Agreed.
That’s actually not completely true. There are a few companies out there who make at least moderate profits off IF (I believe the choices type apps though not standard IF (not a personal fan but I believe some of them do very well in the profits department), then you have companies like COG, Inkle (games like 80 days), fighting fantasy books/games etc.) Parser’s generally a harder sell I know than text/visual novel style if. (It had a heyday back in the 80’s but is sadly seems a bit more niche these days in audience.)
I’ve entered IFComp. I got a lot of feedback from the reviews which I found very helpful and enlightening to see the different viewpoints (this sort of thing is usually hard to get and invaluable), and the whole experience with the author’s forums etc was quite enjoyable despite not placing highly in the comp I entered. As others have said there is a cash prize so you do get something back for making a game to enter and how much does depend on how well your game is received which is fine.
Could I (or anyone else making a choicescript game) have potentially made more money from releasing my entry through Hosted Games which is a platform where you can commercially release IF games of that type? Maybe? But I decided to enter a comp instead for the other perks (feedback, community, having people play your game, entering a comp just to see how you can go, giving back a game to support a comp I’ve always enjoyed being able to play games from each year) and that’s an individual choice. The only reason I haven’t entered since is lack of time and organisational skills to put a game together that’s suitable in time. (But have still entered some of the other unpaid comps that run. They’re fun and that can be enough reason in itself for some people to make games.)
Another option for those who choose I imagine would be to take an IFComp game and extend it out significantly/add optional DLC’s etc that those who liked the game could revisit it and chip in some extra to support the dev continuing to work on it. (I have seen IFComp entries significantly worked on then released commercially (there’s a few platforms like the app stores, steam, itch etc) . The original will always remain free to play, but I don’t think that precludes anyone upgrading the game and putting it out for a commercial release if they wanted to?)
Short version is I don’t have an issue with IFComp games remaining free after the comp personally.
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There’s commercially viable (profitable in a business sense?) and then there’s also the “I’d like to make some money rather than none.” If you find you can work the second category without overly costing yourself other stuff that you also value, I would say, be open to it.
I can give a personal case study. I entered Leadlight in IFComp 2010 and it won the Golden Banana. It remains free. I made Leadlight Gamma, a commercial version with lots of bells and whistles, in 2015. It’s now eight years later and it’s had 234 downloads. Some of those I gave as IFComp prizes. About 30 new players a year is potentially no more or less than, uh, a typical non-blockbuster free IF game in a year.
So if I say to myself, ‘Okay, I could have just the 234 downloads, or 234 downloads at $6.66 each’, along with a bit of monetary thrill, that’s worked out pretty well!
The game situation is a bit unusual. The game already existed. The original remains free. Crucially (to me) the mechanics and prose of the new one are exactly the same as on the Apple II, which was paradoxically a lot of work to achieve. The game has a culty or weird mix of qualities which simultaneously make it boutique but can also make it jump out a bit in different contexts (not that it can jump out on itch. Discovery on itch is essentially impossible for parser games now.)
What has been the cost? Well, there are a good number of reviews of the original on IFDB. Coming from that perspective, I always feel antsy that there’s only one review of Gamma on IFDB. That doesn’t look good to onlookers compared to other commercial IF. But maybe the other games didn’t have another version first where most of the feedback sits.
I’m now working on my commercial parser game that raised AU$14k on Kickstarter. There’s a backer user base that does not have majority overlap with this community, and of course I expect and hope the typical IF audience will want to buy it, too. But the Kickstarter grift involved an amount and nature and duration of work I could barely describe, and usually avert my brain from if I’m reminded of it.
So I’m part of enjoying the nature of this community, and I hope being part of the giving and help and feedback, but I also want to make some money for my artistry.
-Wade
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I feel that other folks on here have responded to the general situation pretty thoroughly already, but since you have mentioned me specifically, I’ll just give you a reply as directly as I can.
