I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on adjusting the royalties based on the quality of the game, or rather, how well it performs. I saw someone mention earlier a potential for authors of particularly successful games to renegotiate their rate.
The reason I ask is because, in theory, it would be more incentive to really prioritize their writing and, more importantly, would make doing so financially feasible. I may be misremembering, but didn’t the author of CCH and some other games have to basically retire because it was taking too much of his time and he couldn’t write all the time because it wasn’t feasible? If I’m remembering that correctly, that is absolutely horrible. Obviously we can’t control how hard life will kick some people in the teeth, but theoretically a policy like this would make the better writers more capable of continuing to do what they love (and continue to make the company money).
That wasn’t quite it. He always did have a career and wrote for HG on the side, but he got a new job opportunity that didn’t leave him with as much time and energy for side projects.
And for what it’s worth, very few writers, for HG, CoG, or traditional publishing, can afford to write full-time. Allowing even reasonably successful authors to write full time is not a reasonable expectation of any publisher.
An average writer in Finland earns ~2 300 ~1 700 EUR (sorry, I was looking the old numbers - it’s decreased in five years) a year from books, which is less than the average salary per month for those with full-time middle-class jobs, good luck trying to live with that. I could imagine the market in English is a bit bigger though.
Authors get about 10% of the net revenue that their work produced (or less, for authors whose publishers have physical production costs) after the publisher, markets, and government have taken their share so it’s no wonder it’s almost impossible to write full time. I don’t think the solution is for authors to work five times as hard or be five times as lucky in order to write full time like is required in the current system.
I think the obvious and most fair solution would be for the markets, publishers, and governments to take smaller shares instead. Reorganise the distribution of revenue so authors have more incentive and resources to write the stories that create the industry and the art in the first place
Oh no, that’s not what I meant. I just meant that they would be able to devote more time to it if it paid better. Like a part-time job, rather than a hobby.
Edit: Just realized that I did technically say full-time in my original post. Changed that to “all the time.”
I would suspect that the finansiel side of going to patreon has more to do with wanting to get money while they make their projects, than how much they’ll earn when it is done.
Considering how many of those projects haven’t updated (publicly at least) for years, the cynic in me wants to say that they are fully aware that they’ll never finish, so getting more royalties won’t be a motivating factor.
I’d also guess that wanting more ‘full’ control of the look and content of their games (and a save feature, which should be less of a problem now), is more important in the change to twine and itch.
Kind of, maybe? But while I think the labor theory of value is fallacious, I also don’t share the capitalist perspective that no deal where both parties are satisfied should be considered exploitative, unjust, or morally unsatisfactory. To me, the whole thing seems too complex for sloganeering or easy side-taking.
Because a bunch of you are actually friends, I’m going to bore the socks off you with a biographical excursus into the main events that have personally shaped my thinking on economic justice. But I’m going to tuck it behind a cut so it’s easily skippable.
Joel's ongoing economic education
Part of my college financial package was a work-study job as a dishwasher in the dining hall. When the college worker union went on strike for a better deal, I was broadly unsympathetic; the wages seemed pretty high to me already, by comparison to my (crap) jobs at TGIF and Ruby Tuesday – to say nothing of the poverty I’d grown up with in Nepal, where my dad had worked for a decade as an engineer on charitable hydropower development. The wages at my college seemed better than “fair,” by the standards of my thrifty Midwestern immigrant roots. On some level, I was thinking, “If you’re not happy with what you’re offered, just go find a better job elsewhere.” I was a kid who had no idea what that actually entailed.
A couple of years later I’d moved to New York and was supporting myself as a temp while I tried to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. My quick typing skills got me gigs at a bunch of law firms, and I got to see the jaw-dropping amounts of wealth sloshing around in the offices of e.g. Freshfields Bruckhaus Derringer. I eventually got a part-time secretary job at a class-action firm, where again I got to see huge amounts of money being thrown around on unnecessary stuff. The team there worked hard, but their compensation wasn’t a function of their hard work–it was a function of where they sat in the economy, able to extract millions of dollars from settlements that would give millions of other people a few bucks of compensation. They had competitors, all of whom enjoyed the same structural advantage, all of whom similarly burned money on expensive parties, meals, limos, etc. etc.
