People have tried to do it poorly and others have done it on a small
scale. The poor attempts have resulted in the expected results. The
small scale attempts have had a range of success, the most obvious and
noted is Peter Nepstad's 1893: A World's Fair Mystery.

Over the past few years I have been contemplating developing my own
business plan for a commercial IF enterprise. I have concentrated my
thoughts on why this is such a difficult business to create and created
a bullet list of points that needed to be addressed:

- The company needed to develop a specific style in how it produces and
markets its games.
- The company needed to be developed and run professionally.
- The company needed to include advisors and gather outside expertise
in order to improve the chances of success.
- The company needed to have an internal process that allowed games to
be created in an organized and professional manner and in a reasonably
short period of time.

Those were the points that I thought were the most critical aspects for
developing a new commercial IF publishing company.

I have gathered a group of forty advisors, many from within the IF
community and quite a few from outside the community.

I have developed a business plan that includes:
- how the business will operate
- identifies the legal expertise for incorporation, contracts, and
copyright management
- identifies accounting procedures for all aspects of the business
- identifies the roles required to run the business
- identifies the plan to develop market analysis
- identifies types of products WCP will focus on at first and how these
products will be constructed and delivered to the public

I have begin the process of contracting designers, writers,
programmers, testers, and other business personnel.

The business will officially open in 2007, but has already begun
operating.

What follows is an overview of the process by which WCP will
operate....

WCP will produce and market high quality interactive fiction games for
entertainment and educational uses.

WCP will operate an imprint website at textfyre.com and textfyre.net.
The imprint of all entertainment products will be TextFyre.

WCP will develop "worlds" where games will take place. Each world will
have the potential of re-using the environment and the characters for
games that run in a "series". Each series will have at least three
"episodes" and depending upon popularity, more.

WCP will contract with World Designers in order to develop vibrant and
appealing series' and episodes. Designers will be offered a stake in
the sales of all episodes developed in "their" world.

WCP will contract with talented writers that will work in tandem with
the designers. Writers will be paid on a work-for-hire basis at a
standard per-word rate. Unless otherwise negotiated, all works will be
copyright-assigned to WCP.

WCP will contract with programmers to take the designs and writing and
implement them in a non-standard implementation of the z-machine. The
"non-standard" part comes from several factors which we will share if
people are interested, but it has mostly to do with the "interpreter"
we plan to use, and the addition of features not currently available in
the standard.

WCP will contract with testers to fully alpha and beta test the games
to ensure high quality.

WCP will contract with graphic artists, flash programmers, and
marketing personnel to create packaging and website content that will
help create interest.

WCP will contract with others to fill roles for business management,
product development, and more.

WCP will also invite any author with a publicly available game to allow
us to "reprocess" their game into "our format" with all the marketing
materials and make it available from the TextFyre.Com website. The
author will have complete control over this process, including whether
the game is offered for free or at a price. All proceeds will be
directly passed on to the original author or authors.

I will write another post in a day or so with more details about the
development processes. I will also layout the rules if anyone is
interested in becoming a designer, writer, programmer, tester, or
product manager.

Sincerely,