>The person to talk to is Graham Cluly, who produced a couple of
>adventure games under the name "Humbug Software" and apparantly managed
>to sell several thousand shareware registrations.
I think it would be a huge mistake to assume that model is still valid
today. We (Adventions) based a lot of our optimism about the market for IF
on Graham's experiences, and found that with a comparable product in a more
portable form and at a lower price, we couldn't get even a fraction of the
interest he did.
There is no commercial market for all-text IF now. And the rapid
evaporation of the text IF market doesn't seem so strange when you take
into account the incredible growth of the web, and the public's infatuation
with so-called "virtual reality". Regardless of whether people know what
"hypermedia" really are, they sure do think they're cool.
>When companies like Sierra can allocate a $4 million budget to games like
>the recent "Phantasmagoria", with more than 50 people working full time on
>the project, what hope do amateurs have?
Financially, none. But I think that single-author forms will always have a
place in the arts. "Art by committee" has a lot working against it.
Dave Baggett
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dmb@ai.mit.edu
"Mr. Price: Please don't try to make things nice! The wrong notes are *right*."
--- Charles Ives (note to copyist on the autograph score of The Fourth of July)