I was seeing firsthand how contrary to laissez-faire rhetoric, “the market” couldn’t be counted on to dole out punishment for inefficiency–that real markets had geometries that allowed people with the right perch to claim huge rents. It offended my thrifty Midwestern sensibilities way more than anything I’d ever seen from a union. Indeed, I soon realized I’d been dismally wrong to begrudge workers the chance to push for better terms, because that kind of organized push was a key way to dislodge money from the pinch points where small numbers of managers and capital owners would otherwise collect it.
Meanwhile, 9-11 pushed me off the fence into my dad’s footsteps and the international development sector, aiming to be a constructive part of the Afghanistan response. My first job there was with USAID agriculture projects. Thanks to the Gore/Clinton “Reinventing Government” push, these were now being implemented by for-profit contractors, on the pretext of injecting market efficiencies into US foreign aid.
What I saw (and wrote about) during my years there was a system that was anything but efficient–because just introducing the profit motive doesn’t generate market competition. The geometries of this particular market included high barriers to entry, a single monopsony buyer, and low accountability for outcomes, because the gutted monitoring staff of USAID weren’t enough to properly oversee the work. The results were unsatisfactory, even before contributing to the West’s overall failure there.
The first contractor I worked with at least had a visionary president who was keen for the company to be a sort of university of development, and I learned a lot during my time there. He was however soon ousted by a colleague who went to the shareholders and accused his vision of being a waste of their money. The second contractor I worked with was just a shitshow. Both had cultures of entitlement where staff expected their business class flights and climate-controlled offices, damn the expense; this was an ugly contrast to the reality of the people we were trying to help in Afghanistan. I soon jumped ship to the charitable sector, to a UK institution where service rather than entitlement was a sincere and core part of the ethos.
But the charity sector’s social conscience hardly made it immune to unjust economic structures. First, salaries set at a US/UK level tended to quickly get unreasonable when looked at from the perspective of either small donors or the people in high-poverty countries that we were trying to help. By picking my opportunities carefully, I managed a career that combined downward salary mobility with increased responsibility, until I felt that what I was earning was reasonably proportionate to the value I was adding. (This has had its downsides; my Afghan friends familiar with the USAID contractor system assumed I must by now be making five figures a month, and we were all disappointed that I couldn’t help them at the level that would have made possible.)
I also got to see the bad joke of “humanitarian localization.” By the mid-2010s, it was impossible to ignore the fact that less than 1% of global humanitarian funding was being channelled directly to organizations based in the countries where it was spent; UN agencies and international charities sucked up huge amounts of money that (given the realities of PPP, not just colonialist salary structures) could be spent much more efficiently by local professionals. At a global summit in 2016, there was much talk of a “Grand Bargain” and “Charter for Change” that aimed to bring the “localized” proportion up to 25%.
The actual fruit of it? Mostly, a lot of people in the sector finding ways to spend money on workshops and reports talking about how exactly we should go about doing localization…in lieu of, you know, actually doing it. These workshops are generally full of well-meaning folk who know that (a) their job genuinely does get help to people in need, and (b) they work very hard in a sector where they’re competing with peer agencies…and those two facts help them justify giving their tacit support to a system that still concentrates way more money in Northern/Western institutions (and with people like them) than in comparably professional outfits and people in the Global South, and accordingly helps way fewer people than it could.
(It doesn’t help that a lot of the expat charity staff involved in these processes don’t regularly socialize with people from the countries where they work, but rather with people in adjacent career tracks who make way more money – UN staff, diplomatic staff, USAID contractor staff. “I need/deserve something in the same general ballpark as they’re getting,” is an easy mental trap to fall into.)
Finally, I’ve also got to see firsthand how government regulation (which many of my fellow left-leaners are happy to prescribe as a solution to most market problems) can push out smaller actors and burden mid-to-large ones without actually generating much in the way of good outcomes. In Nepal from 2015-22, I was running a mid-sized, $10m per year charity with a team of a thousand-odd employees (mostly in our hospitals). We could have done much more good with less intrusive regulation–and the same was even more true for smaller charities, some of which had to pack up in Nepal because the burden of regulation was just getting too great.
