Making Money
jim_b...@my-deja.com
For a couple of hundred hours of work, I got paid a couple hundred
dollars.
Can an IF author do the same?
- Jim
Sent via Deja.com
http://www.deja.com/
Mark Musante - Sun Microsystems
> After a number of years, I've managed to get a short story published.
> For a couple of hundred hours of work, I got paid a couple hundred
> dollars.
>
> Can an IF author do the same?
You made $1/hr writing?
I'd say that was at least three orders of magnitude greater than
what others have made, when they've made anything at all.
At least, post-Infocom.
-markm
Paul O'Brian
> After a number of years, I've managed to get a short story published.
> For a couple of hundred hours of work, I got paid a couple hundred
> dollars.
>
> Can an IF author do the same?
Sure, if you find a paying market. If you manage to do so, please let me
know.
--
Paul O'Brian obr...@colorado.edu http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~obrian
Andrew MacKinnon
>
> After a number of years, I've managed to get a short story published.
> For a couple of hundred hours of work, I got paid a couple hundred
> dollars.
>
> Can an IF author do the same?
Not really. Most of the IF we have is all free, downloaded off the
internet. We don't want commercial IF anymore.
--
Andrew MacKinnon
andrew_mac...@yahoo.com
http://www.geocities.com/andrew_mackinnon_2000/
Jon Ingold
> > Can an IF author do the same?
>
> Not really. Most of the IF we have is all free, downloaded off the
> internet. We don't want commercial IF anymore.
I don't know how many authors I speak for, but for those I speak for:
*We* do.
Jon
jim_b...@my-deja.com
want to pay?
Is it because readers expect them to be free? Is it because many
authors give their work away, thereby eliminating a market?
There are some in non-IF who give their stuff away for free. Most of
these stories aren't publishable, but some are. Some authors get mad
at these altruistic types, saying they're destroying the market.
Yes, for a short story, I expect about a $1 an hour. If I ever manage
to get a book published, I'll do better because of royalties. And
there's always the slight chance I might have a hit.
I am interested in IF. I can imagine a lot of possibilities.
- Jim
In article <Pine.GSO.3.96.100122...@ucsu.colorado.edu>,
Dan Schmidt
| After a number of years, I've managed to get a short story published.
| For a couple of hundred hours of work, I got paid a couple hundred
| dollars.
|
| Can an IF author do the same?
Five authors who entered the IF Comp this year did.
Eric Mayer
>I've looked at some IF stories. Many are very good. Why don't readers
>want to pay?
>
>Is it because readers expect them to be free? Is it because many
>authors give their work away, thereby eliminating a market?
>
>There are some in non-IF who give their stuff away for free. Most of
>these stories aren't publishable, but some are. Some authors get mad
>at these altruistic types, saying they're destroying the market.
>
To put my oar in - I wouldn't equate IF with regular fiction. There is
still a fairly large market for regular fiction and thus companies
which deal in it. As I understand it, the comapnies that were selling
IF either went under or abandonned it as unmarketable, at least from
as mass market viewpoint. So plenty of IF authors are obviously, at
least to me, of "professional" ability if only there were a
professional outlet. I mean to say, our Stephen Kings or Philip Roth's
just don't have anyplace to sell their stuff.
>Yes, for a short story, I expect about a $1 an hour. If I ever manage
>to get a book published, I'll do better because of royalties. And
>there's always the slight chance I might have a hit.
>
So as not to depress IF writers too much, let me point out that while
a very few magazines like The New Yorker pay very high rates, you're
more likely to get 4 or 5 cents a word for a short story. (Ellery
Queen Mystery Magazine, for example, which I've sold to might pay 6
cents a word after a few sales) As for getting *more* for a book.
Well, right, some do. But it isn't the norm. By any means. You'd have
to have a hit to get that sort of return.
The attraction of being published is, in large part, getting your work
out to readers through the marketing mechanisms of the publishing
industry. Interest in IF being what it is, you can reach most of the
audience by uploading to the archive, putting the game on freeware
sites etc. The financial rewards for most writers aren't necessarily
that high so someone who loves writing IF, and is making a good
living otherwise, isn't losing all that much by giving it away.
--
Eric Mayer
Web Site: <http://home.epix.net/~maywrite>
"The map is not the territory." -- Alfred Korzybski
Adam Cadre
money off IF. The usual payment models don't really work: if you ask
for money in exchange for a copy of the game, your potential audience
is going to shrink dramatically, since the number of people willing to
pay for a copy is much smaller than the already small number of people
who'll even put forth the effort to download it and try it out. And
once you've made one sale, there's no way to stop that person from
distributing illegal copies (though this is a pretty honorable group...
I don't believe there were any illegal copies of Once and Future
floating around, but maybe there were plenty and I just didn't hear
about them.) Allowing the game to be freely distributed and asking
those who've already played it to send you some money ("If you enjoyed
this game...") doesn't really work either, since very few people respond
to such entreaties (though some do... I've received $20 and $45 from
kind souls who spontaneously decided to reward me for I-0 and Photopia,
respectively.) Thus, the only time that you have the leverage to get
some money from people is *before* the game is released.
This isn't an entirely original idea, I've discovered -- I believe it's
known as the "street performer's protocol" or some such. Here's the
gist. You release your first few games for free, in order to attract
an audience who's sufficiently familiar with and impressed by your stuff
that they'd be willing to pay to get more of it. Then you announce that
your next game will be released once you receive the sum of, say, five
hundred bucks. Once you receive that amount, whether it's a single $500
check from one person or fifty $10 bills from a wide assortment of
contributors, you release the game as freeware, and anyone can play it,
whether they paid for it or not. This means not having to spend any
(futile) effort to put the brakes on free distribution, and also means
that newbies to the IF scene who've never heard of you can play any of
your old stuff, whether it was originally freeware or sold using this
model. The drawback is that you really have to stick to your proverbial
guns -- no one will pay if they know that if they wait long enough
you'll eventually buckle under and release the game before the "ransom"
is paid. So you can end up putting hours and hours of work into a
project that never sees the light of day because your price is never
met. And for all I know, this would end up being the case for anyone
who tried such a model... but it'd be interesting to see someone make
the attempt.
-----
Adam Cadre, Sammamish, WA
web site: http://adamcadre.ac
novel: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060195584/adamcadreac
jpowe...@my-deja.com
this, but what the hey, this is usenet.
One of the appeals of IF for me is that the community is based on mutual
interest and shared pleasure. There is no marketers, advertisers,
agents, publishers. No one is in here to get rich or expects thousands
of screaming fans to show up at their IF readings.
I live in the USA, but I have traveled a bit, and I don't think we
Americans realize just how market driven our culture is. We take for
granted that every medium is driven by advertising, that our streets are
lined with literally thousands of signs per mile screaming, waving,
clawing for our attention. The outside and inside of public buses are
literally covered in ads. I often get a kilo of advertising mail per
day. We American men know that it is not unusual to find someone has
sold the space above urinals for adverts. I haven't been in any other
country that even approaches this level of hype.
It makes me tired. I probably would like IF anyway. But after a long
hard day it is nice to check in with a bunch of people that are involved
with something just because they like it.
(OTOH, I gladly paid for Once and Future, and don't begrudge anyone who
can make a commercial go of this. I'm not arguing against change, just
throwing out my thoughts.)
-Jim
John Hill
wrote:
> This isn't an entirely original idea, I've discovered -- I believe it's
> known as the "street performer's protocol" or some such. Here's the
> gist. You release your first few games for free, in order to attract an
> audience who's sufficiently familiar with and impressed by your stuff
> that they'd be willing to pay to get more of it. Then you announce that
> your next game will be released once you receive the sum of, say, five
> hundred bucks. Once you receive that amount, whether it's a single $500
> check from one person or fifty $10 bills from a wide assortment of
> contributors, you release the game as freeware, and anyone can play it,
> whether they paid for it or not.
Several years ago, an acquaintance of mine declared that it was his
ambition to become rich enough to have other people clean his house,
drive his car, and make his art. His attitude used to bug me. I'm not sure
if it still does.
The model Adam describes reminds me of public radio fund drives, but
it sent me off on a different tangent. Does anybody know any Mediccis?
If a rich eccentric, infatuated with HP Lovecraft, commissioned you to
write another 'Anchorhead', could someone do a good job of it? How
about a church pastor, who wanted a game in the vein of 'Jarod's
Journey', that all the Sunday School kids could play on their cel phones?
Another thought: I wonder what kind of IF proposal would win an NEA
grant. Something patriotic I suppose.
Please pardon my flights of fancy here. The "street performer's protocol"
seems more plausible.
Oren Ronen
news:91rmem$3lj$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
> Having never written a game, perhaps I have no right to an opinion on
> this, but what the hey, this is usenet.
Everyone's entitled to an opinion. This is an issue that affects both
writers and players.
> One of the appeals of IF for me is that the community is based on mutual
> interest and shared pleasure. There is no marketers, advertisers,
> agents, publishers. No one is in here to get rich or expects thousands
> of screaming fans to show up at their IF readings.
I don't think that will change all that much, but I do believe that IF
writers deserve to get paid for their efforts.
I'd gladly pay for works like Photopia or Spider and Web if the authors had
asked me too. I *did* pay for Once and Future. I have no qualms about paying
money to writers I respect, of for games which got good reviews.
> I live in the USA, but I have traveled a bit, and I don't think we
> Americans realize just how market driven our culture is. We take for
> granted that every medium is driven by advertising, that our streets are
> lined with literally thousands of signs per mile screaming, waving,
> clawing for our attention. The outside and inside of public buses are
> literally covered in ads. I often get a kilo of advertising mail per
> day. We American men know that it is not unusual to find someone has
> sold the space above urinals for adverts. I haven't been in any other
> country that even approaches this level of hype.
You should come to Israel. We're almost as bad.
> It makes me tired. I probably would like IF anyway. But after a long
> hard day it is nice to check in with a bunch of people that are involved
> with something just because they like it.
I don't think this will ever change. I can't see anyone writing any
noteworthy piece of IF if he doesn't like the medium. You will always find
interesting discussion on the newsgroups, even if the games themselves will
stop being free.
That said, I don't think we'll see any major shift towards commercial games
in the foreseeable future. I certainly plan to make my WIP freeware when
(if?) I release it.
Oren Ronen
or...@isdn.net.il
Hans Persson
> Allowing the game to be freely distributed and asking those who've
> already played it to send you some money ("If you enjoyed this
> game...") doesn't really work either, since very few people respond
> to such entreaties (though some do... I've received $20 and $45 from
> kind souls who spontaneously decided to reward me for I-0 and
> Photopia, respectively.)
I think it works better than I thought. Way back, I released Enhanced
as shareware and have since received at least over $300. I can't make
a living out of that, but it's better than I thought. Even more
surprising is that I've gotten payment less than a year ago for a game
last updated in 1994 or thereabout. Enhanced was released for free
download, fully playable. If you registered you got a printed hint
booklet and the source code. I don't know if anyone ever looked at the
source code, though... Some people seemed interested in the hint
booklet. Others just liked the game.
For Sensorer (any month now, just eight years after the first part in
the series) we had originally planned to release it as crippled
shareware, but have now changed our mind to just releasing it and
letting anyone who likes it pay if they like.
Sure, most people will play it for a while and don't pay. On the other
hand, if I was in it for the money, I'd be into something else. Even
if there is no motivation (printed booklets or whatever), someone will
pay. Not many, but at least a few. Also, the handling of booklets and
diskettes and postage all over the globe was frankly more work than it
was worth.
Hans
--
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Hans Persson http://www.lysator.liu.se/~unicorn/ |
| uni...@lysator.liu.se http://www.lysator.liu.se/~unicorn/fandom/ |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Rich Pizor
> Here's the
> gist. You release your first few games for free, in order to attract
> an audience who's sufficiently familiar with and impressed by your stuff
> that they'd be willing to pay to get more of it. Then you announce that
> your next game will be released once you receive the sum of, say, five
> hundred bucks. Once you receive that amount, whether it's a single $500
> check from one person or fifty $10 bills from a wide assortment of
> contributors, you release the game as freeware, and anyone can play it,
> whether they paid for it or not.
[snip]
> it'd be interesting to see someone make
> the attempt.
Ah yes -- the Stephen King model. The experiment has thus far not
proven successful for him -- the serialized novel would only be
continued as long as 75% of the downloading public paid up. Of course,
in that case we're talking about several payments over time for one
product, whereas the model you're describing is a series of one-time
transactions for discreet products. That just might be different enough
to work -- it certainly did for ID software...
Rich
Damien Neil
>I've looked at some IF stories. Many are very good. Why don't readers
>want to pay?
There are some very high quality games out there that are free. Any
for-cost game needs to match or better the quality of any unplayed
free games, or the buyer feels as if he wasted his money.
If Zarf announced that his next game was $20, I'd send him a check
right away. I've played his previous games, I liked them, and I
trust him to not disapoint me.
If Ned Newauthor does the same, I'll wait for the demo. Or a lot of
rave reviews.
Either way, making real money is going to be a tough problem. It's
dubious that the set of people who pay attention to these newsgroups
is large enough to form a profitable market; you may manage to make
a few hundred dollars if you're do an excellent job of marketing,
but that isn't going to begin to repay the investment of time a good
game takes.
Various people have attempted to find a market outside the newsgroup.
They've all failed. I doubt this is because of the availability of
free games -- most of the public has never heard of _Curses_ or _So
Far_. It probably has more to do with the presence of slick, well-made
games with huge production budgets on the shelves of the local
computer store. If _Escape From Monkey Island_ costs $40, $20 for
a text adventure that one person wrote in his spare time doesn't look
very good.
>There are some in non-IF who give their stuff away for free. Most of
>these stories aren't publishable, but some are. Some authors get mad
>at these altruistic types, saying they're destroying the market.
I've never seen an author get mad at people who offer their works
for free. I've seen a lot of them say that you get what you pay for.
The problem with self-published people is that they have no editor.
Editors serve a number of tasks, the most important of which is
guaranteeing a certain minimum level of quality. (Exactly what this
level is depends on the editor and the imprint.) I know that if I
pick a completely random book off the shelves, that it will be better
than 99% of the stories that are being written. (I presume you've
heard of the dreaded "slush pile", in every publisher's offices.)
