Uh, I don’t understand what you are trying to say. You didn’t finish this sentence?
In the Google store, The automatic search of Choice of Games doesn’t bring the result of the Omnibus app
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This is the biggest issue from my perspective. Casual users don’t want to download that omnibus. I’ve said this before but it bears reiterating: I wasn’t even able to get many of my friends with Apple products to download my game because of the omnibus. Most people do. not. like. having to download a collection app and make in-app purchases. The sales numbers, at least on my royalties, speak for themselves.
The omnibus needs a lot of work: it’s clunky and slow, and it’s missing several standard qol features such as sorting your purchased library in a way that doesn’t seem utterly random. It often claims that my last played game is a game I’ve never even downloaded too. I reported several bugs and issues like this when it first came out but they’re all still there. I appreciate that sometimes these fixes may be more complicated than they seem to an outside user, but as an Android dev myself, I just don’t understand why it would be difficult to at least sort the purchased games library alphabetically.
This isn’t me trying to be a jerk (honestly I feel nervous even bringing these things up to the people who are essentially my bosses), it’s me wanting both CoG and myself to reach as many people as possible and make good money. The reviews of the omnibus speak for themselves. Also, I agree with the reviewer who said the app needs to be re-titled to something like ‘Choice of Games Omnibus,’ because as a reader without inside knowledge, I’d have no idea what that app is even supposed to be from the title.
I think I mentioned earlier in the thread, but in my opinion (for whatever it’s worth) is that CoG needs to be upfront about the paywall in the store listing. A huge amount of automatic 1-stars are from people who downloaded it thinking it was free and getting immediately pissed off because of what they feel is deception. This is easily remedied. Will being upfront about costs after the free chapters result in fewer downloads? Absolutely. But we’ll have a higher ratio of quality downloaders, and our ratings won’t be tanked by new users 1-starring it because they felt deceived.
The lack of localization anger is something I don’t understand though. Why would they assume that a game advertised in English would be in their language? I wouldn’t download an app advertised in Chinese… I guess this is just me admitting ignorance here.
I’m starting to come around to it due to Google’s fuckery, but I think it needs a lot of work before it’s a truly viable alternative… and in my opinion the individual releases are still essential, even if they’re harder to maintain a good score in now.
Know what’s scary? I didn’t even know there was a Hosted Games omnibus until just now. That’s how buried it is and confusing to find. And I spend a stupid amount of time watching these things.
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I understand that I personally don’t like the omnibus app and is really not a practical experience for me. But I think for an author more choices mean more revenue and visibility.
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It is actually mentioned on the storefront. Just not in the initial short description they have to expand it to see the message.
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What if they screenshot this part of the game.
I often look at the pictures before downloading.
Would that help?
Interesting thought it had been added to all of the games
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i actually tried the ómnibus and is not so bad, i think you guys are doing an excellent work, is true that for people like me that are only playing this last years few games… since im not interested at all in a lot of the games that have recently been reléase i prefer a standalone game rather than a bundle App with all game but since u actually dont need to download all games i think is not so bad.
btw as for the reviews i did prefer the games when it was with the Price, nowadays a lot of people see that they can download the game and think that are free for that only reason.
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FWIW the individual games are only downloaded when you click on them to play. Therefore, your phone doesn’t automatically hold all the games and thereby waste your space.
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That actually reminds me of a question I keep forgetting to ask: Is there a way to delete those games that have been downloaded in the omnibus when you’re done?
Not currently, but that’s a reasonable feature request.
I’d say send an email to Dan.
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The ratio of sales to downloads is less significant for decision-making than the total number of sales. As authors we presumably wouldn’t want CoG to take steps that improved the former if it was at the expense of the latter. 
Hypothetically, if the people who feel betrayed by only being warned post-download are outnumbered by buyers who wouldn’t have considered buying the game before sampling it for free, and if CoG sales aren’t enormously sensitive to each 0.1 shift in ratings, it would make sense to continue with an approach that annoyed a vocal minority.
Last time I heard, CoG’s approach was based on ongoing platform-specific analysis of what approach actually sells the most games. I imagine they’ll test their assumptions again in light of Google’s new rating algorithm.
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It’s about a long-game, especially considering the changes to the rating algorithm. Now that new 1-star ratings are significantly more important, I think this warrants a second look.
It’s impossible to determine the number of people who wouldn’t have considered buying the game before sampling it for free, and, more importantly, that demographic doesn’t necessarily entirely overlap with ‘people who would never have tried it if we’d been upfront about it being essentially a demo before downloading.’ Those aren’t the same thing. And a 0.1 shift is huge, especially when you get closer to 3.9. Many gamers don’t even bother downloading a game under 4.0 unless there’s something very appealing about it, myself included. With this new algorithm, some great CoG games like Choice of Magics are now under 4.0, which quite concerning because it could happen to any of us at any time.
Hopefully, because I strongly believe that marketing it as free and not disclosing the cost pre-download is going to hurt more now that new scores are given significantly more weight.
But I could be totally wrong, which is why I absolutely agree with you that analysis is needed. Unfortunately, that will take several months of scrutiny, but that’s just life, I suppose. Ideally Google wouldn’t have changed the damn algorithm, but they’re never happy unless they’re messing with things that weren’t broken.
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I definitely agree.
Absolutely–you can’t know the counter-factual on any of these things. All you can do (I reckon) is try different approaches to marketing and selling games, and see which seem to actually be associated with higher total sales over time.
That doesn’t rule out the possibility that you’d have sold even more of a given game by some other approach… but over time, a trend may emerge that gives you reasonable confidence. (Until Google flips the table.) I know CoG does this kind of analysis, and though I don’t know the results, I’m confident they’d not deliberately leave sales on the table.
Not all markets are hypersensitive to ratings. CoGs with fewer one-stars don’t necessarily sell better; it’s easy for me to believe that a given sales approach might attract enough annoyed reviewers to drop a game’s rating from 4.7 to 4.5 and still sell more copies at the end of the day.
But yes, I agree that under a new algorithm where the drop could be more like 4.7 to 4.0, all previous bets are off.
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Then the freemium market is destroying many casuals awareness of cost making games and how a game should cost.
For instance A life of Mercenary. In Spanish reviews, there are dozens that of course moaning about Why is not in Spanish? Make it in Spanish!! Several just outright complaints about Why they ask for money? or then they add advertising that is everywhere and is super annoying … Then He asked where are the images and who will pay for something that hasn’t images
It is something I have noticed and I think is not only in the Spanish market. The entitlement of games Has to be free and have millions of features and graphic demands even if it is commercialized as a gamebook or a text. adventure.
They demand more and more languages. More images More save points…
But of course, they won’t pay a dime for it. They may believe that translations and games are produced and pay By Titania the queen fairy for free in the land of unicorns.
Then @jasonstevanhill how bad results give translate Choice of Dragon? Because I think it wasn’t really rentable.
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Under this new system how does edited reviews work? Are they considered a new review? I’m wondering if someone rated it low due to a bug but rated it higher after the bug is fixed.
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I wonder where was the translated Choice of Dragon even released? I don’t remember ever seeing a spanish version on the Play Store. Maybe the problem was just that it didn’t have enough visiblity?
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It’s not a separate app, it’s a language feature within the app.
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I see. Then I assume it didn’t bring the massive raise in downloads you were expecting. Maybe it’d help mentioning the language choice feature in the description? I mean since the description is in english and all other games from the developer are in english only then I wouldn’t even think of trying to look for a language setting. Idk, just throwing out ideas here…
Edit: Also I was quite surprised now that I checked the description to find out that this had only 30k word count. Still didn’t feel “too short” when I played it.
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