People tend, understandably, to justify their jobs. When the value they’re adding is relatively minimal, that will usually lead to them trying to find new things that they can claim do add value; for someone in a regulatory role, that will generally involve oversight activities. But all of those activities, even when entirely well-intentioned (and not just a structure set up to elicit “facilitation payments”), suck up time and energy and (often) some amount of actual spending from the actor being regulated. I got to see this not just with my peers in the charity sector but with the small enterprises we were trying to help people set up as a way of escaping poverty; their greatest challenges tended to be the regulatory structure, on top of the inherent risk involved in starting a business.
So I’ve not completely lost my right-wing tendencies; running a small to medium enterprise (whether non-profit or for-profit) is hard, and regulation that makes it harder needs to have pretty strong evidence of generating actual positive outcomes before I’d support it.
All of that stuff has some bearing on the rest of this post, honest.
So Harris said something really important and valuable over on the subreddit:
It’s a lot harder than it looks to start and sustain a company like CoG. Most attempts fail, either by going out of business or by turning into wildly unpleasant and exploitative shells of their former selves. (And as the guy who takes 7 years to write a book and has a five-book series in mind, you’d better believe I value CoG’s longevity.) @adrao’s right that if you’ve never had to worry about making payroll and staying on the right side of small business law and regulation, you’re probably underestimating how hard it can be – and the impressive improvisation that the CoG team have managed in keeping the business alive.
The way forward they found involved taking the publishing industry advance-and-royalty system as their model–which again, Harris reminds us, is atypical in the game writing world. CoG’s atypical strategy has coincided with atypical longevity and success. They’ve attracted quality authors, pros like Harris and Jed and Kyle who make a living from their writing, need advances to cover the work they’re doing while they’re doing it, and in some cases (as Dan noted with surprise) are actively suspicious and turned off by a no-advance-higher royalties offer.
And CoG has built this successful publishing house while also trying to stick to Corporate Goal #2, the Hosted Games one, which is I think worth quoting at length:
I think they’ve largely been achieving this (though as average game length has pushed higher into the 6 and 7 figure word counts, the prospect that anyone could have an output of 3-4 games a year has receded). But I’m not surprised that the goal of running a successful core business hasn’t been entirely and perfectly consonant with the goal of running an open platform that helps non-pros get their foot in the game writing door. Dan’s post has highlighted the main point of friction: if they offered a higher royalty percentage to HG authors than to CoG authors, they’d be undercutting the model they’re found that has worked for the core business – even though the central reason they switched to a lower royalty rate (the risk involved in paying advances to authors) doesn’t apply to the HG platform.
One risk that CoG might consider taking at this point, with the publisher model well-established, is adding a third option to the menu for CoG authors: no advance and a higher royalty share (which could then also be offered to HG writers across the board). Dan has written that offering high royalties without an advance looked suspicious and “desperate” to some pro authors, but with CoG’s much longer track record and demonstrated capacity/willingness to pay advances, that might be less of an issue now. Add an explanatory note that some of the non-pro writers and coders on the list prefer this arrangement (maybe because, like me, they finish chapters so slowly that the advance tranches can only be a nice treat rather than a living).
Regardless, like Jason wrote 12 years ago, HG writers who move on from HG – to an EA contract in his hypothetical example, or to Patreon and itch, as has happened more often in practice – isn’t a betrayal of the vision or business model. Let HG continue to be a foot in the door, and one which provides lots of services which can mean some authors are happy to stick with it, while others move on up and out. That might ultimately be the best balance between CoG’s not-perfectly-reconcilable goals for the business as a whole.
It’s worth noting (because I think it will be shaping how many people see this issue), that Amazon and similar platforms have for a few years now made it possible to earn a living as a writer by means other than the unreasonable luck of writing a string of bestsellers. You can do it by the grind, by pushing yourself to get new (perhaps AI-assisted) content out there constantly. HG is not set up to facilitate this model; the (even limited degree of) quality control and the small size of the team aren’t consistent with pushing lots of cheap content continually out the door. Personally, I’m glad, because I don’t think it’s at all healthy; but that’s a key part of the business model for the platforms people are talking about that take a much smaller share of the cut.
Finally, having havered even longer than usual (sorry/not sorry), I want to wrap up with a note on why I’ve always hedged my defenses of CoG a little on the exploitation front. I can and have said that I’m more than happy with the deals CoG has offered me personally; that I’m sympathetic to the challenges and costs of keeping a business alive and employees well-compensated; and that it’s entirely plausible to me that they’re profiting no more than is reasonable. If they’re exploitative at all, it’s certainly a lot less than they could get away with.
