Everyone knows that the text adventure probably won't sell well, if it sells at all. But only a small handful of the team members are working on this game, while the others are doing asset planning for a game we're hoping to start work on this November. Our last game was freeware, Cheney Hunter, and it had 2600 downloads in a little less than a month, so everyone has high hopes now (although I do try to point out that that game was
freeware and people like free stuff, regardless of how crappy it is
The marketing plan: Pitch this game to people who don't really know much about interactive fiction games. Most of us here on the TGC forums who are older than 18 know, love, and cherish text adventures from our youth. We were broken in on classic computers like the IBM PCjr, the Commodore 64, and the Amiga 1000. But there's a whole avenue of potential players out there who have no clue what a text adventure is, and to them, this is all new. One of our team members in particular thinks this game is going to spread like wildfire through one specific market: the "rp" players on Yahoo. I didn't know what this was until he showed me, but basically, these players turn chat rooms into text mmorpgs and fuel it not with graphics, but with their own imaginations. While I disagree entirely and think that these people are doing this because they don't want to dish out money for games (or perhaps they don't think current games are good enough), he thinks some of them will be interested in buying the game. Also, there's the non-gamer market, which another team member is "convinced" we're going to do well in: people who have no clue what a text adventure is, and love to read, and this would bridge that gap. Seriously, I'm the most skeptical person whose working on it, and I'm the one doing most of the work lol
In fact, they wanted to set the price tag higher, around $5.99... I know for a fact we won't sell any units at that price. I wanted to go even cheaper, so this was middle ground for us. I dunno, we'll give it a shot and see what happens. I agree with you guys, but at the same time, I won't know until I try. I know that marketing this game toward IF fans is a sure-shot at failure... but maybe in other markets it will do quite well ("quite well" being anything over, say, 100 units in the first month. "Unbelievably lucky due to divine intervention" being anything over 1,000). I dunno... I'm optimistic, but I'm definitely willing to accept it if this game sinks. And if it does, we'll just give it away for free, lesson-learned
"In an interstellar burst, I'm back to save the universe"
