Maybe. But the prior probabilities are so wildly different as to swamp this concern.
(That is, a hundred people downloading my game would be thrilling. But I’d rather have ten thousand people try my game, even without having demonstrated that commitment.)
Several reasons, which are interconnected, but all stem from the requirement of selling a game. (A paywalled web app has several knocks against it, which I could start listing, but I think it would be a distraction.)
It is true that I’m thinking hard about polish and quality of play experience. But that’s tangled up in all of these other decisions. If my commercial scheme were to release a free game with advertising, then I’d be thinking hard about how to polish Quixe and make a really good browser presentation.
Note, too, that you’re comparing the idea of a web game to that of a game app, not of an interpreter application. If I do branch out to Mac and PC sales, I will still be selling some flavor of packaged downloadable app – not a ZIP file containing an interpreter and a gblorb.
(Whereas the “special edition” form of HL will be a CD containing a game file and some interpreters. Because that makes sense for IF fans, and it’s the fans who pre-order. I’ll also note that while I uploaded a zblorb of the HL teaser, I forgot to link to it – and it was two weeks before anybody asked about it.)
I guess we’re fundamentally talking about two different target audiences. I am spending all my time and energy worrying about the people for whom IF is one entertainment option in a sea of available Internet monomanias. That means a one-button in-path is more important than any other feature – whether that’s the iPhone’s “install” button or a hyperlink. The other target audience, the one I am (perhaps) maligning as “tiny”, isn’t outside my attention – but I don’t have to work to convince them of anything.
TADS: I’ve just started rewriting Gnusto using code that will be much more transferrable. I think it would be feasible to write a new implementation of the T3 VM (remember that currently there is only 1 implementation, all the others are just ports of it!) With Jetty that would mean TADS 2 and 3 games could be played online. I think it would be better to have a team working on this though: if one person wrote the file decoder (which is kind of similar to Blorb or Quetzal), another wrote the objects system and another worked on the JIT the team could get it all finished a lot quicker. If we copied the way Gargoyle connects TADS to Glk that would make the IO work quick too. Ironically that would mean it wouldn’t support HTML TADS [emote]:P[/emote]
As to web interpreters, I’d be interested in knowing how well they run in Links. Regardless… anyone who’s not running a graphical system should be more than capable of finding and downloading IF terps. Those people are not really in Parchment’s target demographic.
Not a correction, so much as a footnote. I said “download games” not “download IF games”. Cave Story, Five Days a Stranger, Soldat and Knytt aren’t played in a browser and are more widely known than any IF game.
I guess what I really meant was, “there are plenty of people who are happy to download Windows games”. Which, again, is why I always include such a version in my releases. (This isn’t to say anything about the desire to download Mac or Linux games, except that I’m ignorant on that subject.)
Well, than any recent IF game. I reckon Zork is more well known than any of these, even pre-Black Ops. Of course that’s not because you can play it in a browser (and maybe it’s not as true among younger folk).
Hard to say about the desire to download Mac games, at least among the indie gaming community, because most of those games seem not to be made for Macs; to the extent to which downloadable indie games often seem not to even specify that they’re for Windows, because it’s taken for granted. (Which is their prerogative; the extra hassle of porting things to the Mac may not be worth the relatively small increase in user base.) That may have influenced me to be more interested in browser games; dunno. I do play Cave Story, which is the only game of those four that plays on a Mac.
Sure. But then, the aggregate number of room-escape games (snack-sized first-person graphical IF) dwarfs all of those, and those are almost universally Flash applets. (Supported by web ads.)
Then there are the hidden-object games, which are not adventures per se but have close enough mechanics that (at this point) most of them have some Myst-style element to them. Those are almost universally pay-to-download Windows and Mac apps.
So I don’t know what that proves, except that if you want to charge money for your web game, you’d better figure out a way to make the core gameplay free. (Either sell ads, sell t-shirts, or charge for add-ons.)
But charging money is not what most IF people are concerned with. My own personality flaws aside.
I have an expectation (right or wrong) that most games requiring download are more polished than their web counterparts. I’m completely happy to randomly try a flash game on Kongregate, but I need some recommendation or hook to download. The same’s true for IF, usually; although I can grab a game from IFDB and open it directly in my interp, if I’m going to save it, I want a more polished experience.
I’m beginning to download more Windows app. games, but that’s largely because I’ve found a couple reviewers I trust.
I think web-playable snippets for games that require download are a very, very good idea - the first few turns, or some crucial decision - something that gives players a chance to prove that it’s worth their click. Because there is more setup involved, and especially for new players, there can be a significant number of sorting out to do. (Ask me how many interps and versions of interps I downloaded the first week I started playing.)
I’m so glad you asked! Around 10, including ADRIFT/TADS terps. And that was mostly because I couldn’t quite figure out where I was going wrong. The community’s system of creative naming of file extensions and interps made it difficult to match, and I had real difficulty getting my hands on updated copies of a few interps. Well, it wasn’t difficult per se, but it took time and effort. Often I’d run into an error, and just go download a new interp rather than trying to figure out what the actual problem was. I still need to go in and clean out the ones I never use, but that means working out which I do use, and which I might use but just haven’t for awhile, and which I might like better if I used them, and that ranks somewhere below defragmenting my hard drive on the list of fun things to do.
(Probably because I didn’t really make it clear, although I was thinking it at the time.)
Absolutely. I think browser games probably eclipse even major commercial releases in terms of how widely they’re played (although, without access to the statistics, I’d guess Wii Sports might beat any individual browser game, ditto Tetris).
As part of your research it’s at least worth looking into how Terry Cavanagh fared selling his Flash game VVVVVV (if you haven’t already).
On the plus side, his demo was extremely widely played, on the negative side many of those players were vocally offended at the idea of having to pay for a Flash game, and then on the even positiver side he made a profit anyway. (I also suspect that the same kind of new-school/old-school collision that fuelled the popularity of VVVVVV might be something you could tap into.)
