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Commercial Twine projects?

mostly uselessmostly useless
in Chit-Chat
Does anyone know of any commercial ventures built in Twine? Just curious.

Comments

  • xaxxax
    I guess it depends on how you're defining "commercial", but my friend Eva is selling her Twine game, SABBAT, (that link is SFW but the actual game is definitely NSFW) and is making some commercial success from it. I don't know of many other Twine games that have price tags attached, but I'd guess that SABBAT isn't the first one.
  • mostly uselessmostly useless
    I followed the link, it's a hell of a pitch! Is she simply selling the web page and emailing it to the customer? I'm also very interested in how well she's doing from it, but I'd of course understand if she didn't want to talk about that.
  • xaxxax
    Apparently the way itch.io is set up is that you can upload a file there, and it'll handle the payment process and link buyers to the file, which in this case is a .zip with the twine story + all the other assets.

    ...and speaking of how much she's making, she literally just posted an update on her tumblr.
  • mostly uselessmostly useless
    Thanks for the info, xax. Does anyone know of any others? I've seen mentions of commercial Twine use all over, but no actual examples besides Sabbat.
  • LiyamuLiyamu
    Read about one the other day (link is safe for work, game is [NSFW]): http://indiegames.com/2013/10/pc_pick_consensual_torture_sim.html
  • CoraBlueCoraBlue
    Didn't a Twine game just get Greenlit on Steam? Depression Quest?
  • mostly uselessmostly useless
    Yes, but it's free.
  • MikeHartMikeHart
    Sorry to dig out an very old topic. My question is, can games made with Twine be released commercially on Steam or any other store? Or does Twine's license not allow this?
  • starvingindiestarvingindie
    There are two Twine games that I know of on Steam: This Book Is A Dungeon and Depression Quest. So, yes you can release games commercially.
  • MikeHartMikeHart
    Thanks for the info.
  • TheMadExileTheMadExile
    Usage rights are a condition of the license of the story format, not the compiler—i.e. Twine's license has nothing to do with it. AFAIK, no story format has a license which prohibits commercial use.

    That said, do make sure that you do read the license of your chosen story format, however, as they do have terms/conditions which you must adhere to, lest you violate the license.
  • GondolaGondola
    Sorry to necro, but I decided to look into this myself. The best I can come up re; legality of commercial use is this - it depends on whether a game made with Twine has components of Twine build-in.

    Twine itself is licensed under GPL v3. This license prevents commercial distribution of the software (eg; trying to sell Twine) via 'copyleft', but the nature of Twine HTML files makes commercial use rather complicated and it's unclear if the output has parts of Twine built-in (eg; the bits that are used to play the game other than the code itself).

    If it the answer is 'no', then there's no problem; you're sweet - but you might want to obfuscate the source code in some way, since ANYONE can download said html files and use them to modify and output their own versions of your game. I suspect that's by design to prevent such uses of the game.

    If 'yes', then commercial Twine games potentially break the GPL license and thus potentially suable by the author of Twine (if they so wish, of course). And yes, obfuscating the game's code would also be a breach of the license, were this the case.

    I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice, etc etc but yeah, that's what I'm able to decipher.
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