I certainly had no intentions of undercutting? other authors who are trying to get some value back for the effort they have put in to their work, mainly because I thought it was a foregone conclusion that making money off of a text game in the VR age was a hopeless dream. Before I joined this forum and got the read of the room, I did entertain thoughts about how it would be nice if all of this effort could see a little monetary recompense. But once it became evident that there was nothing realistic to hope for there, I ended up in a similar mindset to @kamineko… where I would rather that more people see the game and maybe be touched by it in some way or other, than to halve or quarter the potential audience for the game, and end up with maybe a couple hundred bucks to show for all those thousands of hours of effort, if I were to go through the gyrations necessary to make it purchase-only.
On a tangential note to everybody, is there a reason that the old “shareware” mindset isn’t more prevalent among modern IF? Like, “You don’t have to pay for this, but if you really enjoyed it and felt it was worth your while, you’re allowed to show your appreciation of the author’s efforts on your behalf by [PayPal etc.]”?
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It is. There’s plenty of interactive fiction on the aforementioned game store. Nowadays we just call it “pay what you want”. But the genre as a whole has been purely non-commercial for so many decades, it needs time to pick up again, especially in the current market. At some point the bottom fell out of everything, and it’s hard to get any traction at all anymore.
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There is that yes 
There can be a bit of a difference between tinkering around with a project that it mainly just something you feel like making, and actually trying to get something polished and long enough for a commercial release. For the latter, it is kinda nice to get something to help subsidize your hobby as a bit of extra motivation, although it’s often difficult to be able to make something akin even minimum wage doing so for the number of hours you put into making a project. More than anything you could make from the game, having a platform (like HG for CSGs) at least allows you to get some visibility with the target audience so people will play it (even if released for free) which is much harder if trying to go it alone of a platform like itch. Is there an equivalent for games in other forms like parser, twine, ink etc?
It is possible if you happen to hit the right platform, with the right game, and have enough talent to pull it off (something I don’t have, so I’m very much in the subsidized hobby category lol.) But I do know there are a few very popular hosted games authors that apparently do very well for themselves between game sales and patreon. Possibly enough to consider it for a job. Your kickstarter sounds like a very promising venture as well
Honestly, I think it’s because it no longer works- the general mindset has changed. People in general are so used to either paying, true free or freemium models (freemium games are the bane of any non-freemium programmer’s existence), that going back to tip the author if you finish and enjoy a game doesn’t seem to happen as much as it used to. I have had games with a very optional tip jar which had little use. Might just have been those games, except last I heard from another author who made an excellent with a non-enforced fee doesn’t sound like the majority of players made payments either. You only need to go on the app store to see how many people are raging and leaving one star reviews on any type of program if the dev happens to put a price on it. Just seems to be a thing now anywhere except specific gaming platforms like steam.
You almost need to go with ad support (I know, I know I hate them too and they make less money for the author than you’d think), charge outright, or just make it free.
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For me, there’s a bit of holdover from the mid-to-late 1990s. That was the big boom of good free IF tools and the IF discussion community on Usenet and of short IF as a popular form (IFComp, etc.)
The combination of those trends meant that, to a large extent, everybody who played IF was also writing IF! Not literally everybody. But there was a lot of overlap.
My feeling back then was that “tip the author” was silly, because it would just be a newsgroup full of IF fans handing each other the same $5 bill around in a circle. (You can probably find me saying that in the RAIF archives.) It would only be profitable if a broader market started playing games off the IF Archive and sending money into the (then) IF community. And that just never really happened.
This reasoning has long since expired. It is now very easy to make your games available to a broader market. Now you have the reverse problem: the market is vastly oversaturated with weird little games, and “tip the author” is diluted to nothing.
This doesn’t have to stop you. I could certainly post all my free IF games on Itch and mark them PWYW. I did this for Shade and Spider and Web, as an experiment – looks like I’ve made about $40 over the past ten years. It’s not nothing but it doesn’t make me want to go to any further effort in that direction.
