@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.