Well, if I took a week off work I wouldn’t get paid. Which would work out at a bit more of a loss than five Spring Thing entry fees.
But only just… [emote]Laughing[/emote]
Re the Spring Thing entry fee: I like the fact that it’s there. Why? It keeps the same kind of crap that clogs up the IFComp from ruining another competition. Can you imagine the likes of Panks or Slan Xorox or the other joke entry writers stumping up the fee?
Well, they could – the idea is that they probably won’t bother. [emote]Smile[/emote]
Whyld, what’s it with you and Panks? It’s like your out to kill the guy. I know he trolls IF Comp, but…
Well it’s a little known fact that David Whyld actually is Paul Panks.
Or is it that old saying, you know, men and women are from earth, and Paul Panks is from Alpha Psi 12A-45921.
Actually I quite enjoyed “Fetter’s Grim” this year for a little while.
I’ve wondered what would happen if one of the IF comps had a major prize, say several thousand dollars.
Or if that was a separate annual prize, like the National Book Award for IF.
I think several thousand dollars would make people want to cheat the vote.
It’d be interesting, though. If there was a $20k grand prize in the IFComp, I’d feign sickness or cash in all my vacation time to devote to my entry. [emote]Smile[/emote]
Oh, God, just imagine all the crap entries there would be of people trying to cash in for the money!
Likely as not you would have to form a panel of judges and run it as more of a contest along the lines of Writers of the Future. It does get away from the spirit of the IF community.
What, the whole “everything should be free” mentality? I don’t see how that really means anything…? Or the hobbyist mentality?
Yes, the hobbyist mentality fits somewhat, but I mean that the best IF games are decided by the individual votes of all the readers and writers of the IF community at large, in a more democratic, cooperative spirit. At least those that choose to participate.
Contrast this with a contest decided by a small exclusive panel of judges, with its result (the winners) consumed by a mass audience.
On one hand you have indy, diy, co-op, small press, and on the other mainstream, corporate, mass media. Just throwing some terms around.
Oh. I guess I read that wrong.
I can imagine if the first prize in the IFComp was $20,000, you’d have a lot of vote rigging and cheating going on. You could have someone write a game and then set up a thousand false accounts to sway the voting in his favour; you’d have people bribing other voters to vote for him; you’d have people actively spamming newsgroups and forums to bring attention to their games…
But $20,000 for writing a game? Oh yes, that’d be nice.
I’ve made well over $20k writing and selling games, but it hasn’t been just one lump sum. [emote]Smile[/emote]
Is this a joke? Please explain.
Greg
Doesn’t Merk sell non-IF games?
No joke, although it goes way back to the late 80’s. I’d really have to do some research to get exact amounts, so I’m going to try to make conservative guesses here.
1987-1991 - I sold the copyright to simple CoCo (TRS-80) games to T&D Software, for around $45 per game. 66 games (that I’m aware of) = $2970.
1989-1990 - I did royalties sales through SportsWare (four different CoCo games). One didn’t sell at all, one sold about 6 copies, the other maybe 4 copies. So I’m not counting this.
1991-1995 - Miscellaneous shareware. I don’t even remember what I sold. Very little. I’m not counting this either.
1995-1998 (and a few stragglers even now) - Lunatix 1.xx-4.xx for DOS-based BBS, and some Lunatix add-ons. I have folders crammed full of old registration forms in the basement. Conservately, I’ll say 800 copies (I’m pretty sure it sold more than a thousand copies, but I wouldn’t swear it without looking) at $15 each is $12,000. The add-ons would make it a little more, but the last few years it has all been available for $10 as a package, so $12k is probably about right.
1997-1999 (and a few stragglers now) - Lunatix 5.xx for MajorBBS/Worldgroup for $300 per copy ($150 for a 2-user version). At one time, I thought we’d sold around 100 copies, but I think that’s a bit too much. I’m sure we sold at least 50 copies, and the cheaper version wasn’t originally available. Supposing it was half and half, I’ll count it as $225 per copy, and that’s $11,250. I was partnered with a local BBS for distribution and they got half, so say my cut was $5,625. That actually seems way too low, though. There was also Mystic Messages and the Distant Places T-Lord Add-on, which sold several. Hmmm. I’m going to say $8,000 in all. That’s a wild guess, but it seems more right. I think there must have been more $300 copies than $150 copies, or maybe more sales of the other modules.
1999-2006 (and ongoing) - Lunatix Online, which is $5 for a 1-month subscription, or $25 for six months (i.e., one month free). The subscriber base was over 100 at any given moment in the first year, around 350 in the 2nd or 3rd year, floated around 200 for a year or two, and is kind of dying down a little over 100 again now. I’ll average low and say 175 average subscribers for the entire period. That’s running for 8 years, and if I say everybody got the discounted rate (although some did pay monthly), that’d be $50 per subscriber per year, coming to $70,000. That’s probably about right. Since this has been more organized, I could check for sure on past tax returns or have my partner look it up. I think it’s right. The Prowler Productions paperwork I have to file is between 8k and 12k per year.