Most books never get published, and with reason most of the time.
This isn't to say that there are great stories out there that never
find a publisher. Frankly, though, the odds that any given book
self-published on a website is one of those are low enough that I'm
not going to waste my time.
IF is a bit of an odd bird in this way. There is, as far as anyone
can tell, no commercial market, so there are no publishers to screen
works. Readers have to sort through the slush pile themselves, hoping
they find a gem.
Perhaps this is why I don't play much IF any more. The tedium of
wading through a host of poor games to find one good one is far too
depressing. By the time I come across a decent game, I'm so sick
of the garbage that I'm in no state to appreciate it.
>I am interested in IF. I can imagine a lot of possibilities.
I wish you luck.
- Damien
Neil K.
> This isn't an entirely original idea, I've discovered -- I believe it's
> known as the "street performer's protocol" or some such. Here's the
> gist. You release your first few games for free, in order to attract
> an audience who's sufficiently familiar with and impressed by your stuff
> that they'd be willing to pay to get more of it. Then you announce that
> your next game will be released once you receive the sum of, say, five
> hundred bucks. Once you receive that amount, whether it's a single $500
> check from one person or fifty $10 bills from a wide assortment of
> contributors, you release the game as freeware, and anyone can play it,
> whether they paid for it or not. [...]
Hm. I'm honestly not sure about this idea, though it is interesting. I
think there are a couple major trust issues that undermine it.
First, you have the problem of people sending you money but not enough.
So then you don't release the game. This will inevitably engender
resentment amongst contributors unless you send the money back to them.
Which has its own problems, notably that you'll lose money. And if you
don't send the money back you'll have a lot of mistrustful people out
there.
Stephen King created a huge amount of ill-will amongst the people who
paid for the first chapters of his unfinished online book, since they feel
like they paid him good money to buy a book that may never be finished. Or
if it is finished they'll have to buy it all over again. King may well
point to the "freeloaders" and blame them, but paying customers are likely
to say, "well - that's your problem, isn't it? I paid up - where're my
goods?" Luckily for King he has such a huge readership that a few grumpy
geeks aren't going to affect his pocketbook in the end. But we aren't all
in such a position. The subscription model may have worked for Dickens,
but the economic and cultural landscape has changed a hell of a lot since
then.
Second, you have the problem that you don't know whether the final work
is necessarily going to be any good or well-received. Even the well-known
and well-established IF authors have produced works that few people liked.
Just because I liked game X by author Y doesn't mean I'm going to like
game Z by the same author. Sure, there are writers in this community who
have written stuff I like. But I really can't say I'd be willing to trust
them with money to write something else I'd like, since they've all
written stuff I don't like at all.
Though I might be willing to pay them anyhow because of some of the
friendship links within this community. This of course was the main reason
I purchased a copy of OaF - I thought it was an interesting experiment,
and one I wanted to support. Not because I was a huge fan of Underoos, fun
as it is.
But really, once you release a paid game that turns out to disappoint a
majority of your contributors I'll bet you'll have poisoned the well. Very
few people will be willing to pay you sight-unseen again for your next
work, which makes it a fairly fragile payment model.
Personally I suspect the enforced shareware deal - you release the game
and let people play it, but once you reach a certain critical point you
have to pay up - is the least problematic model for getting some revenue
happening. Since you hook people when it's free and then get the people
willing to keep playing. This was the approach I was considering with my
big work-sort-of-in-progress - enforced shareware with the added carrot of
feelies in a box.
But really, when you get down to it, the basic problem we're facing here
is that the IF community is way too small to support income deals. When
you have a bigger pool of users the probability of getting some cash
increases. And unlike the art world we don't have a large number of
wealthy patrons out there happy to bankroll the next great writer.
IF died as a commercially viable proposition in the 1980s. I don't see
that changing at any point in the future. As noted above, I was
considering releasing my unfinished game as shareware when I started
writing it back in 1992 or whenever it was. I wouldn't do that now. It'd
be freeware with perhaps an option for buying feelies separately.
(Though having said that, another possibility comes to mind which sort of
combines your idea with mine. Release the game for free, but it's
impossible to complete it without a specific piece of information. People
send in their 20 bucks or whatever to get that info. After, say, 90 days
that information is made available for free. So enthusiastic players can
finish right away, whereas less serious people who likely wouldn't pay
anyhow can just wait. This completely bypasses the two trust problems I
mention above, though doesn't deal with the larger problem of there being
a small market for IF. However, since it's a time-limited thing, who
knows? Might get a few bucks out of someone.)
- Neil K.
Jon Ingold
> For a couple of hundred hours of work, I got paid a couple hundred
> dollars.
>
> Can an IF author do the same?
Having read through this thread, how about this:
Someone (?) sets up a site which acts as an editor/publisher, and will
offer games which whoever runs the site classes as "good" (or rather
"worth it") for download; and the only place you can download from is
this site. Then you smear the site with banner adverts, get money from
that and split it around, a bit for the site runner I suppose and a bit
for the author.
That said, I've no idea how much money you can really get from a banner
ad. The guy who runs iFiction has them, do they pay off?
It wouldn't solve the problem of illegal copies, but then you wouldn't
have to as the people paying wouldn't be the players. Then after a month
or two you could allow the author to place the game in the archive for
posterity and post up your next game. Kinda like what Mark is doing with
his review site, only on the other side.
...or is this fundamentally flawed?
Jon
Eric Mayer
>
>The problem with self-published people is that they have no editor.
>Editors serve a number of tasks, the most important of which is
>guaranteeing a certain minimum level of quality. (Exactly what this
>level is depends on the editor and the imprint.) I know that if I
>pick a completely random book off the shelves, that it will be better
>than 99% of the stories that are being written. (I presume you've
>heard of the dreaded "slush pile", in every publisher's offices.)
>Most books never get published, and with reason most of the time.
>
First, before anyone else corrects me, I apologise for misreading $1
an hour as $1 a word further up this thread! A bug in my brain. But
the point that self publishers have no editor is very important. I
mostly like the egalitarian idea of having no middleman between artist
and audience, but then here is also no screening process. Indeed some
good stuff gets screened out, and increasingly so given the
market-driven approach to publishing today, yet most of the stuff
screened out should be screened out.
Editors also help to improve immensely the material they edit. My wife
and I had a book poblished last year and the process of tinkering and
fixing little errors etc found by the editor was very like the
beta-testing IF should, and often does not, go through - the
correcting of many, often small errors that invariably creep in and
diminish the reader's enjoyment.
Eric
jim_b...@my-deja.com
> I live in the USA, but I have traveled a bit, and I don't think we
> Americans realize just how market driven our culture is. We take for
> granted that every medium is driven by advertising, that our streets
are
> lined with literally thousands of signs per mile screaming, waving,
> clawing for our attention. The outside and inside of public buses are
> literally covered in ads. I often get a kilo of advertising mail per
> day. We American men know that it is not unusual to find someone has
> sold the space above urinals for adverts. I haven't been in any other
> country that even approaches this level of hype.
That's it!
>l
After passing all the perilous traps and monsters, you finally reach
the summit. Something tells you you're almost at the end of your
ordeal. There is a cliff to the south. You see a sign.
>l at sign.
It says "Enjoy Coke".
===================================
Excuse the silliness.
jim_b...@my-deja.com
How about modifying the model a bit. Sell it for $5 to $10 dollars and
release it as freeware once you reach your asking price? That way,
people who pay will get a chance to play it.
Too bad there isn't someone around with enough capital to start a
publishing business. I think once electronic books take off and once
everyone reads on a handheld of some kind, IF will become very
marketable.
A publisher would gaurantee a certain level of quality. And someone
needs to get the word out; I didn't even know IF was still around until
I read an article on slashdot.org
I live in Tucson and we have a bunch of artists here. One guy cuts out
figures from roofing tin and sells them for $600 to $2000 apiece.
- Jim
In article <3A4151...@adamcadre.ac>,
re...@adamcadre.ac wrote:
Adam Cadre
> >l
>
> After passing all the perilous traps and monsters, you finally reach
> the summit. Something tells you you're almost at the end of your
> ordeal. There is a cliff to the south. You see a sign.
>
> >l at sign.
>
> It says "Enjoy Coke".
Perhaps you would enjoy the 1999 April Fools' game, COKE IS IT! You
can find it at:
ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/inform/coke.zip
Adam Cadre
> Too bad there isn't someone around with enough capital to start a
> publishing business.
Someone -- namely, Mike Berlyn -- tried. It didn't work.
Knight37
23:18:00 GMT:
I don't know how many IF fans I speak for, but for those I speak for:
*we* do.
Why?
Because I will *presume* that commercial IF will be of a significantly
higher quality than the average non-commercial IF. Of course, there have
been some SPECTACULAR non-commercial IF lately, and I doubt seriously that
any future commercial IF endeavors could seriously outclass some of those,
but I would expect a commercial IF to give those games a good "run for the
money" (pun intended). Ie, I'm in favor of commercial IF to reward authors
for superb efforts.
--
Knight37
"I had great expectation on this group. But you all
f_cking people have only big mouse."
-- Sokwoo Lee, csipg.strategic
Knight37
>Jim Bayers wrote:
>> Too bad there isn't someone around with enough capital to start a
>> publishing business.
>
>Someone -- namely, Mike Berlyn -- tried. It didn't work.
But *why* didn't it work? Did Once and Future make money? What about Dr
Dumont's re-release (which, being a re-release, was kind of a special case
anyway)? What other IF did Mike even offer? I was ready to become a
"regular customer" of CMP, but there just wasn't enough IF being offered,
and I wasn't that interested in eBooks.
--
Knight37
"I've never seen so many men wasted so badly."
-- Blonde, from "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly"
Knight37
>This isn't an entirely original idea, I've discovered -- I believe it's
>known as the "street performer's protocol" or some such. Here's the
>gist. You release your first few games for free, in order to attract
>an audience who's sufficiently familiar with and impressed by your stuff
>that they'd be willing to pay to get more of it. Then you announce that
>your next game will be released once you receive the sum of, say, five
>hundred bucks. Once you receive that amount, whether it's a single $500
>check from one person or fifty $10 bills from a wide assortment of
>contributors, you release the game as freeware, and anyone can play it,
>whether they paid for it or not.
Hmm.. There's only a handful of authors this might work for. I think you're
probably one of them. Zarf could probably pull it off. Not sure who else
could do it, but maybe some. At least announcing a teaser about the game
itself could get in a few more people who may or may not be familiar with
your work but like the idea.
The problem will be, of course, if you make a game released in this manner
that sucks. It will probably end up being the last game you can release
like this, unless you rebuild your fan base by releasing a few free games
afterward that don't suck. Of course, since you DO have this danger, you're
likely to put your best effort possible into the game. However, your idea
just may not "click" with the audience, regardless of how much effort
you've put into it.
> The drawback is that you really have to stick to your proverbial
>guns -- no one will pay if they know that if they wait long enough
>you'll eventually buckle under and release the game before the "ransom"
>is paid. So you can end up putting hours and hours of work into a
>project that never sees the light of day because your price is never
>met. And for all I know, this would end up being the case for anyone
>who tried such a model... but it'd be interesting to see someone make
>the attempt.
Hmm... You could always take "preorders" for a game, on a donation basis
or at a set fee, and then when the game is ready you ship it ONLY to the
preordered folks. After it's been out a few weeks, month or so, whatever,
you release it as freeware (fully disclosing this intention to the public
before accepting any preorders). You could then set your own limit as to
how much you'll take for the game before releasing the game, without that
amount being disclosed to the public. The advantage for the fans who
preorder is that they get the next "Cadre game" before anyone else does.
Believe, me, there are definitely people willing to pay for this kind of
thing. They are also the people least likely to spread the game around for
free. You're also not stuck with a game that you can't release because you
didn't collect the magic sum.
I'm not sure how much money you could expect to collect for this type of
thing. Besides, if you're main goal is not money anyway, any money that you
do manage to collect is really icing on the cake. I'm certain that I'd be
willing to take a chance on the next Cadre or Plotkin game. I'd probably be
more willing to take a chance on other authors if I'd played (and enjoyed)
some their games before, and if the subject matter of the proposed game
seemed interesting.
So many may ask, "why should I pay for IF when so many great authors are
willing to release their stuff for free?"
There's not really an answer to that, and it's a perfectly valid reason not
to go along with any new IF-for-hire schemes that people might come up
with. Unless commercial IF ends up being as good as or better than the free
stuff, it's probably never going to become viable.
--
Knight37
Knight: "Are all men in the future as arrogant as you?"
Ash: "No. Just me, baby."
-- "Army of Darkness"
Stephen Granade
> Jim Bayers wrote:
> > Too bad there isn't someone around with enough capital to start a
> > publishing business.
>
> Someone -- namely, Mike Berlyn -- tried. It didn't work.
Well, it's not clear that it didn't work because IF can't be
sold. Cascade Mtn. Publishing was trying to do three things at once --
IF, ebooks, and print books.
Stephen
--
Stephen Granade | Interested in adventure games?
sgra...@phy.duke.edu | Visit About Interactive Fiction
Duke University, Physics Dept | http://interactfiction.about.com
Stephen Granade
> Adam Cadre <a...@adamcadre.ac> writes:
>
> > Allowing the game to be freely distributed and asking those who've
> > already played it to send you some money ("If you enjoyed this
> > game...") doesn't really work either, since very few people respond
> > to such entreaties (though some do... I've received $20 and $45 from
> > kind souls who spontaneously decided to reward me for I-0 and
> > Photopia, respectively.)
>
> I think it works better than I thought. Way back, I released Enhanced
> as shareware and have since received at least over $300. I can't make
> a living out of that, but it's better than I thought.
I've had similar luck with Losing Your Grip. In doing so, I stumbled
across a few interesting facts.
One, having good-quality feelies really helps. I got a lot of feedback
from people who really liked the manual and other things I added in
the registration package. All of the LyG feelies were paper, for ease
of construction, but were carefully printed and assembled. Some
elements were hand-written to make them more individual.
Two, the need for hints is a powerful driving force. Even now that LyG
is available for free, I still get people wanting to register for the
hints alone.