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It would increase the GDP by about $100!
Seriously, there is that, but also the fact that almost everyone is very poor now. There are so many creators I’d like to tip, but my disposable income doesn’t allow it. Where are we going to get the money to tip each other if none of it seeps in from the outside.
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This is, as always, very uneven across people.
IFComp got 25% less prize donations this year than last year. That’s still a lot of disposable income dedicated to IF. From inside the community, so it’s not an answer to the original question – the point is it’s “somewhat less healthy”, not “almost everybody is skint.”
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Most of the one star reviews are either greedy PTW or buggy app. AFAIK, VN is pay, and rather popular. Dan from Choice of Games can probably do a better accounting of income, either main stories or hosted games.
And parser games are rather inconvenient due to pop-up on-screen keyboard, making BT keyboard almost mandatory.
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Don’t! I beg you all!
HG? CSGs? What does that mean?
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Hosted Game? From Choice of Script Games? Commercial Choice IF platform (Choice of Games).
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This is a feature on itch - You can set a game as free, you can have it as “pay what you want” with a suggested price that’s skippable or the player can also pay more, or you can require a payment. You can also click a box to put a “support this game” button on the page which essentially allows people to tip the creator whatever they want with or without a download. I think I’ve gotten like $26 in voluntary donations over the years.
I think it’s kind of clear that most of us value IFComp as a community venture rather than a commercial one. The moderate payouts are a nice little incentive, but the reward is mostly exposure.
If you want to sell your game, Itch makes it easy to do that. That audience is way bigger than the IF community and with correct tagging there’s the potential to get your game in front of more people there than you ever would here even if you don’t bother with a competition.
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Just to be clear, I’m not advocating for the IFComp to become primarily a vehicle for commercial platform release. Nor that subpar games should be submitted purely so they can be developed more after the fact. I don’t think it happens often but I can think of one example where a game did well, and the dev then decided to expand the game out significantly and I was personally happy to chip in a few $ for that effort to see the end result (same as if I might buy or donate to any other game I want to play.) There are games from the comp I would love to see more from (sequels, extra content etc.) and if they are going to put in that effort for something outside of the actual comp itself I think it should be up to them if they sell the result (or ask for tips) or upload just upload it for free. I agree with the conditions of the comp that the originals should still be kept free for anyone to read.
Yes sorry for the confusing shorthand.
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Indeed. That’s why i think it makes sense to publish a separate demo.
a lot of slick games start off free, then you have to pay. Nothing wrong with that. it’s how it works. But i’ve read the one-stars;
This game is a scam! It lets you play for a while then it asks for money!
Like a driving game that gives you a car and a track. but then you have to pay to try the other cars and tracks.
You can’t fix stupid.
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This is interesting. And I’ve noticed a trend of other topics:
- People volunteer lots of their time to make free IF games.
- People complaining about how small the audience for IF is, and how do you market it.
It seems to me that marketing IFComp would be more efficient than marketing individual games. And apparently there is an army of volunteers to do some of the work. How hard can it be to bug reviewers and websites and post stuff on social media? It could be a good project for the community, as opposed to say creating more competitions.
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Please note that you’re quoting point 3 in a list of reasons why IFTF does not act as a commercial publisher.
If you’ve switched to the idea of marketing IFComp as it currently is – a free festival of short IF games – then I’m all in favor. (Although then “publicizing” is maybe the right term, not “marketing”.)
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I’m not proposing changing the competition in any way. It just stuck with me when I read that the people running the biggest competition for IF don’t know anything about marketing.
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Maybe I don’t know anything about marketing either since I consider publicising, marketing, promotion all to be synonyms. There is definitely more interest out there for IF than you’d imagine considering the coverage it gets, even just considering the subcultures of computer nerds, middle aged tech workers, literary tech enthusiasts, etc.
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I’m pretty sure Slashdot usually posts an IFComp story. People joke about grues and stuff, but I don’t know that the comp gets a lot of traffic that way.
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