What’s considered a reasonably successful new IF title? A few hundred players? A few thousand?
Anyway, I’ve written non-IF games that have had (if the analytics are to be believed) hundreds of thousands of players, and that’s still in “nobody’s ever heard of it” territory. To put things in perspective.
That’s not intended to disparage anyone or their ambitions, it’s just something that I’ve been keeping in mind working on a current IF WIP—the expectation that “success” in a niche field is (necessarily) much more modest that “success” in general game dev.
I’ve had one IF game I put on itch that gets about a download a day and I find that much more successful than most things I wrote. Two kickstarted parser games and the more successful choice of games entries have sales in I think the tens of thousands range (but not 100s of thousands).
I think the main draw in this specific IF scene is that if you write a game maybe only 100 people will play it but ten of them will talk to you about it and discuss it with you. I think it’s the communication that people want. Although sales would be nice (I say this while having the worst-selling game in Choice of Games history).
So far as I know, these numbers are not shared. @dfabulich is the chair of the IFDB committee and is a regular here. He could answer any policy questions.
But I agree with everything Brian said. The draw is the community. That extends to stuff like criticism, too. The majority of Gold Machine’s readers do not come from here, but this is the community I want to discuss my writing with.
IFDB just links to download sites; we don’t have access to download numbers. (I guess we could try to count how many people click the download links and/or the Play Online links, but we don’t.)
IF Archive might be able to give you an estimate, since many of our links are to the IF Archive, but I don’t think they track all-time download numbers for any game/file.
And then there’s counting how many “active players” there are in a game, which I’m pretty sure nobody counts in IFTF.
Well, aside from the fact that we’re hosting all sorts of Infocom promotional material and game files and source code without permission. That’s IP theft but not plagiarism.