Three, you need to get your game outside the IF community. When I
released LyG, I got a rush of about 20 registrations from the
community, then nothing. The rest of the registrations came from
people who found my game on a random FTP archive, or on a shovelware
CD, or stumbled across my site and downloaded it. There are a lot of
sites now that have collection of Java-based games; if you could get
your game on there with the registration information, you might could
pick up more registrations.
I didn't make enough to live on, clearly, but I did make some
money. And on a student's salary, it was not an inconsequential
amount.
Gadget
<j...@ingold.fsnet.co.uk> made the world a better place by saying:
As editor for an on-line magazine for an ISP, I can tell you it is
*very* hard to make money from ads on the web. Our readers base is
resonable for a zine that started three months ago, and I find it
impossible to get substantial deals. Sure, people want to swap banners
but that's all done for free. In fact: some ask *you* money for
placing *their* stuff on your site.
You have to have thousands of readers *per day* to make ads
profitable. How many IF-ers are there still around? Couple of hundred?
Advertisement is based on statistics. 1% response of 10000 people is
100 products sold. 1% of 500... well you get the point. And getting a
1% return is rather doubtful to begin with...
But maybe we could all do a little IF promotion outside the circle?
Maybe *we* could place banners, send spam mail, buy billboards, rent
sky writers to get IF back into the mainstream?
--
"So... you've compiled your own Kernel... Your skills are now complete..."
-----------------
It's a bird
It's a plane
No it's... Gadget?
Village Magazine: http://www.villagemagazine.nl
To send E-mail: remove SPAMBLOCK from adress.
Domokov
On the other hand, I'd like to offer my experience with shareware: After
releasing Babel and Exhibition as shareware I think I've recieved a total of
seven regestrations. On Exhibition this is hardly surprising since it was
only released to the IF community, but Babel has been on download.com and AOL
for some time and, if their counts are accurate, has been downloaded around
100,000 times. Now, this alone is MORE than enough compensation for me, but
I've been curious why it's not been registered more. I think the reason may be
multifold:
1) The only way anyone knows that Babel is shareware is via the ABOUT text,
which many people unfamiliar with IF might never encounter.
2) The feelies, while well done, aren't much described in the shareware text,
so people don't know what they're missing, especially if they are unfamiliar
with what feelies are.
3) I give away the hints for free. This may be the biggest sticking point. I
get one or two e-mails a week asking for hints, which I distribute freely. I
just would feel awful having people make it mostly through the game, get stuck
on that blasted cabinet puzzle and then ask them for money to get to the last
ten minutes of the game ;)
So, I'm trying to figure out some more effective method of possibly making a
profit off of IF. It's hardly a high priority, I'd probably go on making IF
even if the only audience available to play it was my dog Hamlet, but a
starving college student is CONSTANTLY on the look-out for ways to make a buck.
;)
Ian Finley
Kathleen M. Fischer
jim_b...@my-deja.com wrote:
> After a number of years, I've managed to get a short story published.
> For a couple of hundred hours of work, I got paid a couple hundred
> dollars.
>
> Can an IF author do the same?
Well, this year the top, what 8(?) in the comp got $100-$200. :)
The tricky bit seems to me how to make it very easy for the player to
get the money to the author. I can't believe that people in this group
wouldn't pay a "paperback" fee for a game if it was easy to do so.
Figuring 100 regular players out there, perhaps half of which would find
any particular game of interest. That's $250 per game for the author -
or perhaps $200 if the site takes a cut to keep things running smoothly.
Not bad.
One possibility, and I have no idea how feasible it is, is to set up a
site where authors could upload their work and players could then pay $5
per game to download them, with the site moderator paying the author
every, say, 3-4 months (heck, once a year would be fine with me!) just
to keep things easier.
Of course, I have no idea what's involved in handling credit card (or
other sorts of money) transactions via the web, nor what operating
expenses there would be. And unless you had an immediate pot of games
out there sizable enough to keep peoples interest it would just sort of
wither away. Maybe a 6 month warning to give people a chance to write
games, and then release them all at once.... or perhaps open the site
when 20 games have been submitted.
People could write reviews (like Amazon.com) for the potential buyers to
read, with a monthly drawing for review submitters - "Win a free game".
To upload a game would require 3 reviews from beta testers, to give
people an idea what the game is about (and to show that someone has
actually been able to play thru it). A registration # would enable the
downloading of beta fixes and such.
Of course, all this would be a mountain of work for some poor dedicated
soul, and in the end might not result in a single game sold.
Kathleen (the IF Co-op?)
--
-- Masquerade - http://baf.wurb.com/if/competition00/inform/mask/
-- The Cove - Best of Landscape, Interactive Fiction Art Show 2000
-- ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/Cove.z5
-- Excuse me while I dance a little jig of despair
okbl...@my-deja.com
Kathleen M. Fischer <green_g...@my-deja.com> wrote:
[ideas about payment]
Surely someone here must know something about the auction payment
services like PayPal, et al?
OK, if I understand the PayPal thing, it's free for a personal account
receiving up to $500 every six months. The only bad side is that to
pay, the person must be registered with PayPal. It's free but I can see
that not appealing to some.
--
[ok]
Carl Muckenhoupt
>IF is a bit of an odd bird in this way. There is, as far as anyone
>can tell, no commercial market, so there are no publishers to screen
>works. Readers have to sort through the slush pile themselves, hoping
>they find a gem.
>
>Perhaps this is why I don't play much IF any more. The tedium of
>wading through a host of poor games to find one good one is far too
>depressing. By the time I come across a decent game, I'm so sick
>of the garbage that I'm in no state to appreciate it.
This is one of the reasons I started my review site five years ago.
Since then, however, the slush pile has grown far larger. I can no
longer pretend to do it justice.
Another notable thing about the IF market is that the author/audience
ratio is much smaller than that for conventional fiction. It's
impossible to say this with any precision, but it seems like nearly
everyone who plays the things also writes them. Thus, if we were all
to start charging money for them, it wouldn't bring much money into
the IF community - it would just shuffle around from author to author,
some of it being lost to income tax on each transaction. Now, this
all may be a gross misperception, but as far as I can tell, it's a
common one. IF authors feel that IF may as well be free, for
simplicity's sake.
-----= Posted via Newsfeeds.Com, Uncensored Usenet News =-----
http://www.newsfeeds.com - The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World!
-----== Over 80,000 Newsgroups - 16 Different Servers! =-----
jpowe...@my-deja.com
at having responses for everything you might choose to type in. That is
one place where even very good games fall down. It is hard to have even
mediocre responses to every possible "examine x" command without a few
good drudge workers. Think of all the hundreds of "inkers" at Disney
studios who used to do nothing but color Donald's beak yellow. Jon
Ingold certainly has done a great job on some big games, but I'm sure
even he would agree he would have filled in more back story if he could
have assigned the drudge work to a couple of interns...
In article <Xns9011769DCknig...@209.155.56.81>,
knig...@gamespotmail.com wrote:
> Because I will *presume* that commercial IF will be of a significantly
> higher quality than the average non-commercial IF. Of course, there have
> been some SPECTACULAR non-commercial IF lately, and I doubt seriously that
> any future commercial IF endeavors could seriously outclass some of those,
> but I would expect a commercial IF to give those games a good "run for the
> money" (pun intended). Ie, I'm in favor of commercial IF to reward authors
> for superb efforts.
>
Adam Cadre
> Well, it's not clear that it didn't work because IF can't be
> sold. Cascade Mtn. Publishing was trying to do three things at once --
> IF, ebooks, and print books.
True -- though the previous poster suggested that the return of
commercial IF would be part of an e-book revolution of some sort,
which sounded more like what CMP was trying to jump on the leading
edge of than not.
Stephen Granade
> ><jdwvctq...@login2.phy.duke.edu>
> >
> >I've had similar luck with Losing Your Grip. In doing so, I stumbled
> >across a few interesting facts.
> >
> >One, having good-quality feelies really helps. I got a lot of feedback
> >from people who really liked the manual and other things I added in
> >the registration package. All of the LyG feelies were paper, for ease
> >of construction, but were carefully printed and assembled. Some
> >elements were hand-written to make them more individual.
> >
> >Two, the need for hints is a powerful driving force. Even now that LyG
> >is available for free, I still get people wanting to register for the
> >hints alone.
> >
> >Three, you need to get your game outside the IF community. When I
> >released LyG, I got a rush of about 20 registrations from the
> >community, then nothing. The rest of the registrations came from
> >people who found my game on a random FTP archive, or on a shovelware
> >CD, or stumbled across my site and downloaded it. There are a lot of
> >sites now that have collection of Java-based games; if you could get
> >your game on there with the registration information, you might could
> >pick up more registrations.
> >
> >I didn't make enough to live on, clearly, but I did make some
> >money. And on a student's salary, it was not an inconsequential
> >amount.
>
> On the other hand, I'd like to offer my experience with shareware: After
> releasing Babel and Exhibition as shareware I think I've recieved a total of
> seven regestrations. On Exhibition this is hardly surprising since it was
> only released to the IF community, but Babel has been on download.com and AOL
> for some time and, if their counts are accurate, has been downloaded around
> 100,000 times. Now, this alone is MORE than enough compensation for me, but
> I've been curious why it's not been registered more.
A couple of questions. At what point did you switch Babel over to
shareware? It takes a lot of time for these things to filter through
the nooks and crannies of the Internet. Granted, the Download.com copy
will have switched over.
How are you distributing it? .gam file, zip archive? I distributed
Grip as a zip archive with a readme file describing the shareware
setup.
> I think the reason may be
> multifold:
> 1) The only way anyone knows that Babel is shareware is via the ABOUT text,
> which many people unfamiliar with IF might never encounter.
> 2) The feelies, while well done, aren't much described in the shareware text,
> so people don't know what they're missing, especially if they are unfamiliar
> with what feelies are.
Both of these would definitely cut down on the number of people who'd
ever see that the game is shareware. Grip said something like "This
game is unregistered" each time you started it.
> 3) I give away the hints for free. This may be the biggest sticking
> point.
I'd guess so. Even when I tell people that I'm not accepting
registrations because I don't want to print more manuals, they say
that they're mainly interested in the hints.
Adam Cadre
> Babel has been on download.com and AOL for some time and, if their
> counts are accurate, has been downloaded around 100,000 times. Now,
And the fact that one of those 100,000 who grabbed Babel off of
download.com was motivated to check out the IF community and eventually
became my sweetie is more than enough compensation for ME. (Thanks,
Ian!)
Edward Lineberry
Handango.com. The IF market has some things in common with the PalmOS
market: 1. Small software that can be quickly downloaded, 2. A limited
target audience (though in the case of IF, much smaller than the PalmOS), 3.
A lot of freeware, 4. A lot of users are also authors.
Releasing IF as shareware or crippleware with a single site handling credit
card payments for shareware while also providing a repository for reviews
and freeware games might not be lucrative, but it could provide some
financial incentives for those who create the best games.
Kathleen M. Fischer <green_g...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:91u7oh$4rh$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
Adam Cadre
> I can't believe that people in this group wouldn't pay a "paperback"
> fee for a game if it was easy to do so.
Scott McCloud has been agitating for a micropayment system where
people could access content, for, say, five cents -- a low enough
figure that virtually no one would be dissuaded from clicking
through, but which would eventually start adding up for creators.
Sounds good to me, though it might be a while before it's practicable.
wo...@one.net
>I've looked at some IF stories. Many are very good. Why don't readers
>want to pay?
>
>Is it because readers expect them to be free? Is it because many
>authors give their work away, thereby eliminating a market?
I'm afraid IF's time as a commercial entity has passed. To be brutally
honest, IF is a historical curiousity, on par with the
ship-in-a-bottle.
IF is a labor of love, created by a dedicated few, and appreciated by
(relatively) no one. I once heard a statistic float around here that
there were only 20,000 people *world-wide* that were interested in IF.
With that small an audience, dreams of wealth are, I fear, misplaced.
Especially with the strong tradition that IF-related works are free.
TADS used to have a price, then the author chose to give it away. If
an IF bedrock like TADS is free, why would anyone pay for a game
created from it?
Respectfully,
Wolf
"The world is my home, it's just that some rooms are draftier than
others". -- Wolf
Domokov
>Ian Finley wrote:
>> Babel has been on download.com and AOL for some time and, if their
>> counts are accurate, has been downloaded around 100,000 times. Now,
>> this alone is MORE than enough compensation for me [...]
>
>And the fact that one of those 100,000 who grabbed Babel off of
>download.com was motivated to check out the IF community and eventually
>became my sweetie is more than enough compensation for ME. (Thanks,
>Ian!)
Consider it my regestration fee for Photopia. Now I just need to hook Zarf up
with someone... ;)
Ian Finley
Gabe McKean
>I'm afraid IF's time as a commercial entity has passed. To be brutally
>honest, IF is a historical curiousity, on par with the
>ship-in-a-bottle.
>
>IF is a labor of love, created by a dedicated few, and appreciated by
>(relatively) no one. I once heard a statistic float around here that
>there were only 20,000 people *world-wide* that were interested in IF.
This could change, though. Think of how many people have played and enjoyed
the Infocom games; I still see Zork references all over the place. Now
imagine if all those people realized that 1. people are still making this
kind of game and 2. many of these new games are very high quality. And the
potential audience is, IMO, much broader than that. I missed out on Infocom
and the other commercial text adventures, but I still managed to get hooked
on IF a couple of years ago.
So, how do we reach this audience (speaking as a wannabe author)? Including
more games on the more popular download sites such as download.com is a
start; I first downloaded Babel and Everybody Loves a Parade there. The
slashdotting of the IF comp might have helped. We could start a tradition
of 'advocacy', similar to that of minority OS's, if we really wanted to get
serious about this, but I'm not ready to go that far :)
Of course, reaching a wider audience doesn't automatically mean moolah for
the authors, but it can't hurt.
Lucian Paul Smith
I wonder if we could get CheapAss Games to market IF?
At the very least, someone interested in making money off of IF on a
corporate level should examine their business model.
</random thought>
-Lucian
Edward Lineberry
<wo...@one.net> wrote in message
news:asj54touropt03r35...@4ax.com...
