I can’t get the hang of itch.io at all. Download and viewing figures for all of my games are dismal except for Excalibur which is the only Twine game of the bunch. Excalibur was featured on The Verge, Part-Time Storier and boingboing.net which generated a lot of interest back when we launched it in June, and a lot of its traffic comes from Grim Curio’s itch page which is much more popular than mine.
I don’t know what to do besides continually plug the same games on social media which is as boring for me as it is for my followers, who’ve seen them all before anyway. I can only conclude that everyone in the world who plays parser games is right here on this forum.
I’ve got two more parser games in the works, but when they’re finished I will probably shift over to writing choice-based IF as I’d like to see a bigger audience for my writing.
This is an incomplete picture because my big paid games (HL, Meanwhile, Leviathan) are also on Steam. Steam does roughly five times the revenue as Itch, for me.
For these charts, the big December spike was my participating in https://confoundingcalendar.itch.io , which was followed by a lot of puzzle people. That was a small play-in-browser game so (unsurprisingly) it did not lead people to any of my other stuff.
Announcing and launching Leviathan brought some attention. Everything else is pretty much a steady trickle of people wandering in.
I don’t do any particular promotion other than blogging and Twitter/Mastodon presence. (If switching from Twitter to Mastodon in October caused a change in my traffic, I can’t see it.)
Itch doesn’t have that many users, though current IF players mostly know that a lot of good IF is on itch. Steam might be a better option as they have so many users. If the IF community collectively wanted to promote parser IF with a game on Steam it could be a game changer. If the goal is more players it may be good to make it free, but sometimes free indicates wrongly, that the game isn’t worth playing. The right pricing for most satisfied players may be greater than zero. Just a thought.
As you already made your fair share of successful parser games it cetainly makes sense. Still, I hope that many of the best parser authors will keep making some once in a while so that the parser format will not die. Choice based games are definitely here to stay, just look at Choice Of Games etc. The parser format is much more vulnerable as you have to learn to play parser games before you can enjoy them thoroughly. Keeping parser games alive is probably a lot harder which is a shame because to me, many great parser games wouldn’t work that well as a choice based game.
On Steam, I think there’s a general assumption that a free game is either (a) so small that it’s not worth charging money for, (b) a demo or promo or teaser for an associated paid game (perhaps upcoming), or (c) DLC-supported or subscription-supported and thus not really free.
This isn’t universally true, but those are the common cases for free games on Steam. It’s a direct result of Steam charging $100 for a game listing, and I’m sure it’s a deliberate strategy decision on their part. Steam is happy to leave the “free / student / experimental” game market to Itch.
Make sure your games are strategically tagged by interest on itch if they aren’t already. You can put up to ten tags on your game entry and you should. The other thing that can help but you want to be careful of - link to your itch profile or your ifdb profile or some resource with your games in some fashion if you’re on social media with a profile page or in a default signature footer that allows links.
Also when posting elsewhere (be casual and respectful about it so you’re not spamming) but whenever you get a chance, name drop your game or your website especially with a link on it. There will be people who will click to see what it is, especially if they’re interested in what you’re saying and your content. And if it’s a popular forum or social media, that gets the web-crawlers indexing your game/links/etc.
So I think that’s kind of the point we’re discovering about “the current audience for IF” there are just a limited number of people (on itch at least) who will play a parser text adventure. While itch is not “the entire world” I imagine it’s a busy enough site that we can might be able to extrapolate percentages and ratios - especially for those of us who have written both choice and parser and have had games up for a long enough time.
I am probably a bit lucky - as people have pointed out a new release drives traffic to all your existing titles, and in my case since I have NSFW games I like to imagine there are those people checking out my other games. (In my brain I’m hoping they go “I certainly enjoyed that sex romp, but I’ve come to enjoy what this feller does, perhaps I ought to try out his more serious mainstream work, like this…faux MMORPG about…pickles?”)
I think gamers - perhaps “narrative curious” ones - will try out something if it suits their interests and click through a thing with the mouse or on their device, but (as we all somewhat subconsciously realize) being presented with a screenful of text and asked to type something is just plain unfamiliar and daunting for many gamers in the general public.
The other factor on itch - choice games lend themselves more readily to be browser-playable online, and I know I’ve had nights on itch where I’m like “if I gotta download a thing, it’s of no interest right now.”
I got into parser games seeing them as a dead subject that I was doing archaeology in; I thought it was fascinating and fun to explore and I wanted to document anything.
That turned out not to be true, and it’s been fun to see the community continue to grow and thrive.
It does seem like there are major barriers to entry to parser games for most people; there are so many unspoken conventions that make it difficult (I remember spending ten minutes trying to leave a space ship because I didn’t know ‘out’ was a way to get out of things, and another ten minutes in another game without directions where I had to use ‘Enter door’ to go through a door.
To be honest, I would be sad if millions of people started playing parser games. I know that’s a selfish thing to say, but once something gets to that level of popularity, it starts getting corporatized, authors get removed from fans, and the level of individual interactions and community we have starts to fade. Some authors would become rich, and new games would probably be designed in a way to hook people into playing for hours, but I’d honestly be bummed.
I’ve been mostly lurking, as they say, but it really has been heartwarming to see the sheer level of cooperation and support from this community. Especially so with the “big names” keeping their passion and willingness to help. Though i do admit that the impostor syndrome gets quite heavy sometimes, especially as an utter first timer. Still, seeing purely the trends on the submissions in the comps, it sure looks like there’s a however slight increase in the active audience and creators, which is never a bad thing! Probably.
