape of the VR porn world overall — as well as its iffy future.
You’ve Gotta Spend Money to Make Money
At a baseline, VR porn is harder and more expensive to shoot than traditional porn. Today, anyone with a good phone camera, a sense for lighting and framing, and basic editing software can hack together a solid conventional film, adult or otherwise. But VR content still requires special cameras and technical know-how. “There are basic principles in adult VR standards that you have to keep to, or the viewer will find the VR experience uncomfortable,” says Alex Nash, a producer at VR porn firm SexLikeReal. (VR creators in the adult world and beyond are often working on ways to reduce feelings of uncanniness — and nausea — among VR users.)
Crafting a scene in line with the restrictions of VR filming tech and best practices and setting up and moving equipment before and during a shoot are time-consuming processes. “We pay models a little more for VR, as it can be a longer shoot,” says Steven Grooby, the founder of Grooby productions, a leading trans porn producer since 1996, which runs a small VR studio.
“After filming is completed, intensive post-production work is needed to stitch videos together to create a lifelike, realistic 3D experience,” says Alex Novak, the CEO of SexLikeReal. “The server costs are much higher too, as the video files are many times bigger than traditional porn.”
Most of the studios InsideHook spoke to weren’t eager to crack open their books and show us exactly how much it costs to make a film. But Grooby says that his team has managed to keep the price tag for a VR scene roughly in line with that of his traditional content by creating a pretty standardized template for their films and cutting costs. “We’re not the company that spends big on location, props or very in-depth storylines,” he says. Beyond this economization, Grooby explains that they’ve also repackaged their VR scenes as traditional 2D point-of-view scenes that they sell on another site, and they distribute their VR videos via other retailers as well. With all those measures active, it still took a year for his studio to turn a profit.
However, industry reporting suggests that most VR studios aren’t nearly so thrifty — a VR scene can easily cost twice as much as a traditional porn scene to prep, shoot, edit and distribute. And many high-end VR scenes cost much more still. Which seems to be why VR porn studios charge higher membership rates than traditional studios but usually post scenes less frequently.
The Biggest Takeaway From Netflix’s Pornhub Documentary? Pay for Your Porn.
Sure, free porn is nice, but paying ensures that it’s ethical, consensual and safeMost VR porn producers don’t seem to put too much stock in head-to-head comparisons between their content and traditional porn, though. From the moment they launched their first studios in the mid-2010s, they’ve argued that they’re offering a fundamentally new experience — a chance to not just passively observe but actively participate in sexual fantasies. A handful of scientific studies from 2021 and 2022 suggest VR porn experiences make users feel more engaged with and connected to a fantasy than 2D porn. But Leighton Evans, the communications scholar behind one of those studies, told InsideHook this line of research is too narrow and nascent to say anything definitive about the experience or effects of consuming VR versus traditional porn.
VR porn advocates and creators have faith that people will embrace this new, deeply immersive experience — and be willing to pay good money for it. In fact, in the mid-2010s, some of them promoted the idea that VR porn would save the adult industry, making porn profitable again. But in order to hook people, the thinking goes, VR porn companies need to unlock the technology’s full immersive potential, make experiences accessible and seamless, and warm people up to giving them a try. One taste of the perfected product ought to be enough to get them invested.
In order to unlock that supposedly irresistible potential, many VR studios have invested heavily in projects like Dezyred that involve technical innovations. From its inception in 2014, VR Bangers explicitly positioned itself as a studio that’d keep its edge against the competition by investing heavily in new tech. It’s continually upped the ante on the ability to explore and interact with scenes. Other companies have focused on innovations like sex toys that will sync with the action in a VR experience so users can feel the virtual fantasies that they’re interacting with. (Novak says SexLikeReal is developing a “game-changing” interactive toy.)
Some studios have also invested in press-baiting gimmicks to increase their profile and convince people to give their content a shot. In 2017, one studio notoriously set up a series of VR rigs in a hotel room in Las Vegas during the influential Consumer Electronics Show and invited journalists to try an erotic VR experience, a novelty they could spin into salacious headlines.
VR Bangers is arguably the master of the press-baiting stunt. In 2018, they released a Halloween experience in which users got to choose whether actresses lived or died, an “ethically dubious” gimmick that the sex therapist and porn industry expert David Ley described in an interview with Daily Dot as “something intended to generate controversy.” In 2021, they created a limited-run, smell-o-vision-type system that allowed users to huff perfumes with names like “Squirt Delight” and “MILF Sensations,” purportedly made with fluids collected from real women, while watching related content. And in 2022, they launched a fleet of robots in Las Vegas that delivered VR headsets loaded with their content to certain hotels, including scenes filmed in those rooms that allowed users to feel like they were right at the center of the erotic action.
