I believe it was FilmDrunkard Erswi who came up with the original pitch for F*ckstarter, a service that would use crowdfunding to raise funds for two attractive celebrities to have sex. Offbeatr isn’t quite that, but it does help you crowdfund your weird porno. After all, these Danish midgets aren’t going to shit on themselves. You know what they say, you wanna felch the cow, you gotta pay the farmer.
From (who else) Vice:
Offbeatr, the site Ben Tao and Eric Lai founded to crowd-fund sex-related projects people are passionate about, has become the quickest way to create the video games and art projects of those subcultures’ wet dreams.
Two Asian guys, shocking.
“We didn’t have friends who would take their clothes off and sell content,” Ben said. “We couldn’t just tell our friends, ‘Hey, we have this site, can you do this?’” During this time, they realized that services like Amazon Payments and PayPal don’t allow users to buy “adult” products and crowdsourcing websites Kickstarter and Indiegogo won’t let you fund porn projects—the problem is a lot of porn purchasers cancel the charges when their spouses find out that they bought Two Dudes Doin’ It Volume 16 or whatnot.
Ben and Eric assumed users would want to make traditional pornography, but most of the successfully funded projects have been the stuff furries dream about. Where users have so far failed to raise $10,000 for Got Mormon Milk?—a chronicle of “the (very secret) rituals that are performed as a rite of passage” into the “very secret” gay Mormon society that has “definitely touched Mitt Romney”—Trials in Tainted Space, an “erotic, ultimately customizable, textual adventure game” has raised nearly $200,000. To make its intentions and audience clear, the game’s Offbeatr page features illustrations like this. (That link is NSFW because it shows an alien-looking dude with four huge cocks.)
Trials in Tainted Space (or TITS) will feature a character who travels through the universe in a spaceship encountering “mysteries of the universe” that are “curvy, well hung, or both.” Along the way, the game’s “perk system” rewards users with “abilities in combat and bed,” which include “SSTD’s—Sexy Sexually Transmitted Diseases. Examples: the Futa Flu, the Dick-Thickening Tremors, or the Sneezing Tits.” The game will allow users to design the protagonist’s hairstyle, eye color, and height and will include several “sex scenes that are short stories in their own right and mold themselves to your appearance using dynamic descriptors to ensure that your unique body is perfectly described.” This is something people really, really want—among its funders are 11 people who have donated more than $600, and two people chipped in over $2,000 apiece.
“The Sneezing Tits” is the name of my indie band. Anyway, of course, there’s also the ever-popular furry and brony-themed projects, proving that people who enjoy watching cartoon animals have sex are willing to pay a premium for it. It seems like the weirder the fetish, the more fanatical people are about it. A friend of mine once borrowed a hard drive from an old roommate, on which he discovered a “secret” folder with hours upon hours of footage of women “blowing up.” Any time a woman grew to a huge height or burst through her clothes, it was there, whether it be from movies, TV, the internet, even commercials. Obscure scenes you or I would never even think of, the ultimate niche supercut. I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t doubt for a second that there’s a lot of money to be made in weird fetishes. I like to imagine a modern version of The Graduate, where an older man pulls the Dustin Hoffman character aside and tells him, “Cartoon animals, son. Cartoon animals with huuuge dicks.”