Then. A Dark Room went viral.
I suspect the author's lack of subsequent success with his other games stems from his apparent lack of curiosity about exactly how his first and only lucky break took place.
I suspect the author's lack of subsequent success with his other games stems from his apparent lack of curiosity about exactly how his first and only lucky break took place.
The problem is that the OP here didn't write it. They ported it to mobile.
So they haven't yet actually created a game like this, they've just made some changes to an existing one that was already insanely popular and reaped the rewards for it.
Story-based incrementals are still incredibly popular in the incremental games community, and another good one will do quite well. It's very, very hard to charge for them, though, because nobody trusts them to be any good until after they've played it to the end.
So you basically have to make a free one and hope it takes off, and then charge for the mobile port of it.
I completely agree. It's not like he wrote a 300 page book on the whole ordeal or anything. He didn't spend those 300 pages trying desperately to dissect every single day, tweet, email, news post, and website write up between 11/17/2013 and 04/13/2014. Nor did he try to analyze his other assets/how they correlated back to A Dark Room. Now... if he put that kind of effort into understanding A Dark Room's meteoric rise, then maybe his subsequent endeavors would have succeeded. At least he would have been more deserving of those successes.