Thank you, Ben! I’m curious to learn more about Plotopolis. Many years ago I was hired to design games for Facebook messenger and I always thought texting was a unique space for games. I’m guessing you agree?
Yes - I think texting games could be magical. I researched implementing Plotopolis on text/sms, but services (like Twilio) are prohibitively expensive for the kind of volume I wanted to do. I do think there's a lot of potential for chat apps>
You get for free: 1) notifications, 2) persistent presence, 3) where the audience is
On the other hand, I've found explaining the concept fairly challenging to anyone who's not tech-inclined, and payment (subscription/etc) might be challenging, if we go that way.
We'll see! ... so far this is an experiment, but I'm going to run hard with it to see how we do.
The company I was working for decided to make their own game chat app with the hope of charging for access to games or choice options within games, like what Choices and Stories do. They were also pursuing branded content. I wrote a tie-in text game to the magician film Now You See Me. So yeah, there are lots of possibilities. Excited to see where you take it!
Thanks for the mention (The Whale's Keeper). Great newsletter - and of course I loved Fix Your Mother's Printer.
Thank you, Ben! I’m curious to learn more about Plotopolis. Many years ago I was hired to design games for Facebook messenger and I always thought texting was a unique space for games. I’m guessing you agree?
Yes - I think texting games could be magical. I researched implementing Plotopolis on text/sms, but services (like Twilio) are prohibitively expensive for the kind of volume I wanted to do. I do think there's a lot of potential for chat apps>
You get for free: 1) notifications, 2) persistent presence, 3) where the audience is
On the other hand, I've found explaining the concept fairly challenging to anyone who's not tech-inclined, and payment (subscription/etc) might be challenging, if we go that way.
We'll see! ... so far this is an experiment, but I'm going to run hard with it to see how we do.
and I should add the caveat that while chat platforms is 'where the audience is', connecting with that audience is going to be an interesting hurdle.
The company I was working for decided to make their own game chat app with the hope of charging for access to games or choice options within games, like what Choices and Stories do. They were also pursuing branded content. I wrote a tie-in text game to the magician film Now You See Me. So yeah, there are lots of possibilities. Excited to see where you take it!