text games aren't that popular.
No. But it need some clarifications and asterisks. Its like saying 'match 3 is unpopular, literally dead genre'...but than you remember that Candy Crush Saga one of is the most popular games in the world....open google play with a three and a half metric fuckton (that is like a weight of seventy five football fields filled to the brim with a corgi dogs) of match 3 games (currently the most hyping is Royal Match) and so on.
Yes, pure text games, where all you can see is a white letters in a completely black window of console, with a cursor in insert mode blinking at the end, is indeed not so popular
at current time. Colossal cave adventure, with it "With what? Your bare hands?", is a good example from the past that is still fun to play even today.
Nowadays most of a text based games is text
driven. coc 2 have standing portraits for all characters, plus some inlines. Original CoC had 8 bit sprites. No a lot, yes, but it is makes obvious who are you fighting against imp, goblin, etc. So text games just 'evolved'.
One of the evolution branch is visual novellas. They literally called 'visual' (images) and 'novellas' (text), so I wont be inquiring further here. Recent Slay the princess VN is a good example of it. It have all necessary thing for a game, art, music, and even a voice acting. But it still a text game, which you can 'beat' by spamming 'number 1'. Just like in CoC, coc2, TITS and so on.
You can check the success of that 'aren't that popular game'
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. Yes, it is mostly a deviation from the popularity of text games, mostly because it plays with....should I spoil it here?...it is not like anybody would actually play it...watch a hour long youtube essay about it.
Another example of text games is CYOA like games for phones. I am not that poor to use Iphone so I will be talking about Android.
Grim Quest and Grim Tides are good
examples. As
games they kinda meh. They advertised like an 'old school RPG', and there are RPG elements in it. But stats of a character, aside from health and sanity, and maybe crit chance, means little to nothing. Its still possible to break the game with potions and buffs but that is completely different story.
Back to the games, they are very sparse for content. Something like 15 weapons and armors, huge rosters of enemies but most of them feels the same (Spider that poisons on level one with 30 health and spider that poisons on level ten with 90 health have exactly the same strategy '
shoot at it until it dies').
Regardless, they can be considered a really popular games. Its much harder to determine mobile games income, since they are free to play, with in app purchases and ads that gifts player...50 gold IIRC, but
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is the
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to them. There are also a Windows ports in Steam
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and
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but they are much less popular, comparing with 'original' games.
So yes, text driven games is not as popular as Hat Fortress 2 or Case Opener: Global Offense, or that one recent 'anti SJW' Wukong game. But they still popular enough to have their own market. I should define market in terms of 'investing capabilities' but that is way to huge step away from the topic.
Oh, and about
pornographic text driven games...People dont want to read. People dont want to wait. They want
HORNI. And they want it
NOW. I know, shocking discovery, but thats the fact.
In other words, people launches coc 2/CoC/TITS/Lilith Throne/Love and Corruption/Degrees of Lewdity/Monster Girl Dreams/Lust Doll Plus/Driad Quest/Debauchery in Calia Kingdom/etc not because of a well defined characters that speaks on shakesperean language like
but to get off on a 'his immense spear pierced her soft mounds and began stretching them' not to read wall of texts about hardness of living in society if you are an orc in the elf city.
