Profiting From “Choose Your Own Adventure Games”

In case you follow the game app market, you would notice that there are “choose your own adventure apps” that are successful with millions of players and are generating a lot of revenues for the creators.

Perhaps the promise of lucrative profits has made you interested in creating your own “choose your own adventure apps” or websites. But don’t proceed yet as there are a lot of things to consider in this kind of software product.

If you Google the search keywords “choose your own adventure app” for example, you would most probably be given by Google a list of successful or popular choose your own adventure game apps.

In case Google doesn’t give you a list, here’s a sample article dated 2017 by Tom’s guide. The article is titled: Best Gamebook Apps. Though the article is clearly dated, I can still see some of the apps featured in the list still popular today.

One of them is 80 Days game app which is patterned around the old novel of Jules Verne titled ”Around The World In Eighty Days”. This app is not only a commercial success but has even garnered some industry awards.

Perhaps you can follow this company’s example of using an old and famous novel as the background storyline for their game app. The idea is actually ingenious. There are many people exposed to the “Around The World In 80 Days” novel.

People read this novel in school especially in their libraries, there are movies made after this novel and so on. So in essence, the game app company has free publicity/advertisement for their game app.

Imagine if other popular novels get turned to similar “choose you own adventure app” or website. I can already see such big novel franchises such as Lord Of The Rings or Game Of Thrones having such apps if they don’t already have them.

But perhaps the biggest success stories in “choose your own adventure type of apps” would be in the romance genre where the players not only number in the million but actually in several millions.

As many in the novel publishing industry already know, the romance genre is the biggest and the most profitable story genre of them all with women accounting for the largest customer base.

Anyone with decent game development programming skills can create these kinds of apps. If by any chance you are not familiar with even the most basic of game development programming, I suggest you get an introduction regarding this programming skill.

App Buttons and Page Layout

But you don’t have to be an expert in game development to program your own “choose your own adventure apps”. You only need to be sufficiently skilled in creating buttons for your apps.

These buttons are what your users would press when they go from one part of the story to another as they make their choices on what the story suggests would be their next action. No app is complete without a button.

One part of the story for example may require the user to select between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in order to proceed to the next part of the story. So this only requires two buttons, a yes and no button. It’s as simple as this.

The same goes for multiple choice questions in a story. The number of buttons just depends upon the number of multiple choice selections.

To be more precise, a page of the story would contain a part of the story and then a question for the user on what they would do next. Then there would be buttons to allow the user to answer the question.

As you can see, this does not require a lot of advanced programming skills. There are even plenty of articles and YouTube videos that teach people how to create their own “choose your own adventure apps” or “how to make an app button” tutorials.

Placing Ads And Other Monetization Methods

To those who have not made an app before in their lives, placing ads and other monetization features in one’s apps could seem daunting and impossible for you to do. But let me assure you, it is possible to learn it with not much effort.

When I first started developing apps, I knew nothing about app programming. But I learned fast thanks to watching YouTube videos about app development. There are specific tutorials in YouTube that teach you what you want to learn about game development.

For our mission of developing “choose your own adventure apps,” you can specifically learn only about making pages and buttons for your apps and then watch specific tutorials on placing ads and other monetization features in your app.

Though there are “choose your own adventure apps” that are successful being only for the most part text based, most of the “choose your own adventure apps” today integrate a lot of illustrations in their pages.

Before I proceed, let me point out to you one specific example of a “choose your own adventure app” that is successful despite being almost fully text based. The name of the game app is Lifeline and is created by the app developer company named Three Minute Games

If you don’t have time to actually download and play the game app let me at least fill you in with the important details about this game app. According to the descriptions online about the game, it is for the most part a text only game.

Based on the comments I read online about the game app, it is the story and the many choices of the user in the flow of the story which attracts the players of the game. This game is proof that you can still be successful even if your game app is not graphics/illustration heavy.

During the early days of the gaming industry, text only games were the norm with such successful titles as “Ultima” managing to gaining a lot of players even though the game was just made up of texts with no illustrations.

But game app players have become jaded. For the most part, “choose your own adventure apps” have to become graphics/illustration heavy in order to be attractive and be noticed by very visual thinking players.

That is why if you are good at digital illustrating, creating these kinds of game apps could be a good activity for you. You can even promote your digital illustrating skills via your game app. If you are not good with digital illustrating, creating such apps can be hard for you.

As I was researching online jobs in writing, I encountered a few job ads from these “choose your own adventure” gaming companies. But they are predominantly from the romance “choose your own adventure” type of gaming apps.

I saw this ad from romance game app company Swag Masha in the Poets and Writers website:

Article: SWAG MASHA: Hiring authors

I did not only saw this ad from this website above but in many other blogging and writers job websites online. It even has its own Google keywords attached to it. The keywords are “swag masha jobs”
This is not only the romance game app company I found online advertising for such writing jobs. There are still one or two more similar companies I found online. From time to time these type of jobs popup online.

Though you may have a specific story in mind that you want to create as a “choose your own adventure app,” I like to talk about the issue of romance stories. As mentioned, romance stories are the biggest and most profitable genre.

Here is an issue from the Global Times which states the popularity of the romance game apps to millions of women in China. The title of the article is quite a long one but very informative:

Article: Why a mobile romance game has managed to sell wet dreams to millions of women in China

Though I strongly suggest that you read the entire article, but if you don’t have the time to read the entire article, here is the summary:

The article is reporting on the romance game app named ”Love and Producer”. The story game is relatively simple, you are a girl who own a production company and you play by interacting with four Chinese suitors: a scientist, a special agent, a CEO and a famous singer.

Sounds like a simple game right? Yet this seemingly simple game app is very lucrative for its creators. The game app has approximately four million active daily users since its debut on December 14, 2017. It has been downloaded over seven million times.

Now let’s go to Japan where similar romance game apps are also popular not only in Japan but worldwide. The full article is titled:

Article: Romancing the Phone: Cozy Up With Voltage's Love Story Apps

According to the article which is dated October 10, 2014, the romance game app company Voltage has several romance game apps which has over 26 million players worldwide. But according to them, their core players are Japanese women aged between 19 to 44 with the majority being in their 30s.

I have also read other online articles which state that romance game apps are not only popular in Asia but worldwide as well. This is the reason why there are many app game development companies entering the industry.

As can be seen from the previous paragraphs, well funded and established companies are major players in this segment of the game app industry. While there’s no harm in trying to see if your game app would be a success, it is important to note what you are going against.

There are literally over a million apps combined in both the Apple and Android app market. There several hundreds of thousands of games in both app markets. Success can be very elusive in trying to stand out from a crowded market.

My suggestion is to test it out yourself and create a simple “choose your own adventure” game app using as little cost to your time and money. Then continue improving it in whenever you can. This way, you won’t be disappointed bad when your app probably does not get popular.

The important thing is that you created your game app already and it would stay at the app stores with only minor updating from time to time required. Whose to say that someday your game app won’t get popular?

Just like romance novels and other lesser popular story genres, romance and other story type “choose your own adventure”game apps are popular especially to women who want to interact with the novels/stories they are reading.

Creating “choose your own adventure” game apps is easy too. You only need to learn how to program pages and buttons as well as the monetization program of the app. It is probably more difficult for you when you create drawing/illustrations of the pages of your game app.

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