Originally written by qDot for mmorgy.com

(This article is part of a multi-part feature on the viability of different business models for virtual world porn. Links to other articles will be added to this one as they are finished.)

Titties are Timeless (as any fan of the Titté brothers knows). Unless they're pixelated, that is.

No one usually thinks about porn having an expiration date, but then again, no one usually takes virtual porn into account. In terms of sexual stimulation through visuals, we've got 3 categories to worry about.

  • Photographic/Film
  • Art
  • Virtual World Based

I'm sure there's a debate waiting to happen between the 2nd and 3rd items on this list, but humor me for now in thinking that they are two different subjects. I'm also assuming basic, mainstream porn here, as fetishes are an article unto themselves.

First off, photographs and movies. I consider the depreciation curve (The curve showing the number of people who find a type of pornography to be the most enticing, the "expiration date" of content being the point at which the curve reaches zero) on either of these is the lightest of the three mediums we're analyzing. The human form has't changed much since we discovered we could record it through burning chemicals on things, and there's certain things about all eras of media based porn that can still turn the mainstream audience on. Fucking was fucking in the 20's (and had those wonderful black and white photos to document it), in the 70's (there wouldn't be so many John Holmes documentaries and re-releases of Deep Throat if people weren't still into the stuff), and still is now. On top of this, there are people that specifically crave certain eras of porn, or it may eventually turn into an emergent form of art.

Art itself is much the same. The talent of an artist means that the pieces they create can have a timeless quality about them. Art created before photography/film is still quite erotic to some. To break into the fetish discussion for a moment (I said I wasn't going to get into it, but, well...), art can also be the only way a certain fetish can be rendered visually, meaning it can have a very deep mental impact regardless of quality (VCL, I'm looking at you here).

Virtual World Rendered porn, however, has a STEEP depreciation curve, because it works at the inverse of Moore's Law for visuals, and relies almost purely on mental and experience aspects (i.e. porn produced from a scene in which the admirer was also a participant) to keep it sexy in the eye of the beholder. Basically, you know that the top-notch rendering you are looking at right now will, in some very short amount of time, suck. Unlike vintage photography or films, there is much less of a chance that someone without experience based relation to the material will find a technologically-dated render sexy. New platforms will come up, new rendering technologies will be released, so on and so forth with the way that all technology works.

When you create a piece of Virtual World porn, the depreciation started immediately, and your content has a much more tangible expiration date on it. This can be countered by the promise of "Oh Shiny" revenue from people new to virtual worlds (or, to put it bluntly, those that don't know any better), but that is also a number approaching zero as more people become familiar with modern technology