Is interactive fiction still popular?

Interactive fiction is still active and quietly popular, though it is a niche rather than a mainstream category. Its community releases dozens of new games every year, the annual Interactive Fiction Competition has run since 1995, and choice-based storytelling reaches large audiences through mobile apps and narrative video games. What changed is the shape of it: fewer people type parser commands, and more play click-based branching stories on phones and in browsers. The tools got easier, which brought in writers who would never have coded a parser game. So interactive fiction is not the mass hobby it briefly was in the 1980s, but it is far from dead, and it is arguably easier to make and share now than ever. Browser play removed most of the old friction.