> jim_b...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> >I've looked at some IF stories. Many are very good. Why don't readers
> >want to pay?
> >
> >Is it because readers expect them to be free? Is it because many
> >authors give their work away, thereby eliminating a market?
>
> I'm afraid IF's time as a commercial entity has passed. To be brutally
> honest, IF is a historical curiousity, on par with the
> ship-in-a-bottle.
>
> IF is a labor of love, created by a dedicated few, and appreciated by
> (relatively) no one. I once heard a statistic float around here that
> there were only 20,000 people *world-wide* that were interested in IF.
>
Though I tend to agree that there is little opportunity for wealth, there
may yet be a market to make some small amount of money to encourage
developers to continue. There is virtually no way to make a living writing
short stories today. Think of all the great short story writers of the 20th
Century. They either wrote novels, had day jobs, or both; but the income
from their stories and their collected stories provided some degree of
compensation.
> With that small an audience, dreams of wealth are, I fear, misplaced.
> Especially with the strong tradition that IF-related works are free.
> TADS used to have a price, then the author chose to give it away. If
> an IF bedrock like TADS is free, why would anyone pay for a game
> created from it?
>
Most people in the IF world seem to be interested in creating as well as
consuming, but only a few have the capacity to create top quality games. I
think people are willing to pay for those games.
Magnus Olsson
Hmmm - an IF dating agency? :-)
--
Magnus Olsson (m...@df.lth.se, m...@pobox.com)
------ http://www.pobox.com/~mol ------
Matthew T. Russotto
Adam Cadre <re...@adamcadre.ac> wrote:
}Ian Finley wrote:
}> Babel has been on download.com and AOL for some time and, if their
}> counts are accurate, has been downloaded around 100,000 times. Now,
}> this alone is MORE than enough compensation for me [...]
}
}And the fact that one of those 100,000 who grabbed Babel off of
}download.com was motivated to check out the IF community and eventually
}became my sweetie is more than enough compensation for ME. (Thanks,
}Ian!)
You mean there really are IF groupies?????
--
Matthew T. Russotto russ...@pond.com
"Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in pursuit
of justice is no virtue."
Stephen Granade
> jim_b...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> >I've looked at some IF stories. Many are very good. Why don't readers
> >want to pay?
> >
> >Is it because readers expect them to be free? Is it because many
> >authors give their work away, thereby eliminating a market?
>
> I'm afraid IF's time as a commercial entity has passed. To be brutally
> honest, IF is a historical curiousity, on par with the
> ship-in-a-bottle.
Interactive fiction *as it stands now*. The *newsgroup-based*
community.
The text nature isn't the main problem. People pay to play text MUDs.
And the current IF community based around these newsgroups isn't the
only one there can be. As I said, most of my registrations for Grip
came from outside the community.
If you write a game for the community and release it only to the
community, yeah, you won't make anything. For many of us (including
me, most of the time), that's just fine. But that doesn't mean you
can't make money writing IF.
ninot...@my-deja.com
time -- he's high-profile enough that I have some hopes that someday
it'll catch on. It seems like an appropriate idiom for IF. I'd sure
pay a nickel to play a game. And I'd probably pay a quarter for the
walkthrough. :)
Nielsen's article:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980125.html
> Scott McCloud has been agitating for a micropayment system where
> people could access content, for, say, five cents -- a low enough
"They're all desperadoes, these kids, all of them with any life in
their veins; the girls as well as the boys; maybe more than the boys."
- Warner Fabian, "Flaming Youth", 1923
Joe Mason
It seems to me to be the exact opposite of what Stephen said was fairly
successful with LYG: they give you the bare bones needed ta play the game,
without extras like pretty boxes or illustrated manuals or dice.
Whereas the "standard" (since Infocom) way of marketing a text adventure is to
say, "Pay for this and you'll get lots of nice extras. Like a pretty box,
and an illustrated manual, and a microscopic space fleet."
(Just pointing out the obvious - I like the idea of peddling to CheapAss.)
Joe
Steve Derby
wrote:
>Another notable thing about the IF market is that the author/audience
>ratio is much smaller than that for conventional fiction. It's
>impossible to say this with any precision, but it seems like nearly
>everyone who plays the things also writes them.
This is the thing that's sort of bothered me during this whole
transaction. I think most of us (us being the IF community) would have
no problem paying the cost of a paperback book for a good work of IF,
but we're a limited community. It seems, then, that the solution would
be to widen the community or find some way to get the non-IF-community
public to "rediscover" interactive fiction.
This is easier said than done, of course, but a few thoughts come to
mind:
- During Infocom's heydey, their games were sold in chain bookstores
like Waldenbooks, which tapped a market that computer software stores
did not (though I've occasionally wondered if calling the games
"interactive novels" rather than "interactive fiction" would have made
them even more successful). I think there's a 21st century equivalent
to this: have an established online broker like Amazon.com or
barnesandnoble.com handle interactive fiction alongside their print
books. These sites could even offer the games for download and
"instant gratification." To realize the potential of this idea,
though, the online brokers would have to "feature" the interactive
fiction and help push it instead of just selling it. That's probably
not a risk any company like Amazon.com is willing to take.
- Shouldn't it be possible to find popular magazine contributors who
are sympathetic to interactive fiction? If so, couldn't these magazine
authors write feature articles on the subject? I don't mean just
computer magazines, but how about fiction magazines, too? How about
the New Yorker? How about entertainment magazines (like "People")?
There have been a few such articles in the last several years, but
every one I've seen has taken the "Text gaming is a dead art, but it
still has a cult following" approach. That's the wrong approach to
getting new people interested in the genre, IMO.
- Next year's IF comp is still a ways off, but it seems like an such
an event would be a great "hook" to inspire magazine writers to do
feature articles.
Anyway, publicity and exposure seem to be the keys to widening the
market. Even among the gamers out there, I have a feeling that most
either have no idea that IF is still being produced by hobbists or
have never even heard of "a maze of twisty passages, all alike."
The downside, as others have said in this thread, is that for every
really good work of interactive fiction, there are quite a few bad
ones. A consistently high quality of writing and design would have to
be guaranteed to newcomers. How about a list of
really-good-but-not-too-challenging games that make good "starting
points" for those curious about IF? (Photopia is an obvious choice for
inclusion in this list, for example)
Rich Pizor
<gad...@SPAMBLOCKhaha.demon.nl> wrote:
> You have to have thousands of readers *per day* to make ads
> profitable.
More than that. I just got laid off from a site that was averaging
12k-20k uniques per day.
Rich
David Thornley
Knight37 <knig...@gamespotmail.com> wrote:
>Quoting "Jon Ingold" <j...@ingold.fsnet.co.uk> from Wed, 20 Dec 2000
>23:18:00 GMT:
>>>
>>> Not really. Most of the IF we have is all free, downloaded off the
>>> internet. We don't want commercial IF anymore.
>>
There's lots of really good fiction out there in the public domain.
I've seen some of it on sale very cheaply, and there's people who
are loading it onto the net so you can download it for free. In
the meantime, there are libraries out there who will happily lend
me anything I like from a whole array of literature, both public
domain and under copyright, for free.
This didn't stop my from buying a copy of "Ready, Okay!".
I think free and commercial can coexist.
>I don't know how many IF fans I speak for, but for those I speak for:
>
>*we* do.
>
>
>Why?
>
>Because I will *presume* that commercial IF will be of a significantly
>higher quality than the average non-commercial IF. Of course, there have
>been some SPECTACULAR non-commercial IF lately, and I doubt seriously that
>any future commercial IF endeavors could seriously outclass some of those,
>but I would expect a commercial IF to give those games a good "run for the
>money" (pun intended). Ie, I'm in favor of commercial IF to reward authors
>for superb efforts.
>
There's two things here.
First, it would be nice to reward the authors, but the IF community
here is far too small to reward them with money. It would be
necessary to find a larger market. (Of course, the same is true
of ordinary fiction - it's really hard to make enough money to
justify writing the stuff for financial reasons.)
Second, it would force commercial IF to be of higher average quality.
To be successful, it wouldn't have to be better than any free IF, but
it would have to be better than a lot of free IF. There's a lot of
really good stuff available for free, and even more really bad stuff.
If I'm going to pay for the stuff, I want some sort of assurance that
I'm not likely to regret the purchase later. (The size of the
community comes into play here. If I'm going to buy IF on a regular
basis, I'm going to want to see reviews. Right now, giving out
review copies is going to cut noticeably into the market.)
--
David H. Thornley | If you want my opinion, ask.
da...@thornley.net | If you don't, flee.
http://www.thornley.net/~thornley/david/ | O-
Vincent Lynch
news:Xns9011769DCknig...@209.155.56.81...
> I don't know how many IF fans I speak for, but for those I speak for:
> *we* do.
>
> Why?
>
> Because I will *presume* that commercial IF will be of a significantly
> higher quality than the average non-commercial IF. Of course, there have
> been some SPECTACULAR non-commercial IF lately, and I doubt seriously that
> any future commercial IF endeavors could seriously outclass some of those,
> but I would expect a commercial IF to give those games a good "run for the
> money" (pun intended). Ie, I'm in favor of commercial IF to reward authors
> for superb efforts.
But from a purely selfish point of view, I don't care about rewarding
authors. I just want to find some way of ensuring that they produce more
and better games.
Commercial IF won't be better just by virtue of being commercial. If there
were enough money involved that authors could afford to give up paid work to
devote more time to IF, then that would make a difference, but I think
that's a long way off.
-Vincent
Carl Muckenhoupt
wrote:
>(Just pointing out the obvious - I like the idea of peddling to CheapAss.)
And the best part of the idea of peddling IF to Cheapass specifically
is that there's a chance that you could wind up with "feelies"
illustrated by the Foglios.
Heck, if you play your cards right, you might be able to get the
Foglios hooked on IF. And then we could see IF-oriented "What's New
(with Phil and Dixie)" in SPAG or Xyzzy News. Wouldn't that be
glorious?
Joe Mason
wrote:
>On Fri, 22 Dec 2000 18:42:28 GMT, jcm...@uwaterloo.ca (Joe Mason)
>wrote:
>
>>(Just pointing out the obvious - I like the idea of peddling to CheapAss.)
>
>And the best part of the idea of peddling IF to Cheapass specifically
>is that there's a chance that you could wind up with "feelies"
>illustrated by the Foglios.
>
>Heck, if you play your cards right, you might be able to get the
>Foglios hooked on IF. And then we could see IF-oriented "What's New
>(with Phil and Dixie)" in SPAG or Xyzzy News. Wouldn't that be
>glorious?
Quick, send them a copy of "You Are a CHEF!" The title at least would fit
perfectly into their product listing (and that's the first step).
Joe
Knight37
>So, I'm trying to figure out some more effective method of possibly
>making a profit off of IF. It's hardly a high priority, I'd probably go
>on making IF even if the only audience available to play it was my dog
>Hamlet, but a starving college student is CONSTANTLY on the look-out for
>ways to make a buck. ;)
Whoa! Your DOG plays IF??!! COOL!!
--
Knight37
"I have an open mind.
Just not so open that the wind blows through."
-- Gerry Quinn, on csipg.rpg
Knight37
>Stephen Granade wrote:
>> Well, it's not clear that it didn't work because IF can't be
>> sold. Cascade Mtn. Publishing was trying to do three things at once --
>> IF, ebooks, and print books.
>
>True -- though the previous poster suggested that the return of
>commercial IF would be part of an e-book revolution of some sort,
>which sounded more like what CMP was trying to jump on the leading
>edge of than not.
I'm not sure the eBook market and the IF market are all that
strongly correlated. I'm sure there are quite a few people who do both, but
most of the people interested in IF are probably much more strongly
correlated with computer gaming than eBook reading. Getting some of the
larger computer gaming websites to feature an IF section on their pages
might go a long ways toward increasing awareness of IF and presumably
increasing the number of poeple in the IF community.
Now, if CMP was primarly aimed at hand-held PC's, then it makes more sense
to mix eBooks with IF. I think there's going to become (not sure when, but
sometime in the near future) a STRONG demand for content on those types of
machines. Interactive fiction is already "making a comeback" through these
devices, and it may be possible to make some kind of commercial renaissance
through them at some point. I think what will eventually happen is someone
will figure out a way to make a hand-held that can be both a "GameBoy" and
a portable "Franklin" and it will be big hit.
I'm surprised Nintendo hasn't come out with something FOR the GameBoy, with
so many units out there. Then again, the GameBoy does not really lend
itself to IF because it lacks a good interface for typing. Maybe if it had
voice recognition... Wouldn't it be cool if Activison released the Infocom
games for GameBoy with voice recognition? I'd buy it.
Man, this post really rambled on, didn't it? ;P
Beej Jørgensen
Damien Neil <ne...@centauri.org> wrote:
>If Zarf announced that his next game was $20, I'd send him a check
>right away.
Maybe it's time to put up a web page with a collection of author paypal
links. I'd tip real money for the free IF that I've enjoyed playing.
-Beej
Beej Jørgensen
>sky writers to get IF back into the mainstream?
I think spam is generally negative, but there are lots of free banner
exchanges out there that we could make use of. That's a fair amount of
eyes and certainly some of them will have the "oh yeah I remember those
games" response.
-Beej
Beej Jørgensen
>In article <91u7oh$4rh$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>OK, if I understand the PayPal thing, it's free for a personal account
>receiving up to $500 every six months.
That's for receiving credit card payments on a Personal account. You
can receive any amount of cash, however I suspect most paypal users have
credit card accounts only.
As for business accounts, they're free to have too. You pay fees
when receiving money (cash or CC) and when sending mass payments or
automatically moving money to another bank account on a daily basis.
The fees are quite reasonable:
Source of funds under $15 $15 - $500 $500
--------------- --------- ---------- ----------
Credit Card 30¢ 2.2% + 30¢ 2.2% + 30¢
Non-Credit Card 30¢ 1.6% + 30¢ $5
I'm not associated with Paypal in any way--I just think it's a great
service.
-Beej
Beej Jørgensen
Edward Lineberry <eline...@iname.com> wrote:
>Releasing IF as shareware or crippleware with a single site handling credit
>card payments for shareware
A recently released ebook (The Satori Effect) did that to a certain
extent. It was crippleware in that only the first half of the book was
released for free, and you had to paypal him money to receive the other
half.
