> Fate series did start with pornography and is easily one of the most popular franchises in and outside of Japan
Popular titles like the "Fate/stay night" don't include much sexual material though. Labeling these as porn is like saying GoT is porn, and I suspect many people would object to that.
Not sure how you can claim that. There's at least 60+ hardcore CG in Fate/Stay Night with fully visible penetration and oral, then you have Fate/Hollow Ataraxia with well over 120 CG (CG = Individual images).
Imgur image (SFW) with a bunch of the sexual tags included in the games, since I'm not sure I can use that kind of language here: https://i.imgur.com/oXjnk13.png
They did eventually move away from pornography as the franchise got popular enough via the initial cult following. This isn't at all uncommon with visual novels, starting with pornographic content and moving away as adaptations to anime and manga are made and it reaches the mainstream.
Because "Fate/stay night" is in Apple's App Store with most of the story intact. Yes, the original version did include pornographic content. But so many people are willing to play it without them.
That's an all-ages version, which is extremely common. You can go on Steam and a lot of the visual novels there are the all-ages versions, because they just sell better in some cases, and primarily because Steam is iffy on including adult content when most visual novels focus on students, which is the case for FATE for example.
Plus, it just re-affirms what I said:
> They did eventually move away from pornography as the franchise got popular enough via the initial cult following. This isn't at all uncommon with visual novels, starting with pornographic content and moving away as adaptations to anime and manga are made and it reaches the mainstream.
Tsukihime, also from Type-Moon (developers of FATE), has recently gotten a remake which stripped away all the adult content (with no +18 patches of any sort).
For reference. Most of the top visual novels on VNDB (Visual Novel Database, the biggest information depository for the VN community) have adult content, but most aren't "NUKIGE", which is when the game primarily focuses on adult content over the plot. You can however, safely remove the adult content from most non-nukige visual novels without breaking the story beats.
Popular titles like the "Fate/stay night" don't include much sexual material though. Labeling these as porn is like saying GoT is porn, and I suspect many people would object to that.