Hacker News Reader

Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

Is there really enough of a market to warrant all this development, particularly for the commercial releases? How much could they really make?

View on HN

I buy retro games. The creators typically make them as a hobby and a lot of the ones I play are basically text adventures with a simple parser and a few dozen locations with a unique pixel art image for each location. So it costs them nothing but time to make and my purchase helps buy them coffee. With very rare exceptions, these are usually not built with any kind of "studio" or large budget, so profitability is irrelevant. They often just release for free.

The Z Machine and Glulx parsers are not that simple. Ditto with PAWS and clones.

I just checked the games I've played and most of them used a pretty simple verb-noun parser (use keycard), but the latest ones are much more sophisticated as you've pointed out like verb-noun-noun (use keycard with switch) or something like that. Of course I think some use a slimmed down version of Inform7, which should be pretty powerful.

Inform 7 it's the language. The parser comes from the library under Inform6 too and is not that limited, it can accept compund phrases too.

You can just use Inform6 which is OOP oriented and it's very easy to define in game-objects, rooms, attributes such as objects being containers/openable/enterable and such. Setting up basic puzzles it's pretty straightforward.

Market? What an extremely HN comment :-D

I see some games can be bought, but I doubt it's big biz. People do lots of things for shits and giggles and out of pure passion.

Well we are on HN. Odd to me for being downvoted for a question rooted in curiosity.

I’m just trying to understand the motivation. If it’s free then I can understand it’s a hobby. When it’s being charged for, and there are some “studios” pumping out commercial games, then to me it warrants trying to understand more about the game creators. Especially when they’re amiga games.

Not a studio, this is development like it's the 90s. Though development is easier now with modern tools, but just like the 1990s it's something one person can write.

I made a simple retro game out of pure passion and released it for free at itch.io, however I see many good games that sell for low prices. There's definitely a niche market. Alternatively users can also donate or become your patrons. From what I see, if the game is decent and the price is lowish, then it sells quite well. Obviously won't pay your bills, but it's something...

A few hundred, maybe a thousand sales.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com