Maybe not ad-based, but sponsorship? Like ad pages at the back of the book, you can add SPONSORS command to show you who contributed.
I’m thinking like a mini Kickstarter, where authors put out proposals for stories, and paid supporters can have their names in. Businesses can pay to have their ads in there as well.
If you want to do that, use Kickstarter or one of the other explicit crowdfunding platforms.
Sort of like Patreon?
Yes. But Patreon offers hidden benefit (exclusive features), this one allows product placement (Kickstarter).
Of course, you can do both as well.
Edit:
Put out a notification for those mugs/mousepads/tshirt products, where people can buy your stuff as feelies. Maybe featuring notable quotes from your game.
Something similar with medium specific crowdfunding already exists for table-top games (can’t remember the name of the site, but it’s EU only), where people can sign up with their ideas, and if selected, those will be put up as a campaign for their supporters (which seems to be working quite nice; they boast about it on their landing page). It’s not, from a glance at least, strictly Patreon or Kickstarter copy, because it targets their own audience only, which they get involved with somehow.
Yes. That’s exactly what I meant. Thank you.
IF specific, but world wide, would be nice to have.
race to the bottom
I hear you and largely agree. Although, there is an important difference with digital goods; no cost of duplication. This means there is no cost of giving your old “paintings” away. But then no gain either. At least directly.
The race to the bottom is something engineered by large platforms that we have to compete with. I have a thing I call “the paradox of apps”;
The solution to this is to split your game into parts (eg episodes) and sell each one for a small amount. However, each part must still be a “storylet” and also fit into the overall plot arc.
Serialized (traditional) fiction has become profitable (Radish, Kindle Vella), but readers really expect regular drops of new fiction, as in, every few days or sooner. Don’t know how that would play out with IF.
One of the last IF Comp entrants (Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee’s) runs a Substack that sends out new adventure games on a regular basis. No idea if he’s charging or not, but it’s an interesting model.
If you say “Adventure Snack,” three times in a mirror, apparently I show up!
I love being able to reach my players directly via email. So far, I’ve built a player base of +2100 subscribers. If I wanted to charge $5/mo (a standard monthly subscription on Substack), I could expect 3%-5% to pay, based on averages for email subscription conversion, but for a number of reasons I want to keep it free for now.
For anyone interested in starting their own IF newsletter, I gave a how-to talk at last year’s Narrascope.
Another interesting distribution method for text games would be formatting them like a magazine or short story anthology from a few different creators. A consistent, clean format with spot illustrations across a series of indie text games, designed to play one after the other as smoothly as possible on an iPad or Kindle. You could sell it as a subscription or individual issues / compilations.
@jnelson Very good point. Totally agree there would have to be “regular drops”.
@AdventureSnack Thanks for this insight. I wonder if there’d be a lot more subscribers and whether it would make more overall for a $1-2/month level? Congrats on your player base.
edit: Also, thanks for the talk link. really interesting.
Substack doesn’t offer a paid tier below $5/mo, but could I get a higher percentage of hypothetical paid subscribers if the offering was cheaper? Maybe! I suppose it depends on how much players value the games. I always liked the Patreon model for its multiple tiers and flexibility, which makes it easier to A-B test.
Glad you enjoyed the talk! I believe email is a great model for IF distribution, if for no other reason than being able to “own” your audience and move platforms freely without losing players.
OK I’ve done a lot more research. Read the threads that were linked to in this thread.
I think the current situation can be improved with this:
“Achievements” like Steam store. Part of the popularity of the steam is that games have achievements. So if you play as Saladin of the Arab Civilization in Civ and Win on hard difficulty you get an award. Lots of people play just to wrack up points. Could be cool with multiple endings of IF. This will require cooperation with the script creators I believe.
Recommendation engine. Something like netflix. I believe they researched the algorithim many moons ago. Worth exploring.
A bunch seemed against it but remember Netflix and Disney+ both have advertisement options. Advertisements fund journalism that expose evil billionaires and politicians. But willing to listen.
