CoG/HG business model

It results in increased sales, but plummets the ratings because some people feel “cheated.”

I personally like the dual app approach (Lite/Demo and full straight up paid version) used by many other app store apps.
Could this perhaps work for COGames?

I think just having an online demo is perfect. That way people can try out, but can’t leave 1 ratings because they don’t get something for free.

@Nocturnal_Stillness
I was just about to suggest that. @jasonstevanhill : have you and the others thought about including a link to the free online demo inside of the paid app’s description? It’d be a way of still getting a lot more people to purchase the gamebooks, but at the same time keeping the ratings from going down.

Reading through the reviews, it seems like most reviewers felt more cheated by the fact that the amount the reviewers paid for wasn’t worth the money, rather than being cheated by the fact that they had to pay at all (though I did see one exception).

I think the problem is more with the trial cutoff placement in NOLA is Burning and (especially) Rock Star than the pricing scheme itself.

@havenstone said this in the NOLA discussion thread:
Re the HG-CoG quality gap, I agree with Nocturnal_Stillness that feedback makes a huge difference (one reason I was determined to get my own CoG WiP thoroughly vetted on the forums at an early stage!).

But I also think the “professional author” thing reduces the likelihood of a CoG meeting forum criteria for a great game; if I actually have to pay the bills by writing, I’m going to write simpler games (in either linearity or duration) than a totally uneconomical labor of love like Tin Star, ZE, or Sabres.

I’d of course be delighted to be proved wrong by Allen, Jim or Paul telling me that they’ve made enough for a living wage relative to the time they put into their games…

To which @cataphrak responded:
@Havenstone I’m holding out until Mecha Ace comes out before I provide a definitive answer to that question, but making $12 000 (Thanks weak Canadian Dollar!) for eight months of writing and art seems pretty okay to me.

Then again, I’m a university student living in a basement suite with his girlfriend. I may not have the highest standards for “living wage”.

To which I have this to say:
@cataphrak You’re an idiot.

Now, you’re an idiot that’s going to help COG prosper. But you’re an idiot all the same.

Why do I say that? Because you took the 10k option, and then gave us a 250k word game. (So, yes, @antiero is an idiot in the same way.) Which means that you value yourself at .04/word, whereas what we contracted you for was worth
$.167/word. In other words, you value work at less than 25% of how we value you.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy that you’re happy. And we’re happy with your game. We think that it will turn a nice profit and it will help us to build our brand and our company. But I hope that, next time around, you value your time more highly.

On the flip side, you’re also making our life difficult in some ways, because professional authors who are more sensitive to cents-per-word counts turn in games that are (much) closer to the 60k word minimum, and you make them look bad. I mean, yes, it is possible to make a great game in 60k words (remember: Broadsides is only 45k, and Dragon is 23k), but we don’t yet have a bunch of authors producing truly awesome games of 60k words.

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Personally, I prefer to consider how much I make based on money earned/hour, as opposed to money/word. Seeing as I write as a rate of 600-700 words an hour, working part-time (seeing as I wasn’t able to commit full-time past December, thanks to having an 18-credit course load), and even taking into account the time spent editing and adding bells and whistles (though not responding to feedback, that’s something I unconditionally enjoy), that’s still about $18-$20 an hour, doing something I love doing, with the added bonus of building my name and reputation as a professional writer.

Sure as hell beats retail.

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Taking the $10K option is not necessarily foolish, if you care a lot about having the money sooner than later. More generally, I try to avoid calling anyone an “idiot” who has done a lot of work to make us money. :slight_smile:

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So why would you take the 10k option then if you don’t mind me asking?

$18-20 an hour counts as a living in my book. ($12,000 for 8 months, not so much, but hey, part time). And making the pros look bad? Priceless.

I wonder how long it takes “the average CoG” to hit $10K in royalties to the author. I imagine it takes well over a year for most games; but I could be wrong.

Jason: insulting the talent? There’s a word for that… let me see if I can think of it…

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@Havenstone
It’s okay, he asked me for permission first. :slight_smile:

As I mentioned in my reply to his e-mail, being satisfied with a $12k payout could be seen as unambitious, and at my age, lack of ambition might as well be synonymous with idiocy. That being said, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working on Mecha Ace’s contract, and when Guns of Infinity is finished, I’d love to do another one.

