No. If I can quit dithering and gather my scattered ideas, the project I have in mind would be to gather information about text-based games, which I think is the information that would help this community. Which is not to say that graphics are all the way out-- certainly there are authors who have tried to meet modern audiences somewhere in terms of making IF more pleasing to the eye, hence more salable. But for this idea I won’t look at anything that isn’t primarily or entirely a text-based game.
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Thaumistry in Charm’s Way - by Bob Bates
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Re: @AmandaB ’s list, Leadlight Gamma is my commercial Inform port of my Apple II Leadlight. While adding graphics like maps and such, they are optional, as the core is a mechanical reproduction of the 8-bit version.
-Wade
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OK, here’s an initial set of questions that might be useful for seeing if there are any trends in author experiences with making their IF commercial. Anyone interested, please feel free to suggest changes to these.
Goal: to determine how well commercial IF has actually done, and to ferret out any factors that contribute to success/failure.
1.) Please provide author name, game name, links to the games on commercial platform(s), year of commercial release, and any other pertinent information (year of release of a free version, awards won, years of significant updates, etc).
2.) Please comment on your commercial platform(s): ease of use, cost to you of hosting, and exposure. If you use multiple platforms, which is best in terms of these criteria, and of sales?
3.) Please share your earnings (in US dollars):
a.) In graph form (sales over time), including the data tables used in the graph. If you have multiple commercial platforms, separating them would be appreciated.
b.) Price of game and any changes over time in price
c.) Total gross earnings to date
4.) If there are any notable peaks/troughs in earnings over time, to what do you attribute those?
5.) Do you have any user ratings from any of your platforms? If you can/will share those rating averages, please do.
6.) a.) At any point have you received coverage (reviews, social media exposure, etc) from anyone with any influence in the gaming world? If so, how did that happen? Did you actively seek that out and if so, how?
b.) Did you have any exposure that you didn’t solicit? Did you have anything you consider a “viral” moment, even if it was modest by commercial gaming standards?
c.) Did any exposure you received boost your sales, in your opinion?
d.) Specific comments on the difficulty/ease of getting exposure would be appreciated.
7.) What did you do with the design of your game that elevated it to be commercially viable, in your opinion? For instance: graphics, sound, layout, interface, or anything that makes it “more” than a traditional parser or choice-based interactive fiction game? Do you feel that those design elements were successful in selling your game?
8.) Is there a free version of your game currently available? How well has that done in terms of exposure and user engagement, comparative to the commercial version?
9.) Was there anything you think you did right at the outset of selling your game? Elaborate on that if you can.
10.) Was there anything you think you did wrong at the outset of selling your game? If so, were you able to correct it and did corrrecting it make a difference?
NB: I’m seeking feedback about these questions right now. I don’t want answers to them until I’ve had that feedback about the questions themselves. I’ve never sold a game, so I’m coming at this very ignorant of the process and I suspect I’ll need to tweak the questions.
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These are all interesting questions, but, to provide feedback, I think I’d need to know what problem you’re trying to solve with them.
Reading between the lines, I think you’re interested in assessing two questions:
- Should I work on commercial IF? (Is it worth the risk?)
- How much work would should I do on it? (Especially “marketing” work, above and beyond simply making a game.)
- How much money would I make?
- Assuming that I’m going to work on commercial IF, what are good approaches? What works, and what doesn’t?
Is that what you’re trying to figure out?
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I’m not really approaching it from a “what should you do” place. I simply think it would be interesting to gather some data about author experiences with commercial IF and collate it to see if there are trends that might be useful. I don’t have a specific hypothesis-- I want to ask these questions because we talk about this a lot and throw around a lot of suppositions and anecdotes and differing opinions, but we don’t really know anything. So this is a way we might be able to know something.
There may not be any trends, or at least not ones that can be uncovered with the questions I’m asking. I figured (and this is probably where my ignorance of selling games will show) that these are the factors to consider:
1.) Platform
2.) Exposure
3.) Design decisions
4.) Business decisions at the outset and changes in those over time
But I’m happy to tweak any of those if anyone feels other questions/data would be more revealing.
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Bless you and your scientific researching mind. Allow the data to guide you… 
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If you don’t know what you don’t know, then it’s hard to see how any questions would be better or worse than any other. What feedback could anyone practically have to offer?
Speaking for myself, this is more data than I’d be willing to share publicly. (Not sure if that even matters, since I may not be in the target of who you’re hoping to talk to…?)
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Well, we often don’t know what we expect to see, but we have an idea of what data could yield some interesting results. Of course, we’re often wrong about those ideas, but there’s a lot we wouldn’t know about a lot if we didn’t just ask, “Hey, let’s see if this yields interesting fruit.” I could throw out a hypothesis like “adding good sound to a game makes it more salable” or “most people under/overprice their games at first before finding the sweet spot,” but why do that when I don’t really think those those things are true? Obviously I’m hoping to see some general guidelines emerge from such a project which would help more people try to sell IF, but I don’t expect it. I think there are some things we would all expect to see (getting a writeup by a popular reviewer makes sales happen!), but expecting to see it doesn’t mean squat until you actually do see it.
A few people have already enthusiastically said yes. And there are people who talk freely about their sales on this forum and elsewhere. Certainly no one would have to participate, and I’d certainly anonymize the data. But I can totally see people not wanting to share financial data with me. I could be anybody, after all.
