A good point – and it’s also worth us all remembering CoG’s strong desire not to be a vanity press. That’s directly relevant to the suggestions upthread that CoG could withhold royalties (or offer less favorable royalty rates, though I recognize that’s not quite the same proposal) until a HG has paid for its costs.
Looking back today to what Jason wrote there, a couple of things jump put at me. First, because it’s also come up in this thread:
Hustler’s written above calling that a “myth”… and I can well believe both 2017 Jason and 2024 Matt. The “everything’s eventual” mindset and business models based on it make sense when you’re confident that the business is going to last a long time. That sure wasn’t clear back in 2017.
From the outside it looks like it’s truer now – a platform with a bunch of hits, an extended deal with a valuable IP holder that should yield more of the same, more employees, a longer track record of survival. But we don’t see the business numbers, and if they’re more fragile than they look to a casual observer, CoG’s wise not to share them. I’m broadly a fan of transparency (hence my active participation in threads like these) but bank runs have their analogies in the small business world; there are plenty of cases where a business would have survived but for a short-term crisis of confidence that caused its suppliers and other key stakeholders to pull back and take a wait-and-see attitude.
And even a business on stable financial footing today faces the risk of disruption tomorrow. All of us who are earning royalties from CoG/HG should be keen for them to be here in another ten years, and thus for them to be hedging against shocks. In part, they do that by not locking themselves into contracts on the bleeding edge of what they can (today) afford. The idea that “a business that isn’t maximizing distributions to its key stakeholders is culpably inefficient” is wrong whether it’s being delivered by the WSJ looking at investors or labor activists looking at workers. Maximium efficiency is brittle and failure-prone.
The closely-entangled CoG and HG business models (changed the thread title to reflect that) are just different enough to increase the overall resilience of the business. The set of shocks that can hit a small publishing house isn’t identical to the shocks affecting an open platform for choicegames. A downturn in one business might not need to lead to contraction or closure if the other sibling business is able to pick up more of the slack. (There are of course limits to how much one legally distinct company can support another, but there are enough options available that I think the broader point is valid.)
So whether we write for CoG or HG, we should be cheering on the health of the other side of the business. This links into what @Dvalor53 has been writing above about the ecosystem of CoG/HG, and how business decisions that seem to be clearly optimal for one side might not be the best when we look at both.
That cuts both ways, though. Dan’s been clear that right now, decisions are mostly being made looking at the CoG side of the ecosystem–the business up front rather than the party in the back. (I’m not sure yet whether I prefer Jason’s coffeeshop to Dan’s mullet.) And I get that. When you look at how the business has grown and the snapshots of their thinking that Jason and Dan have given over the years, here’s how the “evolution of the business model” story reads to this outside observer:
- ad-supported open platform making beer money
- pay-to-play (after getting kicked off AdSense) struggling to even provide a job for the founders, since it’s mostly attracting hobbyists and people who take forever to finish a game in their spare time, not full-time writers
- publishing house model (advances and royalties) brings in pro writers who massively grow the audience (starting with Zach Sergi, and yes I know every forum we have is now full of vocal anti-fans, but the Heroes Rise trilogy was a game-changer, and still holding down the #3 and #4 spots on the May '23 CoG bestseller list)
The book-publisher model and that side of the business has also clearly made possible another, more recent big jump in audience size and business sustainability: licensed IP. (Hello, #2, #10, and #13 on the bestseller list, most probably in higher ranks by now!) IP holders want to partner with an established publisher, one that’s been around for a while and looks like it’ll continue to be. The “open choicegame platform” alone would not have any WoD games on it.
I’m 100% sure the CoG team continue to work to bring in new IP, in ways we won’t hear about unless/until they succeed. We should all be cheering that on; and it can only be done through the publishing-house side of the business. (And btw, for the many CoG/HG fans who hated SotS but loved any of the other Vampire CoGs: IP holders care about the profile-raising effect of things like Nebula nominations too. So try to give at least a tiny cheer for the success of a game you didn’t like, because it makes it more likely that we’ll get more that you do.)
With all that recognized, it’s easy, and maybe ultimately justifiable, to treat the CoG publishing house as the core business–the keystone species of this ecosystem–and the HG platform as a secondary benefit made possible by the continuing success of the core business. Keep HG as healthy as you can, but not by any means that puts strain on the keystone.
But maybe the business model story needs another key turning point:
- The increased audience brings in ever more good and popular non-pro authors to the HG side, who write a growing string of blockbusters that put pretty much all the CoG games in the shade, income-wise.
That’s a hypothetical. I know a lot of HG fans think it’s obviously true; from my more skeptical perspective, none of us have any real idea how Choice of Robots and the -havens (Way and ZE Safe) compare to each other in sales. But the now well-documented fact that my #5 CoG has significantly undersold Malin’s #9 HG gives the hypothetical a jump in plausibility.
Historically, CoG’s steady success and string of big hits anchored HG’s much more erratic performance – especially back before it was clear that the overall business was viable enough for an “everything’s eventual” long tail to reduce the number of truly unprofitable HGs to negligible numbers. But for the last few years, has HG been the core moneymaker whose even bigger string of hits anchors the publishing house, rather than vice versa?
And if so, with royalties calibrated to the needs of the publishing house, are we getting too close to what 2017 Jason said CoG was keen to avoid?
Of course that’s not literally true even for a vanity press; it’s a question of exploitative terms. And whether the terms are exploitative here looks very different depending on whether we see CoG or HG as the keystone species/anchor business.
In closing [sighs of relief all round]: giving CoG authors the option of a higher-royalties-no-advance contract would absolutely increase risk to the CoG authors who chose it, but also increase returns to those who were willing to accept that risk. I don’t think most folks would suspect CoG of trying to push risk onto its authors, Dan, especially as you keep offering more generous advance terms and actively encourage pro authors to take them! Rather, it would open up the option to boost HG rates without creating an incentive clash with the CoG half of the system.
Maybe it sounds like I’m trying to angle for a better future deal for myself as a high-selling CoG label author, but (a) I am genuinely delighted with the generous terms CoG took the initative to offer me for XoR 2, and (b) I’m not at all confident that future XoR games will hit the bestseller list. Sure, I’ll write the best games I possibly can, but they sell based on luck, not just quality; reversion to the mean is a thing, and the mean CoG sales are low and variable enough that CoG advances are a terrific deal. If Pon Para 2 can end up on the underrated games list, I’m confident that Rebels 2 and subsequent sequels might too.
No: the key reason I’m gently advocating for giving CoG authors the higher-royalties-no-advance option is that I think it could improve the health of the HG side of the system. And whether HG really has become the current anchor business, finance-wise, or is just an equally (or near-equally; I don’t think any lower assessment is plausible) important contributor to our ecosystem’s overall success, I think that’s worth doing.