By the time you get through half the book, you're hooked and want the
rest of it for sure. (If you don't make it through half the book, well,
then you obviously don't even want to read it and shouldn't have to
pay.)
Zork had a demo version, but it was really not that much of the game. I
say go ahead and release a full half of the game as crippleware. If
people are hooked, they'll buy the other half.
You might be able to recoup some of your piracy losses by encouraging
payment on game startup ("If you have paid, thanks! If not, please do
so at http...") or by mailing back necessary feelies (like maps, hints,
or required background for finishing the game) for the money.
-Beej
Rich Pizor
<knig...@gamespotmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure the eBook market and the IF market are all that
> strongly correlated. I'm sure there are quite a few people who do both, but
> most of the people interested in IF are probably much more strongly
> correlated with computer gaming than eBook reading.
I'm not entirely sure that I agree with that. Computer gaming to me
conjures up images of adrenaline-pumping simulations that have more to
do with visual pizazz than actual game play (and anyone who's played
F.A.K.K.2 or Rune knows what I'm talking about). It's nearly the
antithesis of IF, which I associate with patience, attention to detail,
experimentation, and methodical exploration (it never even occurred to
me that folks would try to map the entire city in Strangers of the
Night, which (alongside with the errors my beta-testers missed) might
explain why it didn't do well in the 99 comp -- I wrote a game for
gamers, not IF-ers). While certain of these elements exist in, say,
Unreal, I don't think that most hard-core Unreal fans have even heard
of this newsgroup...
Certainly the posts I've seen in this group are more literate than
those I've seen in other groups dedicated to the creation of computer
games. Other groups tend to focus more on matters of extremely arcane
technology to pump an extra FPS or two out of a graphics processor, or
pre-teen fandom along the lines of "d00d, your game is so 133t!".
Neither of these are facets that I see in r.a.i-f -- and while I know
the denizens of this newsgroup don't comprise the whole fanbase of
interactive fiction, I'd say the core certainly hangs out here. Posts
to r.a.i-f also seemed to be concerned with elements of the game that
simply don't occur to those creating the next blood-n-thunder
blockbuster -- things like plot advancement, what constitutes a fair
puzzle, how to convey certain atmospheric points to the player, etc.
So far the closest thing I've seen to IF among the computer gaming
world is Konami's excellent Metal Gear Solid, but even those who are
experts in such things agree that MGS is a unique game that does not
easily fit into the categories which games are typically assigned.
Certainly both have their place; at the end of a long day at the office
I enjoy loading up Smackdown 2 in the PlayStation and beating people up
for half an hour. I play IF for a different reason.
> Getting some of the
> larger computer gaming websites to feature an IF section on their pages
> might go a long ways toward increasing awareness of IF and presumably
> increasing the number of poeple in the IF community.
I think this is unlikely to happen. Most larger computer gaming sites
are ultimately concerned with advertisers first, gamers second.
Advertisers are unlikely to be excited about sponsoring an IF section
because, as has been brought up in countless other threads, it's at
best a market of scale. Maybe in a couple years when the market has
finished consolidating this will be possible. Somehow I doubt it.
Online advertisers are playing by a totally different set of rules than
print advertisers are, simply because there are more tools to get
precision measurements and statistics about the impact of an online ad
-- and as such the demand infinitely more performance for the same ad
dollars. The market is circling its wagons right now; things that are
deemed as unnecessary are getting cut from websites left, right, and
center.
> Now, if CMP was primarly aimed at hand-held PC's, then it makes more sense
> to mix eBooks with IF. I think there's going to become (not sure when, but
> sometime in the near future) a STRONG demand for content on those types of
> machines. Interactive fiction is already "making a comeback" through these
> devices, and it may be possible to make some kind of commercial renaissance
> through them at some point. I think what will eventually happen is someone
> will figure out a way to make a hand-held that can be both a "GameBoy" and
> a portable "Franklin" and it will be big hit.
Exactly -- though there are those who would suggest that the Palm
platform was exactly such a device. And this, I think, is why people
are associating the IF market with the eBook market -- more due to the
underlying technology than to any inherent overlap in the two pools.
The current generation of Palms and whatnot are ideally suited for IF,
because they simply don't have the technology to display
high-resolution graphics. Even when bit depth and resolution improve, I
don't think the devices will ever be used by hard core gamers. After
all, many think that a 17" monitor is too small for gaming -- how can a
2" display possibly compare? IF allows these limited devices an
experience that no graphic can possibly match. I don't see this
changing much in the near future.
> I'm surprised Nintendo hasn't come out with something FOR the GameBoy, with
> so many units out there.
That again has to do with perceived markets, I think. Nintendo is
aiming the GameBoy at the under-12 set, at least for the moment.
GameBoy Advance may change that. The core fan group for Pokemon,
however, isn't going to be up to Curses -- or at least that's what the
company execs believe, whether or not it's true.
> Then again, the GameBoy does not really lend
> itself to IF because it lacks a good interface for typing.
Way back when, somebody came up with a keyboard that could plug in to
the Link Cable interface. They called it WorkBoy and shipped it with an
organizer and a dictionary. It vanished almost overnight because nobody
wanted one. Then again, this predated even Palms by a few years. Maybe
such a venture would be more successful now -- but again, there's the
problem of Nintendo's perceived market.
Rich
Lucian Paul Smith
: In article <3A42C3...@adamcadre.ac>,
: Adam Cadre <re...@adamcadre.ac> wrote:
: }And the fact that one of those 100,000 who grabbed Babel off of
: }download.com was motivated to check out the IF community and eventually
: }became my sweetie is more than enough compensation for ME. (Thanks,
: }Ian!)
: You mean there really are IF groupies?????
<shot mode=cheap>
Sure--you just can't find 'em at the airports.
</shot>
-Lucian "2-year old reference" Smith
Howard Sherman
Whatever became of Cascade Mountain anyway?
Adam Cadre wrote:
> Jim Bayers wrote:
> > Too bad there isn't someone around with enough capital to start a
> > publishing business.
>
> Someone -- namely, Mike Berlyn -- tried. It didn't work.
>
> -----
> Adam Cadre, Sammamish, WA
> web site: http://adamcadre.ac
> novel: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060195584/adamcadreac
Stephen Granade
> Adam Cadre wrote:
>
> > Jim Bayers wrote:
> > > Too bad there isn't someone around with enough capital to start a
> > > publishing business.
> >
> > Someone -- namely, Mike Berlyn -- tried. It didn't work.
>
> *Poof* I'm back.
>
> Whatever became of Cascade Mountain anyway?
Short answer: they shut down.
Long answer: http://interactfiction.about.com/library/weekly/aa050800a.htm
Paul de Valmency
rather than a lack of capital.
The IF community seem to have entrenched themselves in a 'it should all be
free' attitude, which leaves it nowhere to go commercially: as everyone
seems to expect IF works and tools to be free, they all baulk at having to
pay for anything, which means that no-one can make any money from creating
them...it all becomes a labour of love!
As I see it, the only way back to any commercial basis would be for the
development tools (languages and IDEs) to be licensed (i.e. charged for,
possibly crippling un-registered copies in some way), and for the
better-known IF authors to start withholding their works from the general IF
community and putting them through one of a number of publishing houses
(e.g. as CMP was, perhaps, intending to be).
This, of course, would bring a howl of derision from the afore-mentioned IF
community, and would only succeed if all concerned stuck with the programme
and didn't make their works available freely.
If this were to happen, IF authors would presumably have to resort to the
same practices as 'normal' authors and offer their works to each publishing
house in turn until they secure a deal. The publishing houses would have to
agree to package the works and advertise to generate sales, perhaps of
compilations of works rather than individual ones?
CDs could be created with everything needed to play the games, perhaps with
on-line manuals (are they needed?) and hard-copies of manuals could be made
available (again at a charge) as options. The IF languages, compilers and
IDEs could also be packaged together, again with manuals and complete sets
of working examples and/or tutorials).
But all of this takes time...time is money...and the charges for such items
would have to be quite small, meaning that for anyone to make any *real*
money, sales volumes would have to be *very* large...do the gun-firing,
monster-killing, multi-player 3D-action brigade want to excercise their
cerebral muscles enough to sit down and play through a puzzle adventure? AND
pay for it? Hmmm...
On a final note: just because one person tried and failed, doesn't meant
that it can't be done.
What do *YOU* think?
Paul.
"Howard Sherman" <lordr...@erols.com> wrote in message
news:3A642359...@erols.com...
Carl Muckenhoupt
<pa...@jcls.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>The IF community seem to have entrenched themselves in a 'it should all be
>free' attitude, which leaves it nowhere to go commercially: as everyone
>seems to expect IF works and tools to be free, they all baulk at having to
>pay for anything, which means that no-one can make any money from creating
>them...it all becomes a labour of love!
Yes, well, there's also the combination of (a) the vast amount of
material and (b) the rather small audience. Basic economics tells us
that, when supply is high and demand is low, prices plummet - in the
case of IF, probably to below break-even point for the author. This
happens regardless of whether the audience thinks it *should* be free
or not.
Another factor I haven't seen mentioned: In a tech-loving economy, if
you have the necessary technical and artistic skills to write good IF,
you can probably make a good living doing something else, possibly
even something you find fulfilling. For the author, the question
isn't "Can I make money at this?", but "Why should I bother trying to
make money at this?" We'll see if this changes as the stock-powered
tech boom continues to collapse.
Another unrelated point: Quite apart from any alleged "it should all
be free" attitudes, I have serious doubts as to whether IF would
benefit from commercialization. Art usually doesn't. Just imagine an
executive changing the ending to "So Far" in an attempt to increase
its mass-market appeal.
John Colagioia
> jpowe...@my-deja.com wrote in message <932oj1$6r$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>...
[...]
> >Similarly, if I push a chair over to the filing cabinet and and stand
> >on it (interesting description if it is a reclining office chair on
> >casters), I would prefer that I see the key, take it, and get down in
> >the same turn I stood on chair. Unless the key is the bait on a hand
> >sized mousetrap there is not much of a decision to be made. (It hardly
> >ads to the story or drama by keeping this in suspense: Will I take it?
> > Will I leave it alone? drum roll...)
> I have to disagree with this. If I stand on the chair to look at the top of
the
> cabinet, I want a chance to look at the top of the cabinet. When the game
> tells me that I climbed on the chair and took the key, I think, "What key?
> I didn't know their was any key." It fells like the game is rushing me
toward
> a solution without giving me time to look at the scenery. I would rather go
> through every step as if I was really there. (Well, within reason. I don't
> need to CATCH BALANCE every time the character stumbles.) I suppose
> I'd rather fell like I'm moving through a real world than like I'm giving
> someone hints when they get stuck.
I would also get very suspicious of any game that "goes off on its own," since
I may not WANT the key when I first see it.
I mean, depending on the game, I might be worried about leaving fingerprints,
or of someone seeing me take the key, or that it might be the trigger to a
trap, or whatever.
Well...unless I'm playing a specific character and this is being done to
enforce the personality type ("the stereotypical adventurer").
John Colagioia
> In article <3a61f829...@newsserver.epix.net>,
> emay...@epix.net (Eric Mayer) wrote:
> > I can think of three major approaches:
[...]
> > There is a "problem" in that the player can't be sure that the NPC
has
> > exhausted its store of knowledge, since it never says so, but I
would
> > think that most players would assume, safely, that once an NPC
starts
> > repeating itself it has run out of information. (Is that usually
the
> > case?)
> See, in my dream world, the NPCs *never* obviously exhaust their full
> store of knowledge.
> I hear the howls of rage.
Maybe it's because I'm the new guy, but I don't really see how such a
thing could be *bad*. Hard to program, sure. Hard to cram into a
Z-Machine, probably. But not a bad thing at all.
> But okay; here's my point. What we're
> basically talking about here is how to write a game in which a puzzle
> (or the main puzzle) is knowledge-based: the player must obtain
enough
> information to do something.
[...]
> Arguably in a more realistic world model, especially in situations
where
> one is investigating a complex situation or concept, there would not
be
> a one-to-one correspondence of informers and information, but a group
of
> people with a bunch of knowledge some of which is held in common and
> some of which can be acquired through non-NPC means. This leads to a
> non-linear, multiple-solution-path kind of thing: you can either
spend a
> while looking up and consulting the leather-bound book in the library
OR
> sweettalk the crotchety old professor into sitting you down for a
little
> chat OR piece the answer together by getting pieces of it from
several
> of his less-well-informed but more friendly proteges.
> The point here is to discourage the player from regarding the NPC as
a
> kind of quirky puzzle box that must be "worked" until it has revealed
> all its information. Preferable would be for the player to play by
> doing things that make sense within the logic of the game world (ie,
> finding out that crotchety professor knows stuff, asking other NPCs
> about how to get to him, etc), returning to people when he has reason
to
> believe that they have more information.
Hmmm...This is actually a very interesting idea. Programming-wise, I
would imagine that this could be done with a "table" of
information--basically, interconnected phrases, or something (which
wouldn't be more than a mild nuisance in Inform, I think). The
professor, of course, would have nearly all the information at hand
(maybe missing some bits). Each book may contain pointers to a handful
of these notes. And the "grad students" would similarly have pointers
to an assortment.
Which is interesting, in a way, because this means that the students
could possibly be generated on-the-fly (by generating a new sub-table)
from the same game object, so that the player can always find someone
new--specifically, someone who reacts slightly differently to everyone
who has come before--to fill in that final bit of knowledge, or even to
replace a previous student who has been horribly offended by something
you've said or done to him.
I suppose that using such a scheme *might* even lead to NPCs that could
do some of the research for you, by allowing them to select random
books and accumulate those bits of knowledge until you come pick them
up.
I really like this!
Ms. Short, between Smoochie Comp and this idea, you're now my official
hero...at least for a couple more days.
Ted M
>The IF community seem to have entrenched themselves in a 'it should all be
>free' attitude, which leaves it nowhere to go commercially: as everyone
>seems to expect IF works and tools to be free, they all baulk at having to
>pay for anything, which means that no-one can make any money from creating
>them...it all becomes a labour of love!
>...