If I decide to go through with this, FYI I’m looking to partner. I’m willing to invest. I know how to program but beginner.
At this point, advertisements mostly don’t fund journalism, which is why journalistic enterprises are collapsing left and right.
Web advertising is a rigged game in which Google and Facebook decide how much of the profit they feel like keeping. (There have been lawsuits.) If you shackle yourself to that, you’re not going to do well long-term.
I mean, if the site can get $2 CPM (or whatever) from ads, thats $2 CPM that it otherwise normally wouldn’t. As a previous poster said, 97% of visitors aren’t going to be paying for anything.
What kind of IF are you thinking of selling? Parser games don’t have a huge audience, probably less than crosswords (and the NYT crossword has around 200,000 regular solvers). Imagine you got all 200,000 interested in your site. How much revenue could you get out of them with different models? How much would each author get? If you do choice-based, do you have a strategy to stand out from competitors?
On a related note, have you built publishing platforms before? We’ve had a few pop up in recent years (most notably borogove.io and ifspace.net). Do you have a demo to look at? Or are you in the early planning stages?
Every cool new idea comes from somewhere, but it takes a lot of luck and usually a lot of preparation informed by an awareness of the market and the competitors. I’m interested in knowing how prepared you are for this. If you’re pretty prepared, it would inspire confidence; if you’re just spitballing after popping on the scene, I’d be significantly less excited.
Here’s some data for monthly Patreon revenue for popular Twine and Choicescript authors on tumblr (it’s a few months out of date). A few people are making the equivalent of full-time salaries from IF, even not counting sales residuals and the like.
Oh, cool, is that monthly data? Interesting how dominant Choicescript is, but I guess that makes sense since folks are used to spending money on CoG stuff.
This perfectly shows how selective support can be, and how much everything depends on your audience. And those weren’t built in one day either. It’s ridiculously difficult to build anything these days, because especially with IF, you can’t play the “First” card (because everything, or most have been done already). This also means that you need to find a way to lure people over from other platforms, and convince them to invest; which is challenging to rationalize, when you’re that much invested in one of the sites out there. That’s the reason why streaming services try to undercut each-other, or use marketing techniques, because most of the time they lack the “reason” (towards their customers) for justifying the switching over (having 1-2 exclusive content doesn’t count, if the library is otherwise subpar, as people will take notice soon enough, hence Netflix’s struggle in subscriptions). And these companies usually worth billions, and have the financial means. This is why it would be paramount to know what would differentiate this platform from others. So far, no real argument has been brought up to support this venture, that would be more concerned with content rather than financials (just as @mathbrush said, or my concerns from before). This is extremely common, and devs usually hammer “idea” persons (their methods are questionable, because they can be polarizing and detrimental), because on the business side of things, proper evaluation matters that much; as resources aren’t infinite, the market is over-saturated and been around for a while (speaking in general, not just for gaming). It may happen to some degree (launching a new subscription/services), but in the world of business, investments rarely rely on “what ifs”, more so on concrete facts/thorough research.
I didn’t say this was going to be easy and wasn’t soliciting investment. I wasn’t planning on being the next facebook either.
So I guess what people are saying is the model isn’t really broken. A talented and hardworking writer can rise up the ranks, get discovered and build a patreon following? It’s just really really difficult. A big part of the difficulty is that the market isn’t that big? And the plethora of free content.
One idea I had was thinking along the lines of a netflix for books. But people like the connection to fiction author with patreon. Most people it seems don’t have a netflix for books, they buy individual books.
I just saw all the games hosting on free hosts and saw the opportunity for a centralized rev share site, in the past these were successful with flash games some years ago . Sites like kongregate actually advanced the art and science of the genre, developing new monetization methods and sponsoring the biggest developers. Flash games died with mobile phones.
I think whether to host a new or improved platform, it depends:
what do you want as your first priority: Provide games to people as a purpose in itself or make money? And how much money do you expect?
who will do all the admin work? And how long are you willing to run the site (before you get tired or burned out)?
