IF Platform that offers revenue sharing to authors?

Technical Development Development Systems
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The thing is that hard work, as said before, means squat these days, because no matter what you do, you need to have reach. But in order to have reach, you need have a form of luck and favorable circumstances (like growing from a community), otherwise you are shouting into the void (e.g., on social media). Take Wattpad for example (as that’s what stuck for me as a reminder of how packed the market is, speaking of writing, not games), it boasts a huge community, and all you see, mostly on stories, that people show up and advertise themselves in the comment sections; solely because they are trying every way to get noticed.

If we take your Youtube example, my grime with that is, that it may sound intriguing at first, but reality is that at some point an algorithm has to be employed to show recommendations. Which means, the system will become skewed towards a certain group; whichever is favored by the site owners (somewhat), plus trendy subjects. This is partially the fault of “you need to have a following in order to gain followers” dilemma. Either way, what my experiences are telling me, it’ll only favor a few, as in a handful of few (at the top), who might be able to make a decent living out of it, but the rest will be there just to cater for those, for pennies. Wanted to show an updated graph of how skewed indie game earnings are on Steam, currently it’s setting around the media of $4.000 dollars lifetime; for those who can make money out of selling games, because most don’t even make the registration fee back.

This might be grim, the outlook that is, but from time to time it has shown, that sooner or later money becomes involved more so than it should, and creates these monstrous creatures that boast to be the next savior of any given industry; a facade only at best.

netflix for books

Something similar happened when Amazon introduced their self-publishing services, where you’d be able to access technically almost free books, from completely unknown authors; in the thousands.

This, the sheer volume is another concern, because no matter how good your search function is, people won’t browse through 10.000 pages, just to get to the one where they might discover that next “amazing” author. It takes up a lot of effort to just sit down and spend precious time for these things (e.g., after work, kids, etc.). IMHO.

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42

I think this is a good thing. If the market were big, no one would stand a chance at all. Imagine a start up competing with Disney, for example.

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43

Pragmatic issues, quoting from other thread:

It’s worth looking at Itch.IO to see what this looks like in a fully functional (if small) game sales platform.

  • Storefront builder tool for authors
  • Sales reports for authors
  • Payment reports for authors (sales are not identical to payments because of scheduling, e.g., if you pay authors at the end of the month)
  • Refunds and refund policy
  • Do you allow player ratings of games? Player comments? Discussion forums? (all of these require moderation)
  • Tax handling for all countries where people buy games
  • Tax handling for all countries where authors live

(I get US 1099-MISC forms from Itch and Valve every year, for example.)

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44

I apologize for being the person who continually haunts the corpse of Storynexus extolling its potential virtues, but they had a unique free/pay what you want scheme which was basically taken from Fallen London:

Most every user-created game is free to play and accounts got a set number of (author specified) turns for every “world”. The default was like 20. Certain game choices could be “free” or use up a turn, or also a large number of turns say for an action that would take a while, or for premium content (you could make a choice that didn’t show results until a specific period of real-time had passed, like watering a plant that would grow and show up in 24 hours.)

Once the player ran through their turns and could not proceed, turns would slowly regenerate, like at the rate of one turn per hour, so in theory you could play any game for free as long as you were willing to be patient. Or you could purchase extra turns in-game as set up by the author.

Theoretically if the price was low $1-2 USD for say 50 turns, you might get a couple impulse purchases if someone was intent on seeing something out immediately instead of waiting. The author could also make certain choices cost more than 20 or the game’s maximum which would require a purchase for premium content to proceed into that section of the game - you could set a quality for a player who purchased content that wouldn’t require them to pay to make that choice a second time. (There might also have been a way to just require a purchase for extra content, but it’s been a while since I looked at it.)

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45

I’m almost completely sure they outsource the 1099-MISC handling.

46

That’s really to discuss with technical partner. But I don’t think the money generated will be that big. No one is going to get job replacement income, either me or any of the writers. The market just isn’t big enough.

It’ll be more of a hobby business I’m passionate about than paying the rent.

47

I’m thinking all kinds of IF. Open to all scripts (total creative freedom).

200,000 interested in the site, estimated revenue? Depends how often they visit and what type of revenue. $2 CPM (cost per mille) means $400 if everyone visits but not all visits are counted. Also different rates per country.

also users might be willing to watch a video ad (much higher rates) since its for indie fiction.

I don’t have a demo. So I do have some entrepreneurial experience. In college I started a web host that grew to several hundred clients before selling. Also I bought a triplex when I was 30 and raised the rent on each floor from 1000 to 1700/1550/1600. So a “nose for business” I think they say in some countries.

I’m not worried about either borogrove.io ifspace.net at all.

48

Well, seems like you got this all figured out already. We should probably let you get on with it. Let us know how it goes.

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49

yes indeed, your points are the sorts of thing i was referring to. Basically, there’s a lot more to making even a small commercial platform. That’s why I’m happy to share 10% with Itch. They do the bits I don’t want to do.

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