If raising the royalties for Hosted Game authors causes the Choice of Games label to be less attractive to established authors, then that indicates to me that the CoG contracts need to be re-examined. 25% royalties against $10,000 advance is doable for a living wage…in a world back when choicegames were Choice of the Dragon-sized. An author can’t afford to spend over a year and 400k words on that. That is an extreme amount of time, energy, financial risk, and opportunity cost.
I really don’t know much about what CoG offers their authors in terms of editing and support, so I’d rather focus on Hosted Games. For anyone who hasn’t read it recently, check out the link above for a refresher. Hosted Games doesn’t offer authors support. You’re not getting an editor, you’re not getting cover art, a trailer, any sort of promotion outside of the mailer, and you’re certainly not getting any cash advances. You do, however, get content checked by a reviewer and a copyeditor for any errors.
What does this sound like? It sounds like an app marketplace. That’s what Hosted Games is: a platform. And I think that’s fantastic. But no platform, be it Steam, the App Store, or Google Play, takes 75% of royalties. They couldn’t justify it–or get away with it. And so to get to my point, which is very simple: let the royalties reflect what Hosted Games actually is: a platform for choicegames.
I think a large part of the problem this change hasn’t happened yet, though I think we’ll ultimately get there, isn’t because Californians are secretly nefarious. It’s because there’s a lack of incentive to change. More and more authors, often very young with ample amounts of free time, are indulging in writing WIPs that are 300k+ words, and going at it as a hobby they do say during studyhall or in-between college courses.
From what I’ve gathered from HG’s public responses in the past, and this is ultimately just a ‘vibe-check’ from me, but I think the people at Hosted Games justify the royalty imbalance at least in part because it “isn’t intended” to offer an author a living wage, or that it “isn’t intended” to become an income stream for the author to rely on. I don’t think I need to elaborate why this sort of thinking is morally wrong and exploitative, so I won’t.