>What do *YOU* think?
I think this: the gift economy model practiced in r*if has produced an
astounding body of public art which is experienced as a community.
But much, much more is produced than just the finished works.
The community not only produces games and tools, but also provides a
public education system to sustain its own existence. That
educational system includes programming manuals by compiler authors,
personal Q&A on raif, website tutorials and more. Theoretical
discussions and reviews further contribute to the community's
self-education and continued propagation. Those who organize and
archive discussions, reviews and the works themselves perform crucial
labor and services for the community, as do those who organize such
things as comps, mini-comps, art shows, review conspiracies, award
ceremonies and themed collaborative projects (original Textfire,
recent Arcade). Then there are the donated comp prizes, award medals
and even recent material solicitations for reviews. And let's not
forget the beta-testers, ever-unheralded laborers on whose shoulders
all the best works stand. The IFmud, an additional venue for
discussion and activity which further educates and sustains the
community, is provided gratis.
So it's far, far more than just finished games and compilers being
given away here. And that should be acknowledged.
To put pricetags on only some of those things seems unfair. And
fairness aside, imposing economic barriers on participation
surmountable by some and not by others would diminish the extent of
the shared experience at the core of the community and fracture the
educational system. Once and Future was not universally purchased.
Those who didn't buy it couldn't play it, couldn't meaningfully
participate in discussion on it, couldn't write reviews of it,
couldn't incorporate its details into later discussions. A
businessperson might consider it (and the formation of Cascade
Mountain Publishing) the most significant event in text IF since
Infocom's day, but OaF's contribution to the community (and thus the
production of future works) pales compared to the contributions
generated by the widespread accessibility and experience of Curses or
Christminster, both common and enduring points of reference in IF
discourse and thus influences on future works. Whizzard's act of
greatest impact will always be the creation of a tremendous public
venue and motivational engine: the Fall Comp. That engine produces
games (themselves partial products of the educational system and
betatesting) as well as discussion and reviews (further expanding the
educational system) -- heaps and heaps of labor in a self-sustaining
cycle, all freely given.
It's quite a productive model, and the benefits are available to all.
[Note to self: contribute by writing piece on why "Nevermore" (Nate
Cull, 2000) was so very pleasurable. Also describe recent moving
experience with "Galatea" (Emily Short, 2000).]
Altering the model to allow flow of material wealth to a minority of
the contributors would accomplish what, exactly? With what side
effects?
- Ted M
Paul de Valmency
"Ted M" <kin...@a-znet.com> wrote in message
news:ivl96t43a4sqikitq...@4ax.com...
>
> So it's far, far more than just finished games and compilers being
> given away here. And that should be acknowledged.
>
> To put pricetags on only some of those things seems unfair.
I agree whole-heartedly...my list was simply of items that could be packaged
and sold...beta-testers, the raif community ingeneral and all of those who
contribute to it all deserve a great amount of praise, and the work that
goes into what they provide is often forgotten, or never even thought about
by those who only play the games. But my whole point was about why IF is
not a commercial reality any more.
> And fairness aside, imposing economic barriers on participation
> surmountable by some and not by others would diminish the extent of
> the shared experience at the core of the community and fracture the
> educational system.
I disagree, and I don't think that it would 'fracture the educational
system' as such. This would continue in much the same way as it does now,
as does the educational element in other arts, such as painting...there are
many artists who make money from painting, but it doesn't stop there being a
thriving amateur painting community, complete with art courses, etc.
Wouldn't this not also apply to IF?
>Once and Future was not universally purchased.
> Those who didn't buy it couldn't play it, couldn't meaningfully
> participate in discussion on it, couldn't write reviews of it,
> couldn't incorporate its details into later discussions.
But isn't this true of all other gaming genres? If someone wants to play or
write a review of a game, they still have to obtain a copy of it first. The
fact that it has to be paid for shouldn't stop this from happening...indeed
reviews of commercially available games are a pre-requisite as they generate
more sales (hopefully!) for the author and/or publishers.
> It's quite a productive model, and the benefits are available to all.
> Altering the model to allow flow of material wealth to a minority of
> the contributors would accomplish what, exactly?
IMHO, from an artistic viewpoint it would probably accomplish nothing.
>With what side effects?
Perhaps the sheer number of games being produced would diminish as authors
put more time and effort into producing larger and more complex worlds for
their audience. Obviously, the quality of games would be an issue (from a
commercial stand-point) and *most* games currently available would not be
deemed to be of the quality needed to warrant a fee. That's not to say that
these games are not good ones in their own right, and a benefit to the
continued education and production of further games, most are, but there
would probably be a marked difference between the game produced by someone
who simply wants to have a go (they say there's a book inside of
everyone...perhaps that extendes to a game or two?) and someone who has a
wealth of creativity and goes on to create a number of high-quality games.
I think that this difference exists even now...there are a number of authors
who everyone respects, while most authors languish in obscurity, having
produced only one or two games of (comparatively) minor note.
Personally, I'm glad that the current IF community exists as it does. It
was a great surprise and delight to find the gmd existed after not having
played a text adventure for well over 10 years, not to mention the sheer
number of games available. But: will anyone ever make money from text IF
again? I don't think so.
Cheers,
Paul.
Magnus Olsson
>rather than a lack of capital.
I'm not at all sure they failed as a company because of low IF sales;
remember that they were in the businesses of print books and (IIRC)
e-books as well. On th eother hand, if they'd been exclusively into
publishing commercial IF, they may not even have got started in the
first place.
>The IF community seem to have entrenched themselves in a 'it should all be
>free' attitude, which leaves it nowhere to go commercially: as everyone
>seems to expect IF works and tools to be free, they all baulk at having to
>pay for anything, which means that no-one can make any money from creating
>them...
You make it sound as if this was a matter of psychology, an attitude
problem ("if only those silly IF players would get out of their mindset...").
But isn't it rather a problem of economics: there is a large supply of
good, free IF games available. This, and not anybody's mindset, is
what makes it near-impossible to sell text IF: if a rational consumer
can choose between two products, one of which costs $25 (say), and one
of which is free, which do you think he'll choose, all other things
being equal?
>As I see it, the only way back to any commercial basis would be for the
>development tools (languages and IDEs) to be licensed (i.e. charged for,
>possibly crippling un-registered copies in some way),
We have the same problem here: if you start charging money for, say,
TADS 3, it'd better be a much better product than TADS 2, which is
free. I don't think there's any legal way to prohibit the continued
distribution of existing freeware development systems.
>and for the
>better-known IF authors to start withholding their works from the general IF
>community and putting them through one of a number of publishing houses
>(e.g. as CMP was, perhaps, intending to be).
This might work, but it would be an uphill battle for quite some time,
even if you could get *everybody* to agree to doing this. Most players
would probably give playing through all the existing freeware games a
higher priority than buying new, commercial games.
And there's be no way of enforcing this, you know. Because commercial
IF publishers would need to be selective about what they published
(there's no way they could afford to publish every game written). And
do you really think *all* authors whose work had been rejected by all
publishers would voluntarily refrain from distributing it as freeware?
>This, of course, would bring a howl of derision from the afore-mentioned IF
>community,
"Derision" is a strange word in the context; "outrage" would be more
like it, I think.
>and would only succeed if all concerned stuck with the programme
>and didn't make their works available freely.
Exactly. ANd how would you force them to stick to the programme? Threats
of physical violence from the IF writers' union?
--
Magnus Olsson (m...@df.lth.se, m...@pobox.com)
------ http://www.pobox.com/~mol ------
Magnus Olsson
Carl Muckenhoupt <ca...@wurb.com> wrote:
>On Tue, 16 Jan 2001 15:49:23 -0000, "Paul de Valmency"
><pa...@jcls.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>Another factor I haven't seen mentioned: In a tech-loving economy, if
>you have the necessary technical and artistic skills to write good IF,
>you can probably make a good living doing something else, possibly
>even something you find fulfilling. For the author, the question
>isn't "Can I make money at this?", but "Why should I bother trying to
>make money at this?"
I think many authors ask themselves the opposite question: "Why should
I bother doing this if I can't make money on it?".
There are of course many answers to this: one may be after
recognition, or just the pleasure of creating the games, or many other
things. But I think many people would find it easier to justify
putting an enormous effort into a game if they could get some money
out of it.
>Another unrelated point: Quite apart from any alleged "it should all
>be free" attitudes, I have serious doubts as to whether IF would
>benefit from commercialization. Art usually doesn't. Just imagine an
>executive changing the ending to "So Far" in an attempt to increase
>its mass-market appeal.
>Shudder<
But "commercialization" doesn't have to mean "commercialization,
Hollywood-style". Something similar to the mid-list book market, where
people could make at least some money without having to prostitute
their muse would be nice. (Yes, I'm aware that most mid-list authors
can't make a living exclusively from writing.)
Andrew Plotkin
> rather than a lack of capital.
Do you regard the two titles they sold (Avalon and Dr.Dumont) as
non-commercial? Both were first publications, available only from CMP,
for a commercial-game price. Both were from well-known authors.
> The IF community seem to have entrenched themselves in a 'it should all be
> free' attitude, which leaves it nowhere to go commercially: as everyone
> seems to expect IF works and tools to be free, they all baulk at having to
> pay for anything, which means that no-one can make any money from creating
> them...it all becomes a labour of love!
I think you're tremendously mixing up cause an effect. Neither Avalon
nor Dr.Dumont were ever freeware, and CMP died *anyway*.
I said, early and publically, that if CMP demonstrated its viability
-- by selling its two opening titles to a large audience -- I would
write a game and publish it through CMP, for money.
It didn't happen. The failure was not money-hating IF freeware
fanatics.
> As I see it, the only way back to any commercial basis would be for the
> development tools (languages and IDEs) to be licensed (i.e. charged for,
> possibly crippling un-registered copies in some way)
I don't see the relevance of that. The only effect there is to
*reduce* the number of people *willing* to write IF. How can that
possibly benefit the market in any way whatsoever?
This isn't a supply-and-demand curve. You don't raise prices by
reducing the supply.
> and for the
> better-known IF authors to start withholding their works from the general IF
> community and putting them through one of a number of publishing houses
> (e.g. as CMP was, perhaps, intending to be).
Yes, that's what would have to happen. I, a well-known IF author, was
ready to go.
CMP's failure had nothing to do with the IF community, in fact. If
every newsgroup regular and IFmud hanger-out had bought a copy of
_Avalon_, CMP would *still* have been a failure -- maybe not as soon,
but inevitably. I would not have signed on with such a venture.
Why? Because I don't *need* CMP to market my game to newsgroup
regulars. You've all heard of me. I can market *myself* to the IF
community. And I'll sell more copies, too. Because my prices will be
lower; which is because my advertising costs will be zero, and I can
keep 95% of the profit. (The rest is a tiny cut for Kagi or Paypal or
whatever.)
I have faced that decision before -- shareware or freeware -- and I've
always decided on freeware for my text games. Simply because the
community is too small to make for-profit attractive to me. People
times price times buy-in ratio: I estimate and I get a smallish
number. ($500 to $1000, maybe.) The benefits of releasing free games
are, in my judgement, greater. (Albeit not measured in dollars).
Obviously someone else might decide the other way. And in a sense I
*am* spoiling the pot for such a person. But -- not really. Authors
are not interchangeable. I can't undercut Adam Cadre, because I can't
write an Adam Cadre game.
Back to CMP. The promise and value of Berlyn's business proposal was
*always* that he could sell IF *outside* this little group of people.
If he could do that, then hell, it wouldn't matter if newsgroup
regulars screamed and yelled about freeware authors "selling out" --
they wouldn't be the important market. Finding that mainstream,
real-world market is the trick. Damn if I know how to do that. If I
knew how, I'd be doing it.
As it turns out, CMP didn't know how either, and so it was damned. In
a business sense. :)
What have we learned? Well, that an ad in Games Magazine isn't good
enough. :(
Carl Muckenhaupt:
> Yes, well, there's also the combination of (a) the vast amount of
> material and (b) the rather small audience. Basic economics tells
> us that, when supply is high and demand is low, prices plummet
As I said, supply and demand doesn't operate that smoothly in an
artistic market. Otherwise you could raise the prices of books in a
bookstore by assassinating Stephen King.
More realistically: the number of sci-fi and fantasy titles published
per year has *zoomed* in the past twenty years. Far more people are
writing the stuff than used to. More SF books are sold. (Yes, *even
ignoring* Trek/Star Wars/RPG tie-in novels.) Does that mean prices per
book have dropped? No, of course not. It's had an effect, which is
rather deeper and more complicated and I don't understand it well. But
it's not Econ 101.
> Another factor I haven't seen mentioned: In a tech-loving economy,
> if you have the necessary technical and artistic skills to write
> good IF, you can probably make a good living doing something else,
> possibly even something you find fulfilling. [...]
>
> Another unrelated point: Quite apart from any alleged "it should all
> be free" attitudes, I have serious doubts as to whether IF would
> benefit from commercialization. Art usually doesn't.
In both cases, I think the book market provides a useful model. The
field of SF *has* benefitted from commercialization. Like I said, more
books are available. (90% of them may be crud, but this was always
true.) More good books are being published, and they cover a wider
range of experiment and possibility.
And it's for damn sure that most authors could make more money doing
something else.
> Just imagine an
> executive changing the ending to "So Far" in an attempt to increase
> its mass-market appeal.
Relating to what Paul said above about free development tools: the
tools to write a book cost exactly the same as the tools to write IF.
You need a computer and some sort of text editor. (Yeah, yeah, you can
write a book on a typewriter. That costs the same as a cheap
computer.) Then you put in time, time, time.
The fields where commercialization *does* wreck art -- notably movies
-- are the fields where you need multiple people, multiple talents,
and millions of dollars of investment. It's not the profit that screws
up the endings to movies. It's the model where the artist needs a
financial investment from that executive *in order to make the work*.
Nobody can force me to change the ending to _So Far_, because I own it
entire. All they could do is refuse to sell it. In which case I go to
the next publisher, same as a rejected book author would do with his
manuscript.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
Gunther Schmidl
> As I said, supply and demand doesn't operate that smoothly in an
> artistic market. Otherwise you could raise the prices of books in a
> bookstore by assassinating Stephen King.
