The Future of IF

Interactive fiction has been developing over years. Most of it has gone from wrting on paper to computer browsers. I belive that in interaactive fiction could begin to make a push onto the mobile gaming community.  

I think mobile did create a lot of new spaces for Interactive fiction, and there were a number of successes for games that were fundamentally IF, with some really good art direction and a heap of a lot of content and polish.

That push basically already happened, though, in my opinion. I think you can always carve your own lane with an amazing new game, but I think that the "commercial" potential of IF is always going to be in bringing high-quality storytelling to more graphical games.

A few companies have tried to come up with a great mobile platform for IF that connects authors to a good mobile deployment and profit model, but I haven't seen anyone quite accomplish it. There's one person I've seen be moderately successful making Twine games for a Patreon group, but their games are sexual/gender/fetish in nature so I think there's a niche there.

In other words, yes, I think there's a space for commercial IF with some cool art and a concept to support it. And no, I don't think there is going to be a big commercial resurgence of pure Choose Your Own Adventure IF.

Just like early text-based computer adventure games, these gamebooks used the tools of heroic fantasy - dwarfs, goblins, quests and the like - as they both had their roots in insanely popular roleplaying games such as Dungeons and Dragons which arose in the 1970s. Fighting Fantasy books dispensed with the need for friends that made D&D so unwieldy. An American publisher, Wizard Books, re-released the original series of books and is adding new titles every year. The question is, do readers really want the responsibility of driving the narrative, or is that the author's job? Make your choice now...