Re: Can I make money by writing IF?


29 Nov 1995 22:56:45 GMT

In article <49e71c$2oa@nntp.Stanford.EDU> jreese@leland.Stanford.EDU (james reese) writes:
> I agree completely that IF is no longer (if it ever was) a financially-
>viable business. For all of the reasons previously mentioned (rising
>illiteracy, the proliferation of graphically-oriented quick fixes that pass
>as entertainment these days, the Web, etc), IF remains confined to a narrow
>niche market, and very likely will remain there. The financial gains for
>an IF shareware author are abysmal, usually not even sufficient to cover
>the costs of an inexpensive shareware platform/language such as TADS. The
>labor that goes into one of these games is phenomenal, and, frankly, the
>returns are just not there.

Just thought I'd mention an idea I had, since I have no time to do it
myself... With WWW being the hip cool thing these days, I bet someone
could make some money by doing IF on the web. Here's the basic idea:

The engine is written as a CGI script. Each command you give generates a
new page with the new description and a box for entering a new line of
text. After the user has entered a given number of commands, they are
required to 'register' which lets them have unlimited time in the game.
The registration could be done the same way many places are starting to
sell things using www pages. Of course, there would be a big notice at
the beginning so that users wouldn't be angry at being caught unaware.

You could charge $4 or $5 bucks or whatever. When the user came back,
they would have some sort of account that would let them play as much as
they wanted and have save files, etc.

I was just thinking, instead of a fixed number of moves, it should be
more like visiting a room. For example, if it were Zork I, it could be
entering the caves under the house. If you were clever, you could even
work it into the game somehow... Something like a door in the game with
a card slot, that requires a special $5 card. When you register, it
puts the card in your inventory.

The nice thing about putting it on the web (if you do it REAL SOON) is
that it would be seen as whiz-bang innovative, and you would get tons
of free advertising by way of the "best of the web" sites. Who knows,
you might get 1000-10,000 people world-wide to play the game.
(or you might get 25 people :)

If someone uses this idea and makes a million bucks, I hope you will be
kind enough to at least let me play for free.

Greg

-- 
Videogames, Unicycling, and Anarchism: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~galt/