1999-2006 (although this has pretty much died out) - CGI Chat and CGI Poll. Not big sellers, and not really “games” as such. I think we’ve sold around 25 JabberChat licenses at $25 each and maybe 15 ProwlerPoll licenses at $15 each (funny how that worked). That’s what… $850 I think?
$2,970 + $12,000 + $8,000 + $70,000 + $850 = $93,820.
Here’s the catch. Most of what we’ve made on Lunatix Online has gone back in to pay for prizes, the server charges and internet fees (around $300 per month – for a year, we were running two servers), etc. I’m not sure how much profit has came out of that. Only a fraction. I did better on the other things - the BBS and Worldgroup games - because there weren’t really any expenses. Also, this is all spread out over MANY years. Chop it all up, and it’s not nearly enough to live on.
I hope that answers the question. [emote]:)[/emote]
And no, none of it was interactive fiction, but it’s pretty much all text-based games.
(edit) correction. Several of the CoCo games were interactive fiction – but when I look at them now, $45 outright was probably way too generous. [emote]:)[/emote] They’re really bad.
Whoa, I had never heard of Lunatix, it looks cool. Merk, did you create all the content for that game?
If you don’t mind my asking, do you keep it as a sideline and not something full time due to the time you want to spend on it, or because of its perceived potential market share?
And to try to stay somewhat OT: I’ve browsed the last five years of the IF Comp, and I was surprised by the number of new authors every year. I started with the assumption that it’s the same old people writing and entering games every year, and this explains why the Spring Thing doesn’t get as much attention, because the same authors historically focus on the Fall competition.
But a first approximation says repeat authors make up only about 1/5 or less of all the comp authors in any year. So why shouldn’t some of these new authors gravitate to Spring Thing? Why do they choose IF Comp? After 4+ years it seems like ST should be better established. Do the newsgroups and IF sites put too much emphasis on the Fall competition? Do people naturally start projects early in the year, or in the summer, and finish them late in the year? Is it the extra difficulty of making longer games, as Merk mentioned? Does ST need more exposure?
I wrote the game from scratch, yeah. The graphics were done by my partner, Anna, and are various pieces of altered web- and clip-art. The monsters, for instance, are morphed versions of some halloween mask photos. I’ve been told that the Mean Li’l Birdie is an FF chocobo, but as to this I couldn’t say. I’ve never found the image elsewhere, so either she altered it a lot, or I’m looking at the wrong chocobos. The game is based on the older BBS version, which was inspired by the Legend of the Red Dragon BBS game (with Lunatix having the same basic play mechanics, set in an insane asylum).
My bigger achievement is StarLock, at starlock.com – six years in the making, but just way too big/ambitious for one part-time developer. It’s a big world with thousands of original graphics (simple ones, but at least they’re original work). I don’t advertise or publicize it much at all, so almost nobody plays. It’s kind of a hybrid browser-based MUD with elements of IF/puzzles. Unfinished, but enough quests/content for a few weeks of play, and free.
We had big plans for Lunatix, StarLock, and another (not yet written) multiplayer game to form a kind of community site with a shared subscription. I used to be really optimistic about the market, but Lunatix Online came out when there were only a small number of browser-based multiplayer game – and nothing major to speak of in Java or Flash. Now there are hundreds of free browser-based games which, while not of the same style as Lunatix, are seemingly more fun and more addictive – and you have games like Funeral Quest (Flash) and Runescape (Java) that make true browser-based seem behind the times. And now there are fancy internet-ready mobile devices, services like gametap, the “casual gamer” market that goes for flash-based portal sites, etc. I’m not sure it would be worth spending time on HTML-based games at this point.
What I’d like to do is work on something with TrueVision 3D, or learn Direct-X or something, team up with a small number of other developers, and write something that might be worth selling or attracting a publisher. The problem is just a lack of time. I have to work a full-time job to support my wife and kiddo, and I couldn’t just quit to crank out a new game (and I’m not about to cash out my retirement plan or take out a loan or something on pure speculation). So I’m left to work on it in my free time, which is how I end up wasting six years off and on, on StarLock. It’s a matter of time and motivation, learning new tools that’d let me write more marketable games, and just… doing something. I’ve kind of been in this hobby mode where I just want to write games (interactive fiction, at present) for the fun of it – no pressure to sell it. Then again, the commerical/periodical IF idea is still out there. I guess that’s the blending of both.
Heh. I’m just rambling now.
I think the annual IFComp gets a lot more exposure, and it’s the one new players find out about. Plus, since it’s for shorter games, it’s probably easier for a new author to manage than the ST, which asks for medium to long-sized games.
I really wish Spring Thing would become a bigger comp, though. I think that a lot of people read the 2+ hour thing and thing it’s just way too long.
That’s one reason I didn’t play and review the games in 2005. I was busy. In 2006 there were only four games, and I started thinking it wouldn’t be a problem if each one took two or three long evenings to complete (I was less busy than the prior year, I think). It turned out that they weren’t as long as I expected.
I wonder if that’s why the competition doesn’t get more judges, too? People will look at 43 games and be willing to invest up to 2 hours in each, but if they look at 4 games, maybe it’s the thought of spending a lot of time on each one that’s the problem.
This thread goes back several weeks… I get the feeling maybe I’ve already said all this…