To dust off a thread where the last post is almost a decade old: there’s an interesting discussion over at Intfiction.org about what it would take to develop a competitor for Choicescript. I thought Dan’s answer was measured and helpful, highlighting the reasons behind some of CS/COG’s often questioned features: How difficult is choicescript to duplicate? - #23 by dfabulich - Authoring - The Interactive Fiction Community Forum
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Yeah, read that, really good insights! And one of the reasons why I am here and not doing something of my own…
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Authors having to go to publishers and accept low royalties (I’m not talking about the industry standard, I’m talking about the imbalance between publisher and author) in order to get their work out there isn’t a match made in heaven, it’s just the way the ecomomy is organized. Workers just have their labor and no workplace, writers just have their words and no audience and employers and publishers can take advantage as they have the ability to get us a workplace/audience.
It’s true that authors wouldn’t be able to get much exposure without publishers but publishers would have nothing to publish without authors. At the end of the day it’s about whose work is creating most of the value and who is taking most of the cut. Most of us authors are putting in hundreds or thousands of hours of work into our games and we deserve a raise in royalties
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As someone who self-published a Twine game, my take on this is: if you have a significant following and you are a well-known author, go for self-publishing. You’ll retain all your earnings without COG taking a cut, but keep in mind you’ll handle support, troubleshooting, and approvals from platforms like Steam, Google Store, and Apple Store.
I enjoyed the self-publishing experience as it taught me a lot. However, for authors with a smaller following seeking to maximize profit, publishing with COG remains the preferred choice, even after they take their cut.
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Not gonna lie; I have been thinking about it. Who wouldn’t want a bigger % share? And I could afford to pay for the license. However, I would need to pay someone to do that anyway; the amount of time it would take me gives me nightmares to think about.
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Hard thing to gauge. What’s the economic value of a work without an audience? The value of Rebels to me is high whether or not I’d sold a single copy, which is why I wrote it. But I don’t think it has an absolute, objective cash value, independent of what other people are willing to pay for it; and putting it in front of more people certainly adds a lot to the cash value of the work.
Of course you’re right that people can reap massive exploitative “rents” by virtue of standing in a gatekeeper role. Robust competition and strong egalitarian values are the only two things I’ve run into that work to keep people from maxing out those rents.
I can’t say for sure whether there’s an element of exploitative rent snagging in CoG’s profit margin or not; I’ve got no idea how profitable they are or how those profits compare to the risk they take on. All I can say is that as an author, I’m personally happy with what I’m getting out of the deal.
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Probably the same as the economic value of a publisher without authors. 
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For traditional books, a huge reason why publishers get the lion’s share they do is because of the risk they take. The cost of creating the books themselves, all the logistics involved in getting them to readers (through bookstores or other retailers), and the advertising as well. There is a lot at risk for them if the book sells poorly, risks that the author themself doesn’t take.
There is no such risk for publishing a choicescript game. There’s a copyeditor, a small database hosting fee for user saves, and the time involved in going through all the app/game publishing menus on the app stores and Steam (which takes a matter of hours, not months of work). That’s not an extensive list of everything involved in the publishing process, but my point is that the monetary risk and time just isn’t comparable. Continual support through emails is definitely something, but it’s minimal risk and cost compared to a misprinted pallet of books.
The CoG/HG business model is one of minimal risk and very low overhead. The long and short of what they offer to authors is a marketplace and a built-in audience. I would argue that by this measure they function more as an app store than a publisher, so instead of a lion’s share, something more like 30% would be appropriate. Perhaps in a future when pigs can fly, we’ll get there!
I do foresee more authors going the self-publishing route in the future, though, and I think there’s a few reasons for this. Open-source tools like Twine are a great example, but even if you wanted to create your own text interpreter from scratch, it’s fewer and fewer chatGPT prompts away. The main problem has and always has been getting an audience, and that’s why I think we’ll see authors start with choicescript then continue their IF writing careers elsewhere.
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That’s what I’m saying.
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The author “needs” the publisher and the publisher needs the author, so those cancel each other out. From there it’s about who put in the work. The authors put in hundreds or thousands of hours of work per title whereas the publisher puts a handful of hours in.
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But that doesn’t correspond to the cash value of the work. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I can put hundreds of hours into a work that very few people actually want to buy. (As I did with the book I ghost-wrote.)
