Re: Marketing, was Re: Can I make money by writing IF?


30 Nov 1995 04:43:13 GMT

Gerry Kevin Wilson (whizzard@uclink.berkeley.edu) wrote:

> I don't mean to come down too hard. But having just erased a 6 page
> rant/bitch/moan, I figure I'm entitled to a paragraph long one. Don't
> hold your breath. Look around you. This is it, dude. There are a few
> hundred hardcore fans left. Text adventures are going exactly nowhere.

Really? Ask Graham Nelson (don't tell him I sent you, anyway) about
the thousands of people playing _Curses_. Talk to Graham Cluly about
_Humbug_.

> Ask Dave Baggett. Two years ago I was arguing your viewpoint. Text
> adventures, like the Mexican peso, have been devalued. They are no
> longer economically feasible in any form.

You seem to be confusing the _economic_ viability of text adventures
with their popularity. As someone else pointed out, poetry is no
way to make money either, but poetry is hardly dead.

> I hope to just recoup my
> investment on Avalon and flee the genre, skin intact. 2 years. 2 lousy
> stinking years I been writing that game. And I'll be THRILLED, ECSTATIC
> to sell 15 frigging copies. That's a sum profit of jack nothing.

If that's your total interest in IF, please flee. And don't let the
door hit you in the butt on the way out.

> Sure,
> the hobby aspect (SPAG, the IF Contest) is fun, but the game writing is a
> waste of time unless you feel it too is a hobby. As for writing
> book-length texts about writing text adventures, well, let's just say I'd
> rather have the time back that I spent writing that IF Authorship Guide.

IF is something that you have to expect to do for love, not money. If
it's not a hobby for you, why did you bother "wasting" the time? Did
you really expect to make a retirement nest egg?

--
we would rather be rowdy and gaunt and free       Laurel Halbany
and dine on a diet of roach and rat               mythago@agora.rdrop.com
than slave to a tame society                      Unwed mother
ours is the zest of the alley cat  --don marquis