Well, you could at least raise the QUALITY of books...
-- Gunther
Carl Muckenhoupt
wrote:
>Do you regard the two titles they sold (Avalon and Dr.Dumont) as
>non-commercial? Both were first publications, available only from CMP,
>for a commercial-game price. Both were from well-known authors.
Minor quibble: Dr. Dumont was not a first publication. It was first
published in 1987, by First Row Software. Unless you specifically
mean the Z-code version, which did make some slight changes to the
content.
Beyond that, I stand corrected.
David Thornley
>rather than a lack of capital.
>
That being said, having more than two games to sell would at least have
improved things.
>The IF community seem to have entrenched themselves in a 'it should all be
>free' attitude, which leaves it nowhere to go commercially: as everyone
>seems to expect IF works and tools to be free, they all baulk at having to
>pay for anything, which means that no-one can make any money from creating
>them...it all becomes a labour of love!
>
At the very least you're overgeneralizing. I, for example, bought
copies of both of their games. I wouldn't be surprised if lots of
this community bought one or the other.
However, that means very little from a business point of view.
There aren't enough of us to keep CMP going, even if we all buy
our copies of all the games that come out. The only way to do it
is to appeal to a larger audience, and either that audience isn't
there or CMP didn't reach it. Face it, no matter how many games
CMP had, the amount all of us are willing to spend on IF is not
likely to keep the company going.
>As I see it, the only way back to any commercial basis would be for the
>development tools (languages and IDEs) to be licensed (i.e. charged for,
>possibly crippling un-registered copies in some way), and for the
>better-known IF authors to start withholding their works from the general IF
>community and putting them through one of a number of publishing houses
>(e.g. as CMP was, perhaps, intending to be).
>
I did send in the $40 for TADS 2 registration, quite a few years ago.
I don't see what keeping it shareware would accomplish, aside from
increasing the number of Inform games. If all development tools were
payware, then I would think there would be fewer people writing IF,
and I don't see that as a desirable goal.
If the better-known IF authors were to start charging, then they'd
get some money, their work would be less distributed, and they'd get
fewer warm fuzzies. This means they'd have to get enough money to
offset the loss of warm fuzzies, and in a community of this size
I don't think that likely.
>This, of course, would bring a howl of derision from the afore-mentioned IF
>community, and would only succeed if all concerned stuck with the programme
>and didn't make their works available freely.
>
And, if we were to use the orbital mind-control lasers to do this,
what would we accomplish? We'd presumably have something like CMP
in business, at best. Now, CMP really didn't do a whole lot for me
other than distribute a couple of games in a less convenient way than
downloading from gmd or mirror, I'm going to ask what's in it for
me? (Having a physical paper copy of "Ready, Okay!" is an advantage
over having it in electronic form, and that is a service the
publisher provided. Having Varicella in CD-ROM form rather than
downloading it is not a similar service.)
The advantage is that it could cause the production of more high-quality
IF. Partly because money can be a motivating factor, partly because
it would allow some authors to concentrate on writing IF without
worrying about getting an external paycheck.
In order for this to happen, lots of people have to buy the games.
Lots. Not just the current IF community.
So, if CMP had been able to expand its market to reach at least several
thousand people, that would have been a Good Thing. If Whizzard had
made enough money to cover all the work that went into Ava^H^H^HOnce
and Future, that would have been great. I really, really doubt it
happened. If CMP couldn't stay in business, it couldn't pay
Whizzard a decent rate for his time and effort.
>But all of this takes time...time is money...and the charges for such items
>would have to be quite small, meaning that for anyone to make any *real*
>money, sales volumes would have to be *very* large...do the gun-firing,
>monster-killing, multi-player 3D-action brigade want to excercise their
>cerebral muscles enough to sit down and play through a puzzle adventure? AND
>pay for it? Hmmm...
>
Precisely. How many $40 TADS registrations would Mike Roberts have
needed to quit the day job? I'd bet the answer is more than he got.
If there is money to be found in IF, then I'll help by buying games.
Since there is not, at the moment, we'll have to live with mostly
free IF or no IF at all.
>On a final note: just because one person tried and failed, doesn't meant
>that it can't be done.
>
Right. I don't think it can be done on other grounds, but I've been
wrong before. If somebody else thinks it can be done, and starts
something up, I'll buy some stuff from them, just as I did with CMP.
I'll expect them to fold, also, but it would be a pleasant surprise
if they succeeded.
--
David H. Thornley | If you want my opinion, ask.
da...@thornley.net | If you don't, flee.
http://www.thornley.net/~thornley/david/ | O-
Andrew MacKinnon
I don't think very many people register shareware provided that it is
fully-functional. For example, many people have Pkzip or Winzip
unregistered. Although a few people that really like the game might pay
for feelies, extra graphics, sounds, more game, etc. but you can't
expect to get much money. ($100?)
--
Andrew MacKinnon
andrew_mac...@yahoo.com
http://www.geocities.com/andrew_mackinnon_2000/
Sean T Barrett
accidentally trim the poster, but I think it was David Thornley:
>I did send in the $40 for TADS 2 registration, quite a few years ago.
>I don't see what keeping it shareware would accomplish, aside from
>increasing the number of Inform games. If all development tools were
>payware, then I would think there would be fewer people writing IF,
>and I don't see that as a desirable goal.
In support of your belief, didn't r.a.i-f (and presumably the IF scene
in general) take off with the release of Inform and with the freewaring
of Tads? I wasn't around then, but I did used to read r.a.i-f a long
time ago (1989-ish maybe?) and it was almost entirely nonproductive--
all talk and no development--enough so that I gave up on it and missed
out for a while when it did finally start up.
SeanB
(I did chat with Whizzard by email before he started up SPAG, so
I must have been coming back to raif periodically or something.)
Magnus Olsson
Sean T Barrett <buz...@world.std.com> wrote:
>In support of your belief, didn't r.a.i-f (and presumably the IF scene
>in general) take off with the release of Inform and with the freewaring
>of Tads? I wasn't around then, but I did used to read r.a.i-f a long
>time ago (1989-ish maybe?) and it was almost entirely nonproductive--
>all talk and no development--enough so that I gave up on it and missed
>out for a while when it did finally start up.
This depends on what you mean by "take off".
I'm not sure that there was no development in the early days of raif.
No released games, but we're talking about very long lead times here.
But what we have seen is not one "take-off", but several. The release
of Inform probably triggered such a surge, but due to the long lead
times it's hard to separate the exact causes here - Inform generated a
lot of interest and a lot of talk when it was released, but there
weren't very many Inform games until considerably later. And Inform
took quite some time to mature - the earliest releases were nothing
like the later versions.
The freewaring of TADS certainly renewed interest in that system, but
the early shareware releases also served as triggers for a lot
of activity. I'm not sure that the availability of *free* tools is
the decisive factor, as compared to the availability of the right
tools to begin with. Would we have had very much fewer IF authors today
if Inform had been shareware? Who knows?
OK, I'm being hopelessly vague, so let's complicate things further by
bringing in the Competitions, which also generated a lot of interest.
And the IF community itself, which is self-stimulating - there's
a lot of positive feedback involved here.
But, of course, the availability of free tools *helps*.
Paul de Valmency
"Andrew Plotkin" <erky...@eblong.com> wrote in message
news:944mn2$pt9$1...@news.panix.com...
> Paul de Valmency <pa...@jcls.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> > I think that CMP failed simply due to a lack of *commercial* titles to
sell,
> > rather than a lack of capital.
>
> Do you regard the two titles they sold (Avalon and Dr.Dumont) as
> non-commercial? Both were first publications, available only from CMP,
> for a commercial-game price. Both were from well-known authors.
No, both title *were* commercial. My point was simply that there were too
few for a company formed to promote and publish such titles to exist long
term.
>
> > The IF community seem to have entrenched themselves in a 'it should all
be
> > free' attitude, which leaves it nowhere to go commercially: as everyone
> > seems to expect IF works and tools to be free, they all baulk at having
to
> > pay for anything, which means that no-one can make any money from
creating
> > them...it all becomes a labour of love!
>
> I think you're tremendously mixing up cause an effect. Neither Avalon
> nor Dr.Dumont were ever freeware, and CMP died *anyway*.
>
> I said, early and publically, that if CMP demonstrated its viability
> -- by selling its two opening titles to a large audience -- I would
> write a game and publish it through CMP, for money.
>
> It didn't happen. The failure was not money-hating IF freeware
> fanatics.
This proves another point that I was trying to make. If, instead of holding
back and waiting to see if CMP would survive, you (and other authors) gladly
wrote games with the pure intention of having them published commercially,
this *may* have sparked a trend towards this way of producing IF.
Of course, the lack of titles wasn't the *only* cause of their
demise...proper marketing to a larger audience was an absolute necessity to
bringing IF back into the main-stream, and still is if it is ever to become
a commercial venture again. But whether there are enough people outside of
the (rather small) IF community to make this a reality remains to be seen.
>
> > As I see it, the only way back to any commercial basis would be for the
> > development tools (languages and IDEs) to be licensed (i.e. charged for,
> > possibly crippling un-registered copies in some way)
>
> I don't see the relevance of that. The only effect there is to
> *reduce* the number of people *willing* to write IF. How can that
> possibly benefit the market in any way whatsoever?
>
> This isn't a supply-and-demand curve. You don't raise prices by
> reducing the supply.
That's not what I was implying. What I meant was that as long as the tools
to create IF were free, there will always be free games (and, no, I'm not
saying that this is a bad thing!). However, if all of the available tools
had a price, fewer people would write games, and of those who do, some will
do so with the express intention of recovering their 'investment' in the
tools.
I agree, the trick to CMP surviving was better marketing of the titles it
did have. That said, from a business perspective, would the few titles it
did have warrant a full-on advertising campaign? I think not...it's catch
22 again...marketing is needed to succeed, but the goods have to be there to
be marketed, but no-one produces the goods because there's no market, so
marketing is required to create a market, but there are no goods to be...
One thought that occurred to me: Perhaps if CMP had managed to secure the
publishing rights to Activision's text adventures, it may have generated
enough interest outside of the If community to make itself viable? I for
one, an avid Infocom fan of old, happened upon the If community by pure
accident, and was amazed, as well as extremely pleased, to find that text If
was so alive (albeit 'underground'). I am sure that there are many others
like me, who remember fondly the days of playing games by Brian Howarth,
Level 9 and Scott Adams as well as those from Infocom. This, to my mind, is
the market that CMP should have been aiming for initially (perhaps it did,
but I don't ever recall seeing any advertising for it). Compilations of old
games would be, I'm sure, quite popular.
Paul.
John Colagioia
> I agree, the trick to CMP surviving was better marketing of the titles it
> did have. That said, from a business perspective, would the few titles it
> did have warrant a full-on advertising campaign? I think not...it's catch
> 22 again...marketing is needed to succeed, but the goods have to be there to
> be marketed, but no-one produces the goods because there's no market, so
> marketing is required to create a market, but there are no goods to be...
Actually, I'm almost certain that a market outside of the readers of this
newsgroup exists. In my "other other life" (i.e., not here, and not at my day
job), I'm an adjunct professor for the local university (Polytechnic--once
"Brooklyn Poly," if anybody cares), and I teach the programming languages course
at one of the "satellite" campuses. When discussing object-oriented
programming, I often bring Inform in to cover certain concepts.
Well, doing that sparked a fairly significant discussion of "what ever happened
to those guys," and "where can we get more of these games."
I can't imagine that Long Island, NY is such a special part of the world that
20% of the graduate students have played Zork and remember it fondly.
Perhaps the problem is what population segment to target. If I remember
correctly, originally, Infocom targetted people who would have the disposable
income to own a personal computer, and those people happened to be technical and
relatively literate people. Maybe those would be the best people to target
again, but for different reasons? Engineering trade journals, association
newsletters and so forth?
> One thought that occurred to me: Perhaps if CMP had managed to secure the
> publishing rights to Activision's text adventures, it may have generated
> enough interest outside of the If community to make itself viable? I for
> one, an avid Infocom fan of old, happened upon the If community by pure
> accident, and was amazed, as well as extremely pleased, to find that text If
> was so alive (albeit 'underground'). I am sure that there are many others
> like me, who remember fondly the days of playing games by Brian Howarth,
> Level 9 and Scott Adams as well as those from Infocom. This, to my mind, is
> the market that CMP should have been aiming for initially (perhaps it did,
> but I don't ever recall seeing any advertising for it). Compilations of old
> games would be, I'm sure, quite popular.
Well, that would certainly be a good way to "jumpstart" public opinion and get
the market ready for new games.
At least, I think it would. I suppose it could also backfire, by flooding the
market with older games, and tying up enough customers (still trying to figure
out how to get the [strong language censored] Babel fish) that there aren't
enough people ready to purchase a new game...
Magnus Olsson
Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
>More realistically: the number of sci-fi and fantasy titles published
>per year has *zoomed* in the past twenty years. Far more people are
>writing the stuff than used to. More SF books are sold. (Yes, *even
>ignoring* Trek/Star Wars/RPG tie-in novels.) Does that mean prices per
>book have dropped? No, of course not. It's had an effect, which is
>rather deeper and more complicated and I don't understand it well. But
>it's not Econ 101.
I think that what we might be seeing in this case is that an increased
supply *creates* an increased demand, partly because the market
expands (increased exposure for SF means more new readers), which is
not peculiar to artistic markets, but also because an increased
activity in the field means that the entire field is stimulated - and
that, I think, is a difference between creative fields and your
ordinary potato market.
>The fields where commercialization *does* wreck art -- notably movies
>-- are the fields where you need multiple people, multiple talents,
>and millions of dollars of investment. It's not the profit that screws
>up the endings to movies. It's the model where the artist needs a
>financial investment from that executive *in order to make the work*.
An example here would be the mainstream games market, wouldn't it?
Which is one reason, I suppose, for text IF authors to resist a
commercialization of the field.
Andrew Plotkin
>>The fields where commercialization *does* wreck art -- notably movies
>>-- are the fields where you need multiple people, multiple talents,
>>and millions of dollars of investment. It's not the profit that screws
>>up the endings to movies. It's the model where the artist needs a
>>financial investment from that executive *in order to make the work*.
