Getting stinking rich by designing IF

Authoring General Design Discussions
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Look at the news about games on Steam like “To The Moon”, “The Novelist”, “The Stanley Parable”, “The Cat Lady”, “The Shivah” and so on. Are those masterpieces? Who knows? It’s up to the individual buyer. But all have been discussed quite a bit in terms of how they use interface in different ways to tell a story. They certainly make much more press and have much more visibility than text games do. But those games I just mentioned are a form of interactive fiction, so I think that’s where things get confused. If you talk about pure text games, there is an audience for those, just as there is still an audience for on-line games of Scrabble. But there is a much, much bigger audience – and much bigger paying audience – for games like those I just mentioned. (Hell, even “Broken Sword 5” has done really well and most gamers seem to agree that the series has steadily gone downhill.) Pendulo Studios continues to churn out adventure games and manages to make a pretty good buck off it. (Even “Yesterday” and “The Next BIG Thing” did surprisingly well.)

Many gamers, who play various types of games, are aware of and talking about the upcoming Dreamfall Chronicles, which continues the story of “The Longest Journey.” There is nothing even remotely equivalent in text games in terms of anticipation. Games like “The Walking Dead”, which are heavy on minimal interaction and more about story, are quite well received and anticipated, now that Season Two of the game has started. Again, nothing even remotely like that in text games. I bet Scribblenauts would have much better fanfare than anything text games could ever present, simply because it engages more of your senses. Someone already mentioned Monster Loves You, which falls in that same category.

I would be curious how text games would do on a service like Steam. I don’t think people who attempt to design commercial “IF” are out of line at all. There’s clearly a market for different ways to tell stories. Whether that translates well in text games, I don’t know. No doubt a few people can make some good money off of it. And I think that’s cool. But imagine if you put time and effort into one of the games I just mentioned above? If your goal was to get more monetary compensation, that would probably be your better bet. But if you just want to create an experience for people, and if you find an audience that relates to text based games, you can probably do not too bad, as long as your goal is a modest one and not getting “stinking rich.”

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OT, but I was under the impression that Words with Friends, which is basically online Scrabble, was orders of magnitude more popular than anything we’re talking about.

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I’d be surprised of anyone playing more Scrabble than what gets played daily online at pogo.com. Also, Words With Friends is like Scrabble, but brother, it ain’t no Scrabble! :slight_smile:

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Right now, our Sorcery! apps - which are CYOA games pretending to be parser games with a pretty UI - are sitting at the #1 and #2 spots in the App Store role-playing chart here in the UK, a few months after release. [edited for accidental blatant lie]

That’s partly nostalgia for the Fighting Fantasy brand, but not entirely – the recent Lone Wolf game, arguably a better known title in the US - appears to have sold less well. I think the big difference is we made a choice-game with the pacing and level of fidelity of a parser game, so it’s got depth of play, but is still very accessible.

I do this full time now. It’s great, and I’m really glad to be using text, and not rubbish 3d in Unity, because we can take the stories all over the place and still look like a top-quality game.

The indie scene is, in general, quite receptive to text. Blackbar did well, Device 6 - which is arguably not a game, and apropos that Conversational Storytelling thread, is also totally linear - has been raking in cash. People can read, after all. They just have to be able to play the thing, and find it worthwhile when they do.

I’m also still hoping Shadow in the Cathedral will one day re-emerge with a really nice, really playable UI. I know David is working on it.

Jon

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No, former self, that was on Steam.

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All of that is really good information and quite interesting to read. I wonder since everyone seems to keep talking about more and more UI elements whereas what distinguished text games was largely the fact that their UI was primarily if not entirely text. So is the notion of the “pure text” game going away? How much is too little graphical UI to keep crowds interested? After all, Scribblenauts could technically be done entirely via text if you were willing to sacrifice the “game” part. :slight_smile:

Are we seeing “text games” evolve into what they have to be to compete?

That’s a genuine question on my part. I work in the game industry but I do not work at all with text games and my insight into them is largely what I glean from this community.

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Well, we have to take into account that Jon has recently posted a very, very interesting and throughful article on the nature of parser-IF and what they do at InkleStudios, so he’s biased on that account. :slight_smile:

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You’re probably right that if you just write a novel and self-publish it, it probably won’t make enough money to sustain you comfortably. And the same is true for games; no single game is probably going to let you quit your day job. But at least for our stuff, we have evergreen sales. When we release a new game, we get about a month or two of sales in the first week, and then the game just hums along at a steady state, making a little bit of money every day.