At the same time, as I spent probably too much time discussing behind the cut, I’ve seen firsthand how easy it is for well-meaning people to justify a flawed and unfair distribution of resources on the basis of I am adding some meaningful value and I am working very hard. I’ve seen how when the question of the amount of value-added is raised, the natural response is often to find new activities to do, rather than letting go and letting others keep a higher share. I’ve seen how it’s easy to compare yourself to other people doing similar work (e.g. perhaps “the CEO of that other software startup”) and making much more money for it.
Am I 100% confident that CoG hasn’t fallen into any of those traps, leading to it being less effective than it could be in its stated mission of helping authors (HG in particular) make a living from their creative work? No; I don’t see the numbers that would let me answer that question. That’s ultimately an issue that Jason, Dan, and team need to grapple with themselves. Even so, I’m broadly happy with the company, think it’s overall a force for good, and am very grateful for the opportunity it’s given me to find a wider audience for (and a generous income from) my writing.
@Havenstone Very nicely argued. After writing my post this morning I had been turning some other points in my head, and I think you succeeded in wrapping many of them together nicely.
I agree, but in the current circumstances, it’s hard to gauge what is “tolerable” or “fair” because there isn’t any other company (that I know of) that approaches interactive fiction the way CoG does. It’s not physical book publishing because they don’t have to handle the whole distribution chain. The closest thing it resembles is an app store like Google Play or Steam. They do a bit of marketing when the game comes out, but as an author, you do get more than that because your game sits on the front page for weeks in a marketplace that’s not very crowded, and you won’t get that anywhere for free.
That means that successful authors are getting less off royalties because the company wishes to set the bar so low. An alternative would be to pay royalties after the company’s expenses are paid for, but even then the few $ the financially unsuccessful games make won’t be enough to break even. I don’t see an easy way to solve this as I don’t know the sales numbers and operation costs, but having a business model where you let anyone who has a finished game publish through the label will have this drawback. Although, to be fair, in the last years I haven’t seen any games that are incomprehensible or have breaking bugs. Most unsuccessful titles were not a match for the audience.
I agree. It’s difficult to gauge where to draw the line between fairness and exploitation when it comes to creating art and publishing. Most people publishing through HG are first time authors who do it as a passion project. Probably all of them have an alternative way of sustaining themselves so technically the low profit share isn’t going to affect their livelihood. The conversation would go a totally different direction if HG would bottle their only water source and sell it back to them, but since we are talking about brokering a need that is arguably at the highest level of Maslow’s pyramid of needs, there is more room for debate.
All in all, there have been some great points brought up in this thread so far, but I thing one key ingredient to CoG’s success was omitted: the forums. Without this community and the support of the users, mods and testers, there wouldn’t be so many authors giving this whole IF business a try. I think HG/CoG should give a cut of the profit the users who support the authors along their journey (with feedback, a kind work, or just by being there and reading in silence).
The argument that, because HG has such a low bar for entry, that all these releases (~2 a month) is somehow financially straining them makes no sense to me. As mentioned before, Wayhaven alone has paid for years worth of publications well into the future.
I think some people don’t realize just how low the overhead is. It would enlighten all of us to know what sort of number ($) goes into the release of any particular Hosted Game title, including the work hours spent in review, those for the copyeditor, and those dealing with the release itself. But we’re measuring in 100s of dollars here, perhaps around the $1000-$2000 range, and when you compare that vs the lifetime sales of even a “stinker” game, it’s simply not a concern.
But let’s say it is: have a contract with a 70-30 publisher-author split until X amount of total revenue has been made. Once X has been made, that flips to 30-70. This alleviates risk and gives authors long-term “financial staying power” in choicegames. This way, risk is alleviated from the publisher and the author is better compensated for the % of the work they’ve put in.
You could even have a different cut for older titles: those that are 3+ years old for example, that cost essentially nothing to maintain, for better long-term author revenue. I can’t think of a single better way to get an author to write out a long series using choicescript.
The reason why so many of us are on Patreon (or similar platforms) isn’t just because we like money. Personally, I couldn’t financially justify the continued work on my series without it. I don’t think I’m alone on this.