Given that the cash value of a book/game is nothing like an hourly wage, but rather depends on the number of people who both see and like it, any deals struck around that cash value are going to have more to do with audience dynamics than with hours invested.
In general, I think the road to a just economy runs through abandoning the idea that our income needs to be proportionate to hours of hard work, rather than trying to strengthen that idea. Universal Basic Income and all that. The labor theory of value has too many anomalies for me to swallow.
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The labor theory of value just states that the value of something is determined by the amount of socially necessary labor put into it. That’s not saying that income should come from hard labor, it’s saying that labor should be in control of the income: that’s the road to a just economy. Any anamolies I’m sure are just misunderstandings or outliers because it’s a simple and solid theory
I’ll just reiterate that the publisher has nothing to publish without the author. There’s a power imbalance that allows the publisher to decide the terms, which is why the publisher takes the majority of the profit despite the author putting in the majority of the work, but there’s nothing to say that this is a natural or ideal scenario.
Yay, a 9 year old thread has been necro’d and it has capitalism vs socialism undertones. Sign me up!
I read Dan’s post and everything he mentioned crossed my mind before, but I didn’t think about the part about not wanting to give better royalties for HG vs CoG as they want to incentivize people to publish under the CoG label. Since the publishing costs for HG are lower than for a CoG, this may seem unfair to the HG author since the company is taking a lower perceived risk and getting a higher cut (I may be wrong and the costs might be high even for a HG game even if the editing is minimal).
All in all, I think it all comes down to a business decision for the author (whether they make more money/ gain a larger audience through a publisher, or go independent). The fact that the company profits off the author’s labor might seem unfair at first, but if the end results are better than going independent, does it really matter?
I don’t think traditional labor theory applies to art-related stuff, but I’m going to elaborate more on that tomorrow, as I’m a bit sleepy now and don’t think I can muster the words to express the key nuances properly.
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Getting published is better than not getting published but we can at least try to look forward and think about what’s best for the future, not just what’s tolerable under the current circumstances
The costs are certainly higher for a CoG game, but that doesn’t mean the costs for a HG game are insignificant. HG games that get a Steam release get copyediting, and even those that don’t go on Steam require a content review, app store fees, and HG staff time and attention.
I could also make the case that for HG, the risk isn’t so much reduced as redistributed. The bar for publication by Hosted Games is set so extremely low that they regularly publish games that don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of making back their publication expenses - and they pay authors royalties anyway. I can’t think of another business model that includes that kind of guaranteed loss. So without knowing the details of their finances, it’s entirely possible that HG actually couldn’t afford to pay higher royalties to authors even if they wanted to.
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I’ve talked about this a lot over the years, so I’ll just say the short version:
-The business model here is terrific, and there’s not really anything else like it in either traditional publishing or the digital marketplaces.
-That being said, the cut for authors could be higher. I think suggesting they take only 30% is not feasible; app marketplaces don’t do the marketing for you, and CoG does for us on all three labels. Plus, of course, they created the programming language itself. But their overhead for an individual story, especially a HG one, is so low that there’s not much justification in their very sizable share of the net income. In a perfect world I’d want to see author cuts go up 10-15%, maybe as a gradual increase over time to soften the blow. But if we remain in an imperfect world, I’ll probably still be here. I believe in this place and the opportunities it provides. More importantly, and I cannot stress this enough, self-publishing is largely awful and involves doing a lot of distasteful stuff just to carve a space out, which you must scrabble constantly to maintain.
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I agree with you. CoG and HG are still better than some other publishers or trying to self-publish, I just believe that increased royalties for authors is warranted and would be great for author productivity as well.
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That’s why you would implement quality control. Extremely low earners should not determine (drag down) the percentage of royalties that all titles get.
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I don’t know how royalty percentages are determined by the business, but I think making a stricter quality control would put a dent in the mission of Hosted Games - ie to have a barrier to entry for authors that’s as low as possible.
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The question of quality control has been raised in the past and they’ve made it very clear that the low bar was part of their point in founding the company in the first place: anyone can be a game developer. Now, maybe they’ve taken that too far, and that’s a discussion that can be had, but I don’t think that’s something they would (or should have to) significantly budge on, any more than they would budge on their commitment to inclusivity and diversity in CoG.
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