I only have a few minutes to look at sales reports right now, so I’ll just report on iOS, excluding Android and Chrome Web Store (Android+CWS combined are usually ~60% the size of our iOS sales), but, at the high end, “Heroes Rise: The Hero Project,” is our best seller; it came out in August and made about $1,500 in November and $1,900 in December on iOS. At the low end, “Eerie Estate Agent” came out in August of 2012; it made $90 in November and another $90 in December on iOS. We’re not on Steam yet; their approvals process is pretty tough.

We’ve got 20 games out now; they earn Choice of Games enough money to employ three people full time to manage the publishing process and write games. We also hire writers to work for us, but nobody makes it their full-time day job to write for us. As described here choiceofgames.com/looking-for-writers/ we pay either 25% royalties ($2,500 in advance; you keep the IP) or $10,000 work-for-hire with no royalties.

We started doing this late 2009. I have no doubt at all that if somebody were to release two IFComp-sized parser-based games a year for iOS and Android, (integrating iOS/Facebook/Google/Amazon Achievements) and shipped a simple executable to the Mac App Store and Amazon Indie Game Store (no separate interpreter required), selling a blorb file only to customers who couldn’t (or didn’t want to) buy the game on any of those other platforms, you’d be making (low) tens of thousands of dollars by the end of Obama’s term; even sooner if you can get your game on Steam before then. (All of this is assuming you don’t give your games away for free.)

Not enough to quit your day job? Keep shipping games for a few more years, or do as we do and start hiring writers.

It would probably work even better if you shipped point-and-click text adventures, in the style of Colder Light.

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Our games are all “pure text.” (But they’re choice-based; no parser.)

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(The following are my thoughts only, your mileage may vary)

One of my online friends told me that she knew someone who was making a decent chunk of money (perhaps not enough to live on, but a nice supplement) by writing rather explicit romance ebooks (essentially “soccer mom porn” similar to FIFTY SHADES) and selling them at 99 cents on the Amazon Kindle store. The reason she does well is she turns out content on a regular basis, perhaps a novella every month or every other month, and has a very devoted fan base she’s built who know what to expect from her writing, and eagerly await her upcoming works.

I’ve also read a few things from a horror novelist who does the same thing. His novels are very hardboiled horror with explicit violence and he’s found a niche audience who likes his specific work. His books are either .99 or 1.99 on Amazon.

What this seems to suggest to me is:
-There is an audience for “pulp” which has been facilitated by the availability of e-book readers. By “pulp” I mean inexpensive genre fiction that isn’t going to win awards, but delivers a solid story or experience that perhaps isn’t as much of a time or thought commitment as a full-length novel. If I knew I was going to be stuck somewhere, I’d gladly spend $5 or so on a couple of books that look interesting just by description, especially in a genre I’m fond of.
-This audience has no problem spending a buck or two on something that they can read on a plane or while away some idle time with. The cost of admission is worth trying unproven stuff out, or they find their favorite independent authors who consistently deliver on all cylinders for their particular taste and buy everything they write.
-This audience might not buy these books in hardcopy, but online stores like Kindle allows impulse buys and anonymous reading - there’s no lurid romance novel cover with bosoms and abdominal muscles and fluttering hair announcing to everyone you’re reading something indulgent. Similarly with horror, there’s no shiny foil blood-splashes and screaming victims on the cover that might make people think the reader is a weirdo.
-I think the indie game market is in sort of this position. Small, cheap games, that aren’t a huge investment so if it’s not exactly the greatest game in the world, you haven’t wasted $60. I’ll gladly spend $2-5 for a great short experimental experience. For $30-60, this game better knock my socks off. I think this is a similar attitude people have with going to the multiplex - you’re not going to spend $20 for admission and $20 for snacks to see a potentially mediocre flick you can rent later that loses nothing on a small screen. I’m not going to spend $30 on a hardcover novel that’s not by Stephen King or similarly proven author.

So what does this have to do with IF? I think it could show a way that individual authors could develop a hardcore fan base who might be willing to donate or pay for installments of a really good, continuing story. Choice of games tries to do this, offering one chapter for free. Storynexus allows numerous ways and methods to monetize content. Inkle can make you a Kindle book (within some specific parameters and a for a small fee) that you can publish yourself. If they can pave the way with known authors and people really like that style of “tablet story”, they may eventually be able to mine the more talented IF community for the consumers of that type of game/story who like SORCERY! and want more, even if not written by a name author.

