>>308374
>Grope simulator minigames are for fags anyway, as evidenced by waifu emblem adding a watered-down version as one of the first things they did to pander to women and ironic weebs.
I don't know how in the world you got the idea of them pandering to women or ironic weebs at all, those are literally the two groups MOST likely to pitch a bitchfit over them.
>it always seemed like the coward's way to crank up fanservice without applying effort and invariably the wrong kind of skeezy
It's a way to be able to lewd the heroines without compromising their "purity", something important if you want otakus to get attached to the characters, because how much do you really care about a girl whose sole purpose in the story is to be a whore who gets fucked in half a dozen different holes? The way I try and put it is that ecchi allows lewd and maidenhood to coexist by putting the heroines in "embarrassing" situations where both their femininity and their innocence is put on display. You may call this a mere half-measure, but as a connoisseur of moe and bishoujo games, I value this aspect.
Put in a more layman's way, I like seeing cutelewd anime girls interact with each other and save the world while still being sexy, not Goblin NTR Giga Rape Simulator: Maiden's End edition. If I reach for an H-game, it's going to be something more wholesomelewd like OniKiss or something with a novel concept and story like Maitetsu.
>>308384
>Best case, the game would be confined to the same distribution channels as doujin games with its AO/refused classification rating
Rating boards themselves have never actually banned or refused to rate a game over these minigames, actually. All of Compile Heart's games with them have cleared the ESRB and CERO with an M or D respectively at most, with some of them even being rated T (Agarest War 2). It's Sony and Nintendo's own internal content review teams that have begun objecting to them in the wake of #MeToo where feminist journalists argued they promote rape and harassment and were responsible for GamerGate and this was enough for Sony to implement policies to block them with Microsoft and Nintendo following later. Steam still allows them, but only if the character isn't "underage" (which sadly they have an extremely broad definition of, especially when anime styles are involved). I don't know how every single console maker collectively fell for the "le rape culture" meme including ones that are ostensibly Japanese, but they did. So you're right for the wrong reasons. There has not been a single one of these minigames in a Compile Heart game since Mary Skelter 2 and it frustrates me to no end, they used to be so common on Vita games and now they just got wiped out of existence because some resentful foid couldn't handle an anime girl being more desirable than she is. Tokyo Clanpool's rerelease cleared both CERO and ESRB and yet it had so many issues launching with the minigame that the publisher ultimately had to resort to a fucking USB stick physical release which as far as I know is completely unheard of for something that wasn't actually banned or refused by the rating boards.
The average normie genuinely doesn't give a shit that these games exist much less be willing to protest or boycott Nintendo or Sony for hosting them and give up their bing bing wahoo and UE5 beige moveislop games to do so, so Sony and Nintendo are just cutting their own nose to spite their face here, they gain no favor from normalfags for censoring them, they only lose favor with otakus. It's just some petty bullshit they feel they can get away with because otakus are too few in number to make a dent on their sales by protesting.