These gimmicks worked well at first, but many reporters and reviewers seem to be growing tired of them, urging companies to cut it with the overplayed stunts and focus on tech and content. But their tech investments have certainly paid off, insomuch as the quality and appeal of VR porn has wildly improved over the last decade. High-end scenes really do make many people feel a unique sense of participatory immersion, and they’re getting better every year. Granted, this perpetual innovation means that, as Novak puts it, “if anything, creating content is more expensive as the bar continues to be raised!”
But have these sort of big-swing, ambitious investments succeeded in their overarching goal of unlocking the accessibility, appeal and profitability of the VR porn genre?
When Big Ambitions Meet Hard Walls
VR porn studios have always had to grapple with the fact that the future of their industry hinges on factors beyond their immediate control. While people have seen great promise in VR experiences since at least the 1990s, the price and impractical clunkiness of at-home VR setups limited the market for their visions. VR tech has evolved rapidly in recent years to become consumer products rather than high-end luxuries. But they’re still beyond many people’s budgets. Most systems and filming protocols also haven’t addressed that people of different genders seem to experience VR differently; as VR systems are mostly designed with men in mind, they’re not optimal for or accessible to wide swathes of the population. And folks with rigs that work for them may still struggle with wider issues, like incompatibilities between their system and a given site’s content, or the challenges of streaming massive VR files smoothly on America’s chronically overpriced and underperforming internet.
Core VR technology and the infrastructure around it are still developing rapidly, and folks like Grooby and Nash believe that these lingering barriers will melt away in the coming years. “Then we’ll be hitting a much larger demographic,” Grooby says.
Advances in core tech and VR porn studios’ investments in quality and visibility have generated growth in recent years. The field went from nothing a decade ago to (by some estimates) a $1 billion global industry as of 2022, making it one of the biggest and most profitable uses of VR tech. However, a recent survey of American adults’ sex tech usage suggests that even after a decade of rapid proliferation, only about 10% of people have tried VR porn — which is not much higher than the proportion of the population that’s used smart sex toys or sex chatbots. And while Novak stresses that SexLikeReal has an active, engaged user base, there are many accounts of people trying VR porn once, not getting hooked and walking away, enthusiasm tempered.
Evans further notes that social, political and cultural forces often play a major role in determining how people interact with new tech and content. To wit, tech and experiences that are objectively better than their alternatives don’t always take off and succeed. There’s still just so much we don’t know about how people do, or will, engage with VR systems, or VR porn specifically, based on these murky, nebulous variables, Evans explains. It’s even harder to take this hype-up talk seriously when, as the sex tech reporter Samantha Cole put it back in 2021, VR porn advocates have been promising the big breakthrough is just right around the corner for years on end.
Joseph Slade, a communications tech scholar who’s studied the history and business of the adult industry, adds that when people push promising new tech farther and farther, they often run into unexpected limitations. He recalls how, a couple of decades back, a group of traditional porn makers thought HD content would be the future of the industry by bringing viewers deeper into their fantasies. “Performers complained that greater fidelity revealed their pimples,” he says, and folks started to realize that HD filming can puncture a fantasy as easily as it can draw people in if it’s not handled correctly. Similarly, VR porn’s quest for immersion runs the risk of running into unexpected barriers — like the fact that porn fantasies often involve acrobatic positions that people might not actually want to POV immerse themselves in.
“There is only so much you can do” in the quest for immersion, Grooby acknowledges.
Several adult industry analysts told InsideHook that they’ve started looking at VR porn not as some wondrous growth sector that’s going to change the adult industry, but as a stabilizing niche. And just like the hype around and growth of the wider VR sector has seemingly cooled down in recent years, we may see a cooldown in wild, big-swing VR porn investments and projects in favor of more measured and incremental growth.
But that doesn’t mean that we won’t see any ambitious, high-budget projects like Dezyred again in the coming years. The VR porn world is apparently still full of true believers in the field’s potential and the promise of a breakthrough on the horizon. And true believers will always be willing to pour limitless time and energy into the pursuit of their utopian visions. Because what’s one bold investment when weighed against a future of untold sexual fantasy?
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