And fyi, I decided to take the 10k contract because I needed to pay my tuition and still be able to make rent. If I took the royalty option, I’d have to apply for massive student loans, and I’m pretty proud of not having to resort to that.

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I actually considered the 10k over royalties for my CoG title. Guaranteed money is still guaranteed. The best CoG titles sell 10,000+ units but the others may sell 4-5k units. It can take several years at 17.5% royalties to equal $10k. Of course, I only have ZE sales to use as comparison, and let’s just say I value ZE for exposure not money.

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Orpheus Ruse is 1,000-5,000 units on Google Play, so let’s say 3,000 there, 2,000 on iPhone, maybe 1,000 on Chrome/Amazon, +20% international sales. At $3, that’s $3780 in a year to the writer. Maybe, those are conservative numbers but I’d say the average app sells 8,000 units in its first year.

Orpheus is kind of a unique game though. If you have a game that people say, “Oh cool it’s about surviving the zombie apocalypse!”, “Oh cool it’s kind of like fantasy Vampire Hunter D!”, “Oh cool it’s like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The X-Files!” then you might get more people buying it. Orpheus is like…“Oh hey…I get to…take over people’s bodies…because…I’m a…psychic…and…what?”

I’m only guessing but if the sales on that one are particularly lower it’s probably because its a bit harder to understand what the game is going to be about. I bought it and thought it was pretty good, but you know…going by the crazy reviews players have written on better games…I can only guess that’s probably why the numbers are lower.

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Yes, ORPHEUS is what we would call a “high-concept” game. I think it’s really well done, but the concept is hard to communicate effectively.

Paul Gresty is working on another game in the same world, called MetaHuman, Inc. He submitted about 50% of the game last week. There are some design issues that need to be addressed, but I think the game will be a little more accessible than ORPHEUS. You’re a division head that suddenly becomes CEO of a huge multinational corporation that’s busy developing sorcery/cutting edge technology; you have to deal with typical corporate shenanigans (employee embezzlement, workplace romances gone sour) while trying to fend off the sinister “majority shareholders” and figure out what happened to the previous CEO. Still high concept, but “CEO of evil multinational corporation” is a little easier to understand than “ring of body-hopping industrial spies.” (And, to clarify, you don’t have to be evil in MetaHuman, but changing corporate culture is hard.)

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You had me at CEO. Man I’m easy.

For those of you paying attention at home:

As has long been disclosed, we’ve had problems with advertising providers. MobClix went bankrupt. After that (last August?), we began transitioning to Burstly. Unfortunately, Burstly was purchased by Apple, and their advertising arm was shuttered. (Their TestFlight software, unrelated to their advertising arm, really deserved to be bought by Apple; it just sucks that we started the transition about three months before they got bought. This is, if you remember, exactly what happened to us with AdMob and Google about three years ago.)

We have now begun testing MoPub as an ad mediator. We’re hoping to roll out patches for Dragon and NOLA with MoPub (and using house ads in Dragon to advertise NOLA) next week. If everything goes as planned (which is not guaranteed; their dashboard is pretty opaque, and their response time to inquiries is slow), we’ll be able to start rolling out MoPub to the other games.

Not that advertising revenue was ever anything significant, but it’d be nice for some of the old Hosted Games to start generating some revenue again.

It sounds like a good idea. A quick google reveals that MoPub is owned by Twitter, who are very keen to increase their (comparatively tiny) share of mobile-ads revenue, so it seems extremely unlikely that this company will go bankrupt (or be closed down, or sold off) anytime soon… It looks as safe a bet as any. Good call - and thanks for keeping us informed. :slight_smile:

@JasonStevenHill I noticed on another thread you mentioned that it was possible for a game submitted as a Hosted Game to be accepted as a Choice of Game. While it’s not happened yet I’m sure there’s a few writers who have their fingers crossed and are hoping to be the first one.

Would you accept a game that’s had a public link posted, and undergone an open, not closed, beta-test?

This is all just theoretical curiosity.

@FairyGodfeather an open beta-test wouldn’t factor into that decision.