I didn’t watch the video the article references but it seems to be missing a big part of why so many NSFW games have been added to places like itch.io and Steam in the past couple years.

COVID 19. A significant amount of developers got started during the quarantine and continued on afterwards. Development of a lot of these games slowed down afterwards and many were abandoned though. A big percentage of them make direct reference to some kind of quarantine or virus.

It probably helped, as well, that so many people were stuck at home and the tools to create these games have become more accessible in the past couple years.

I think it has just spiralled since then with lewd games sneaking into people’s recommended games list and others making jokes or commenting about it. Fetish Locator was one that some people might recall.

I don’t think games like Cyberpunk 2077 can be considered sex games because they have occasionally have visual genitals and carefully framed sex scenes. That seems more like a natural progression like people’s tolerance for violence in video games.