> An example here would be the mainstream games market, wouldn't it?
Yes.
> Which is one reason, I suppose, for text IF authors to resist a
> commercialization of the field.
Only if that involved a transformation of the standards of IF, to a
place where one person could no longer write a complete game.
Magnus Olsson
Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
>Magnus Olsson <m...@pobox.com> wrote:
>
>>>The fields where commercialization *does* wreck art -- notably movies
>>>-- are the fields where you need multiple people, multiple talents,
>>>and millions of dollars of investment. It's not the profit that screws
>>>up the endings to movies. It's the model where the artist needs a
>>>financial investment from that executive *in order to make the work*.
>
>> An example here would be the mainstream games market, wouldn't it?
>
>Yes.
>
>> Which is one reason, I suppose, for text IF authors to resist a
>> commercialization of the field.
>
>Only if that involved a transformation of the standards of IF, to a
>place where one person could no longer write a complete game.
Oops - I realize that I just made it look like I had completely missed
the point of your post, despite agreeing with it a few lines
above. :-) I suppose I was short-circuiting the process from thought
to expression a bit again (which I tend to do every now and then,
earning me reactions varying from blank stares via "howls of derision"
(to quote a recent post) to outright abuse).
What I meant was that this is probably the psychology behind the
resistance to commercialization: people see the downsides of the
commercial game market, think "we will *never* let this happen to our
beloved text IF community" and miss the crucial differences.
Andrew Plotkin
> "Andrew Plotkin" <erky...@eblong.com> wrote in message
> news:944mn2$pt9$1...@news.panix.com...
>>
>> Do you regard the two titles they sold (Avalon and Dr.Dumont) as
>> non-commercial? Both were first publications, available only from CMP,
>> for a commercial-game price. Both were from well-known authors.
> No, both title *were* commercial. My point was simply that there were too
> few for a company formed to promote and publish such titles to exist long
> term.
But they failed short-term. They didn't even start to succeed, let's
face it.
>> I said, early and publically, that if CMP demonstrated its viability
>> -- by selling its two opening titles to a large audience -- I would
>> write a game and publish it through CMP, for money.
>>
>> It didn't happen. The failure was not money-hating IF freeware
>> fanatics.
> This proves another point that I was trying to make. If, instead of holding
> back and waiting to see if CMP would survive, you (and other authors) gladly
> wrote games with the pure intention of having them published commercially,
> this *may* have sparked a trend towards this way of producing IF.
I think you're still seeing a free/commercial dichotomy far beyond
where it makes sense.
I wasn't holding back because of fear of commercial publication. I
was evaluating them *as* a commercial venture. I wanted to know
whether I'd make enough money to be worth the effort!
Obviously if authors write commercial games without considering the
business risks and rewards, we will have a bunch of commercial games
in a hurry. We'll also have a bunch of commercial failures.
> What I meant was that as long as the tools
> to create IF were free, there will always be free games (and, no, I'm not
> saying that this is a bad thing!). However, if all of the available tools
> had a price, fewer people would write games, and of those who do, some will
> do so with the express intention of recovering their 'investment' in the
> tools.
I just don't understand how you understand people to be motivated, I
guess.
> I agree, the trick to CMP surviving was better marketing of the titles it
> did have. That said, from a business perspective, would the few titles it
> did have warrant a full-on advertising campaign?
You are now entering pure speculation.
It's possible that Michael Berlyn decided "Since I have only two
titles, I won't start a full-on advertising campaign." But if so, he
never told *us* about it. I'm not going to make decisions based on
that kind of guessing.
This is what a business plan is for. A company could come forward and
says "We're going to do what CMP tried, but we need eight full-length
text games for our launch lineup. Who's interested?" And then I'd
consider *that* based on its business merits.
> One thought that occurred to me: Perhaps if CMP had managed to secure the
> publishing rights to Activision's text adventures, it may have generated
> enough interest outside of the If community to make itself viable?
It's possible. However, it would probably also be an expensive
proposition. If you convince Activision that those games are valuable
to you, you're also convincing them that they're valuable to *them*.
Paul de Valmency
> Paul de Valmency <pa...@jcls.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>
> >> I said, early and publically, that if CMP demonstrated its viability
> >> -- by selling its two opening titles to a large audience -- I would
> >> write a game and publish it through CMP, for money.
> >>
> >> It didn't happen. The failure was not money-hating IF freeware
> >> fanatics.
>
> > This proves another point that I was trying to make. If, instead of
holding
> > back and waiting to see if CMP would survive, you (and other authors)
gladly
> > wrote games with the pure intention of having them published
commercially,
> > this *may* have sparked a trend towards this way of producing IF.
>
> I think you're still seeing a free/commercial dichotomy far beyond
> where it makes sense.
No, I'm simply tossing a few ideas around as to how this hobby of ours could
return to a commercial venture, that's all.
>
> I wasn't holding back because of fear of commercial publication. I
> was evaluating them *as* a commercial venture. I wanted to know
> whether I'd make enough money to be worth the effort!
<snip included from later in the posting>
> A company could come forward and
> says "We're going to do what CMP tried, but we need eight full-length
> text games for our launch lineup. Who's interested?" And then I'd
> consider *that* based on its business merits.
This proves my point entirely...*someone* has to get the ball rolling: as
long as everyone sits around on their fat arses looking at each other,
waiting for someone else to get it going, nothing will *ever* happen.
I applaude Mike Berlyn for at least getting the thing started. It was lack
of support and, I'll say it again, the proper marketing that killed CMP,
nothing else.
> Obviously if authors write commercial games without considering the
> business risks and rewards, we will have a bunch of commercial games
> in a hurry. We'll also have a bunch of commercial failures.
>
Come on...what business risk are we talking about here? Your time is not a
business risk. Certainly you haven't any financial outlay to put on the
line. So what risk? All the risk would be taken by the publishing
house...that's what they are there for. Also, why would they automatically
be commercial failures? Surely, with the proper marketing, such titles
*could* permeate outside of the IF community, and with enough numbers to
make it a commercial concern?
> > I agree, the trick to CMP surviving was better marketing of the titles
it
> > did have. That said, from a business perspective, would the few titles
it
> > did have warrant a full-on advertising campaign?
>
> You are now entering pure speculation.
Andrew, this whole thread is speculation! 8-)
> > One thought that occurred to me: Perhaps if CMP had managed to secure
the
> > publishing rights to Activision's text adventures, it may have generated
> > enough interest outside of the If community to make itself viable?
>
> It's possible. However, it would probably also be an expensive
> proposition. If you convince Activision that those games are valuable
> to you, you're also convincing them that they're valuable to *them*.
>
You're probably right there. I think it's a shame that companies like
Activision sit on back-catalogues of titles that they no longer publish or
support, but won't let go of, or even relax, the publishing rights to them.
Paul.
David Thornley
Paul de Valmency <pa...@jcls.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>
>"Andrew Plotkin" <erky...@eblong.com> wrote in message
>news:94hqkb$j19$1...@news.panix.com...
>>
>> where it makes sense.
>
>No, I'm simply tossing a few ideas around as to how this hobby of ours could
>return to a commercial venture, that's all.
>
back of your mind, at least.
>
><snip included from later in the posting>
>> A company could come forward and
>> says "We're going to do what CMP tried, but we need eight full-length
>> text games for our launch lineup. Who's interested?" And then I'd
>> consider *that* based on its business merits.
>
>This proves my point entirely...*someone* has to get the ball rolling: as
>long as everyone sits around on their fat arses looking at each other,
>waiting for someone else to get it going, nothing will *ever* happen.
>
>I applaude Mike Berlyn for at least getting the thing started. It was lack
>of support and, I'll say it again, the proper marketing that killed CMP,
>nothing else.
>
two different games? Wasn't that Mike Berlyn's decision?
I don't think CMP lasted long enough to attract more games, considering
how long it would likely take to agree on a concept, write the game,
pass it through some sort of editing or review cycle, and agree
on the terms. In any case, it apparently failed to show enough
promise to prospective authors.
>> Obviously if authors write commercial games without considering the
>> business risks and rewards, we will have a bunch of commercial games
>> in a hurry. We'll also have a bunch of commercial failures.
>>
>
>Come on...what business risk are we talking about here? Your time is not a
>business risk.
Um, why not? Is it reasonable to expect somebody to put in several
hundred hours on a project that might or might not make fifty dollars?
After all, the author could certainly have put that time into something
else that might make more money, either in the short term or long
term, or something more potentially entertaining. If I'm going to
put time into a commercial venture, I certainly want to know what I'm
going to get for it.
The only way this can't be a risk is a guaranteed advance for
enough to adequately pay for the author's time, however much the
author thinks it worth. This could easily be a major expense
for such a company. How many hours went into the bigger games
available, and what do the authors think their time is worth
to them in dollars (or pounds, or marks, or whatever)?
Certainly you haven't any financial outlay to put on the
>line.
Are you sure about that? Suppose that there are expenses connected with
writing the games, or with the feelies. Without knowing what the
contract Whizzard signed said, we're speculating.
So what risk? All the risk would be taken by the publishing
>house...that's what they are there for.
Here's a risk: that, after spending a good deal of time and effort
writing a game, the author winds up with an hourly rate of $.31,
extra paperwork for the IRS (if the author lives in the US), and
a badly distributed game that is generally unavailable and which
the company holds the rights to. CMP failed fairly cleanly, and
(AFAIR) returned the rights to the authors, but that is not a
foregone conclusion.
Also, why would they automatically
>be commercial failures? Surely, with the proper marketing, such titles
>*could* permeate outside of the IF community, and with enough numbers to
>make it a commercial concern?
>
Well, yes. As I understand Zarf, that is precisely what he wanted
to see. If CMP had demonstrated that sort of success, he would have
written somethin for them. As they did not, for whatever reason,
well...
>
>> > I agree, the trick to CMP surviving was better marketing of the titles
>it
>> > did have. That said, from a business perspective, would the few titles
>it
>> > did have warrant a full-on advertising campaign?
>>
The Berlyns apparently thought two pieces of IF was reasonable to
start out with. They may have been mistaken.
>You're probably right there. I think it's a shame that companies like
>Activision sit on back-catalogues of titles that they no longer publish or
>support, but won't let go of, or even relax, the publishing rights to them.
>
Right. This, however, has a bearing on the points above.
Suppose an entrepeneur came along and offered to buy IF works for
royalties, and got some of the better IF authors to sign on.
The entrepeneur says that, since he's taking the risk, he wants
the rights to the games for however long the company exists.
The company fails but is never actually dissolved, leaving the
games in the same sort of limbo that Shogun is in. How does
that serve anybody's interests?
Magnus Olsson
David Thornley <thor...@visi.com> wrote:
>Suppose an entrepeneur came along and offered to buy IF works for
>royalties, and got some of the better IF authors to sign on.
>The entrepeneur says that, since he's taking the risk, he wants
>the rights to the games for however long the company exists.
>The company fails but is never actually dissolved, leaving the
>games in the same sort of limbo that Shogun is in.
The company doesn't even have to fail; it's enough that the game stops
selling after some time. This is what's happened to most of the
abandonware games out there - their publishers still exist, and don't
want to release the rights to the games (if nothing else because doing
that would cost them both time and money), but they can't afford to
keep the games in print either, because too few people want to buy
them.
Andrew Plotkin
> "Andrew Plotkin" <erky...@eblong.com> wrote in message
> news:94hqkb$j19$1...@news.panix.com...
>> I think you're still seeing a free/commercial dichotomy far beyond
>> where it makes sense.
> No, I'm simply tossing a few ideas around as to how this hobby of ours could
> return to a commercial venture, that's all.
You're also being fairly rude towards me and the other members of this
little community. This disinclines me to spend a lot more time
answering you.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* It's about the vote, stupid!
Adam Conover
wrote:
>Um, why not? Is it reasonable to expect somebody to put in several
>hundred hours on a project that might or might not make fifty dollars?
>After all, the author could certainly have put that time into something
>else that might make more money, either in the short term or long
>term, or something more potentially entertaining. If I'm going to
>put time into a commercial venture, I certainly want to know what I'm
>going to get for it.
Wow... to take an example, if every band thought "Is the time I'm
about to invest going to be monetarily recouped?" before starting
their career -- well, we wouldn't have any good bands now, would we?
- adam
(write e-mail address numerically to reply)
i blog at:
http://students.bard.edu/~ac484/blog.html
David Thornley
Adam Conover <acfoure...@bard.edu> wrote:
>On Tue, 23 Jan 2001 19:03:56 GMT, thor...@visi.com (David Thornley)
>wrote:
>
>>Um, why not? Is it reasonable to expect somebody to put in several
>>hundred hours on a project that might or might not make fifty dollars?
>>After all, the author could certainly have put that time into something
>>else that might make more money, either in the short term or long
>>term, or something more potentially entertaining. If I'm going to
>>put time into a commercial venture, I certainly want to know what I'm
>>going to get for it.
>
>Wow... to take an example, if every band thought "Is the time I'm
>about to invest going to be monetarily recouped?" before starting
>their career -- well, we wouldn't have any good bands now, would we?
>
enough to become known by the fans, there's several who never got
above AA, and have little to show for a few years of their lives
except for nagging injuries. People follow their dreams, and I
think that a very good thing.
What I'm saying is that this is a risk. It's risky to try to break
into professional sports. It's risky to try to become an actor.
It's risky to try to become a band good enough to quit the day jobs.
It's risky to commit to writing a book or IF piece that may not
sell.
So, when somebody comes along and says that the only risk worth
considering is money, I get annoyed. If Cascade Mountain
Publishing had negotiated with an author to get that author to
write something and hand over the rights for a unknown sum
of money, that's a risk. If CMP was going to succeed, it had to
get people to take that risk, and the only way to do that
would be to show that the risk can be worthwhile. (You don't
have to show them that the risk is worthwhile, and it's probably
prohibitively expensive for a startup to do that (a startup
is not going to want to give me an advance for a three-hundred
hour project sufficient to make me feel that the money makes
it worthwhile).)
To put it another way, nobody owes a business enterprise anything
unless they make a specific commitment. If somebody is going to
commercialize IF, it's up to that person to convince people that
it may be worth making that commitment.