Why is Fallen London so dominant?

[billmaya]

@zarf

To be a competitor in that space, you have to start small and then work tirelessly for several years to accumulate fans, content, gameplay, and loyalty. “Work hard for years for a modest success” is not an attractive target for competitors. If you’re in the business of chasing hits, you want to chase big hits that pay off fast.

See also Kingdom of Loathing, which isn’t as big but had a similar slow build. (And similar reliance on a very distinctive, albeit totally different, house style.)

I have to agree with this statement based on what I’ve read about Fallen London (2009) and Kingdom of Loathing (2003) in Aaron Reed’s “50 Years of Text Games”.

@HanonO

Most of us who liked Storynexus would love a similar alternative, but nobody’s been brave enough to attempt it.

This reminded me of the post Thinking About Seltani Again by @zarf.

I played Fallen London briefly a few years ago but I’ll have to check both it and Seltani out again to see how the game experiences overlap in function and form.

I’m also reminded of this post by @dfabulich.

@dfabulich

If I were to start another line of text-only IF games today, it wouldn’t be a publishing house for parser-based text-adventure puzzlefests; I’d start a line of text-based point-and-click adventures, with user interfaces that look like the sort of thing Robin Johnson has done in Detectiveland or Zarf’s Seltani, and ship layered, progressive hints as part of the product.

Personally, I’m definitely interested in the possibility of selling parser-ish games to a larger audience, but I don’t know how viable that is given the current state of the art.

I have some ideas but, like most people here, I’m just an amateur doing this part-time. I’d love it to be a full-time job but that will probably entail working part-time “for years for a modest success”.

One of the things that I’m doing right now is playing more parser IF on iPhone and Android (Frotz, The Dreamhold, Hadean Lands, Detectiveland, Zeppelin Adventure, etc.) to get a feel for the good, bad, and ugly of parser IF on mobile.