I think we’re so used to IF being a free thing - specifically parser/Infocom mode games that play on a computer. We like our parser games, but besides what Infocom did in the 80s, this type of work doesn’t lend itself well to marketing. Readers have to work hard to work their way through a ZORK or ANCHORHEAD or COUNTERFEIT MONKEY, and they need a comfortable way to type in commands that hasn’t quite been worked out on ebooks or tablets.

Something like SORCERY! or a CYOA style tale is much more accessible and readable/playable/marketable in the current phone/ebook/tablet mode of prose consumption. As much as a certain faction of the community shuns or disdains the choice-based types of narratives, it would seem there are enough talented people who could evolve it into engaging and marketable works that could become a niche market for these audiences who will pay for a stream of content that caters to their tastes. Parser fiction is probably going to always be the “hardcore/diehard” version of text adventuring. If it doesn’t evolve, it’s always going to be produced just for this tiny hardcore/diehard audience who expect games for free.

If Emily Short sold her next big work, on the scale of CM, how much would you pay for it?

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EEA really deserved a better reception than it got, striking out brave new genre territory unmatched by anything since until Choice of the Deathless came along, but its real-estate theme was probably just a little too far out in left field to intrigue more players (who really missed out). Such are the risks of being fearlessly avant-garde.

That said, $90 a month from a relative flop still points a somewhat rosy picture – I imagine it’s about $90 more per month than most people here are getting from their games.

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Right, this is more what I meant when I said text games were evolving away from what they were traditionally, I suppose. The idea of “CYOA” goes back to Choose Your Own Adventure Books, of course, and many people have nostalgia for those. So really it seems like the crop of CYOA games is just doing what those books did. And it sounds like that has had some success.

So I guess you have the pure text games, whether parser based or CYOA, and then you have the text games that rely heavily on some graphical component. Consider “The Typing of the Dead”, as more educational, I guess. It’s a typing game (to help you learn typing, strangely enough) but it does so in the context of typing words before zombies eat you. I brought up Scribblenauts before which is basically a “type/write in the word” game with a bunch of graphics. The other games I mentioned earlier, which do sell well on Steam, are basically CYOA in nature, except it’s all done via a graphical interface. “Click on the book rather than the door. Ask this question rather than that other question.” The Walking Dead series is very similar. You’re basically just clicking on a conversation choice or a part of the screen – essentially, a “choose your own place to click” and see what happens.

Pure text has the advantage that it can run on most devices because you don’t need a lot of graphics. CYOA seems to have an additional advantage in that you can avoid the parser and thus sometimes cumbersome typing mechanisms and the possible lackluster reception of such a mechanic with modern gaming audiences. So are systems like Inform and TADS essentially promoting a system – parser-based IF – that is simply going to go away?

And, yes, I know there has been much discussion about “Is the parser dead?” I’m not trying to start that. But what it looks like to me is that the kinds of text games (“IF”) that Inform and TADS produce are not the kinds of games that are going to necessarily garner the most “market shares” as it were. Or am I wrong?

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No.

Not every IF author is doing it for “market shares”.

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I’d be quite happy shelling out a few pounds here and there for a game if I knew (or at least had reasonable expectations) that it would be good. I’d probably want something more substantial than the standard IFComp fare, though. A game that’s intended to be finished in two hours tops isn’t a game I’d want to pay money for.

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Something doesn’t have to be marketable to have staying power. There’s an audience for parser IF; it’s not going anywhere.

I would say that it does pose an accessibility issue that may make it difficult to monetize, but there’s a big difference between “hurdles to monetization” and “obsolete and about to disappear.”

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I realize that. Thanks for being obtuse. I meant my question in the context of this thread and the title of it, hence the quotes as well since we have been focusing much on monetary considerations.

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Well put, unlike the last guy. But is the audience for parser-based text games diminishing? Staying steady? Or actually increasing? Or do we even know? If I was working in text games, even as a hobby, it would seem to be an interesting question.

I do agree about monetization and obsolete, but there’s also a distinction between obsolete and about to disappear. :slight_smile: After all, those two don’t have to go hand in hand. It depends on our context. You can be “obsolete” in terms of able to make money on something, but not obsolete in terms of having an audience, as you indicated.

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Your mom.

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Oh no she didn’t!

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Yeah I don’t think anybody has a definitive answer about the encroaching or receding obsolescence of parser-based IF. In a way, I’m not sure it matters; there is obviously an audience. It’s right here. As long as the tools exist, you can make these games. As long as people are posting here, they can get played.