If you have games in my target area of interest, then of course I’d like your responses if you’re willing. But I think most of your work is through CoG? I’m really only interested in games written outside of companies/programs that do any marketing or exposure for authors.
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Yeah, I think I’m not in your target.
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I’ve done a lot of commercial work for various studios over the years, enough to earn my bread and butter as a narrative designer, but the studios always promote the work. I’ve never done much personal marketing.
Hadean Lands is probably my favorite commercial IF made outside the context of a company/program (and one of my favorite games, period).
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Yeah… growing up around small businesses I don’t think this is a place where that’s actually useful… one of my biggest indicators for whether a business-coach kind of person knows what they’re doing and isn’t the usual con-artist is whether they recommend against collecting data within your business without a reason for it: you tend to end up with something that you think is data but doesn’t actually have the specific things that you need to usefully reason or generalize from…
So my gut reaction to this set of questions is that it’s very much a continuation of throwing around suppositions and anecdotes (anecdata?) and not really a move away from it. I think that what you would get in response to these would be results that authors think are general but are actually useless outside of the very specific set of circumstances that that author happened to find themselves in…
I’ll have to think more about if I have any positive recommendations. I’m not sure I do: in the general indie-game-dev space this is a topic that is really tempting for people to talk about: it gets a TON of words and ink spilled over it and I’m pretty sure most of it is hogwash at best and actively harmful at worst, like most popular stuff about marketing anywhere (it’s way easier to succeed by being a scammer selling marketing advice than it is to be successful at marketing). But I’ll… hmm. Yeah, I’ll have to think about whether I think there are useful ways to approach this…
Also, disclaimer: I haven’t talked to the other Rosebush crew or thought about this at all in that context, so this definitely not me saying we’d decline to publish it or anything like that.
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I’m waiting for someone to make a (commercial?) IF game about how to make money making IF games.
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Interesting. I guess what I’m hoping to see is some kind of modest trend in something: what kind of effort getting press has paid off, what pricing model works well, whether a lot of effort put into interface design pays off, with the understanding that this is the experience of a very few people, which unfortunately is all we have in the IF world-- a very few people.
This is a worry, because it can’t take zeitgeist into account, and because the sample set is necessarily very small. It also makes me the arbiter of what games are “quality” enough to be included. Obviously a lot of people throw games up on itch hoping to make a buck, and some of them are great and some of them are terrible.
Mind you, the goal here is simply to see what people with experience have to say about that experience, not to gold-plate those answers and call them The Way, which I agree is harmful. But I can’t imagine that those experiences are completely without merit as long as we keep them in perspective.
I think it’s very unlikely that you’ll find anything actionable. I think all of the answers to those questions will be “it depends” or “nobody knows,” especially from the people you’re planning to talk to.
You’ll get no useful information about pricing models or the profitability of interface design from authors who have published only one or two games. “How much more/less would I have made if I’d behaved differently” is a question you can’t have an informed opinion about with N=1.
And, as for press, these days, it’s streamers, not traditional games press, that delivers users who want to buy, and games without graphics basically can’t participate at all in that environment.
Your intuition is strong: “surely I’ll learn something, right??” But, speaking as a guy who’s tried this before, I have learned approximately nothing actionable from this kind of research.
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Wow, a lot of pushback on this. Maybe it’s just a bad idea to collect the experiences of people who’ve done it because everyone will think I’m trying to push a roadmap onto them. Maybe it’s better to think of it as a series of interviews about the experience, or maybe no one is interested in what those people have to say. The sample set is indeed small, but there’s no getting around that because not very many people do it.
If the general consensus here is that no one wants this project, then of course I’ll drop it.
** edit: I somehow managed to reply to myself here. Not sure how or why I did that.
For what it’s worth, I see value in understanding the experiences of community members, documenting them, and synthesizing what can be synthesized. This doesn’t seem like a strange or unusual thing for someone to do. It will be useful history if nothing else.
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I need to finish that! You just reminded me. Too many IFs, not enough time 
You’ve probably seen it, but one of my all time favs is by the same company called 80 days.
Early game FL is amazing and I recommend it to people. Unfortunately it gets too grindy for content for my taste in the later game so I ended up abandoning it which is sad. Couldn’t get into sunless seas at all.
Undertale’s probably a bit graphics heavy to qualify as pure IF but is also enjoyable.
As other’s have mentioned there’s some good games among the COG/HG catalogue.
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I think this is the important bit. It may be that earnings/responses are so wildly varied that no synthesis can be done. But if 20 games are consistently earning $100/year, or $2000/year, I’d find that interesting, although certainly not any kind of guarantee about the market.
Also, I was seeking feedback about my questionnaire. It seems that people think it’s not great, which I suspected was the case. OK. How can I improve it? What kinds of questions should I be asking here? How should I be asking them?
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I think you’re digging into something very worthwhile.
I think the pushback is that it’s just not going to bring useful (actionable) answers, but that’s the interesting part of researching something. What will the data reveal? Maybe there’s a lot of need for a platform that promotes independent IF (lots of product and no way to deliver it)? Maybe it reveals a not so obvious bottleneck in the pipeline? There’s clearly an audience out there (CoG), but can they be reached? Is parser IF even more obscure than choice-based IF? Is the mobile/desktop dichotomy a major factor (is that even tracked in the sales figures)?
I think what the data doesn’t reveal could be very beneficial as well.
Also, I think this would make a wonderful Rosebush article. Just sayin’.
If you’re passionate about this, do it. 
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