By "too cringe" I mean "games that cater to the tastes of people who want to see up the skirt of a 12-year-old school girl but make the excuse that it's not illicit material because she's actually a 4000-year-old demon".

You're moving the goalposts. I was not talking about porn games here.

That's not moving the goalposts. You can go on Twitter and find plenty of examples of gamers @'ing developers about how they censored the model on some character to maintain decency. It's held up as an example of censorship and the woke agenda.

You could absolutely sell a game with those textures and models to those gamers. You'd want to scrub your skin off with boiling water for every shower for the rest of your life, but that dropped nickel is just waiting to be picked up.

This is literally the problem, let's RP. Engineer: comes up with strong rational solution, hey so all of the people polled -in places with actual gamers, not random polls to people who know what a game is- have said, hey can you make the elf hot please, im spending 10 hours a week on this and having the character being a nonbinary sac of potato orc with a Tumblr addiction is killing my vide. You (Toby), but someone might complain on Twitter and if I conflate some random numbers online I can draw the conclusion that one teenage girl complained. How is that rational?

>You can go on Twitter

well there's your first mistake. I'd rather go on 4chan and ask them for game design ideas. At least they will be consistently trash. Consistency is key in game design.

It's not about sourcing ideas, it's about gauging what "real gamers" are bitching about.

As it turns out, the things they bitch about are occasionally indicative of people who have tastes that polite society doesn't want to indulge.