We’ve had plenty of established authors dip their toes into choicegames over the years. Hardly any of those authors stick around after a single release, because the time and effort in takes in creating a choicegame is so much more than a traditional book, of which they could conceivably put out 2-3 a year. That’s not going to happen in a world where you have 6 month publishing queues and 250k wordcounts are considered on the small side!
But if they’re getting a lion’s share of the royalties from their work, month after month? Suddenly this platform becomes many times more viable for so many more authors.
You keep saying things like the labor theory of value has “anamolies” (it doesn’t) and that it’s fallacious (it’s not) without providing any explanation so it seems like you’re just piggybacking off the prevailing sentiment without knowing much about it. UBI is downright satirical (wanting the governments and businesses that create artificial scarcity to give you a UBI to soften that artificial scarcity) and definitely not a real alternative to labor simply having control of itself
You’re absolutely right that I’m not defending those claims at length here. Maybe another day. Meanwhile (and even afterwards!) you’re free to judge me to be mistaken.
That’s the main takeaway I want people to have from this. We quibble over percentages and minutiae but never let it detract from how most/all of us writers like this place. As evidenced by our continued presence here.
That being said, one thing I do want to mythbust is that there’s a lot of games that never reach profitability. To quote a Stephen King short story collection title, everything’s eventual. Unlike a physical book publisher, there are not continued costs to a story being available (beyond minimal amounts for hosting it). They pay the marketplaces (and for stories they know will be stinkers, that’s just two these days, Apple and Google; Amazon was never much of anything and now stories don’t release there at all), and for a Hosted Game, that’s most of their cost. Then it sells. And if it sells poorly each month, it still sells. A bad or unpopular game can take years to reach profitability. But most of them still will.
Shocking truth and mild self-own: NPT has likely reached profitability for the company. My estimates put it in the lowest 25% of HG titles by overall earnings. It did so poorly that Day After still managed to be under the financial cut that meant games qualified for the Underrated poll, and it has outearned Toaster by a literal factor of five despite being out for one year compared to Toaster’s 5+. But Toaster’s total net (meaning after the marketplace cuts) in five years has been $2,227.65. Subtract out the $558.16 that I got from that as royalties and it’s $1,669.49 to the company. Going by the $1k estimate it costs them to put a HG title out, that’s still way over the mark. This means that even a lot of the unabashedly dud games pay for themselves. Now, obviously the company could not survive if every game was like this. It’s technically profitable but still was by no means a success, and it’s more paying into the company coffee fund than literally keeping the lights on. But it does mean that the hit games aren’t paying for the duds. Most of the misfires still pay for themselves, and the profit from the hit ones is just that: pure profit. I mean, aside from the obvious and undoubtedly substantial costs for employee salary, benefits, site and app infrastructure, and so on.
Any suggestion of royalty increases needs to be rooted in reality. It shouldn’t be us demanding the lion’s share of the profits, both because that doesn’t respect what the company has constructed and because it sure as heckfire ain’t gonna happen. We still need this place, and even the people who don’t likely did at an earlier point in order to get where they are now. But it does need us as well, and a bigger piece of the pie helps reflect that.
I really appreciate your numbers because it’s a little exhausting that people uncritically accept company costs as a reason to never examine royalties, when the reality is these things are NOT expensive to make compared to paper books, and the fact is that a large majority of these games clearly make CoG anywhere from $5k-$20k like mine, up to hundreds of thousands of dollars each like the Wayhaven games. $1k in publishing fees is not enough to slam the door on talk of raising royalties, and to me that just seems like anti-labor kneejerk reaction
Do not forget that people do need salaries. The CoG staff are not volunteers who work for free, as someone with my own company with a half-time employee my overhead is not computers or internet connections. It’s salaries, insurance, and pensions.
@malinryden Employees are there to support authors. Authors are not there to support employees. Authors were paid 25% several years before CoG even hired employees, and the reason they were able to hire employees was because of the success of authors like you. How many employees do you think CoG has? How much do you think they pay them?
1: A publishing company makes money by selling and publishing books.
2: Those books earn the company money. Some go to the author. Some is kept by the company.
3: The company uses that money to pay the staff, offices and other things.
4: Many companies start out small and part-time, earning very little money with the hope they might earn more in the future. This is NOT a sustainable state, and the reason why many companies fold after a few years. The fact that CoG has got to the stage of being able to hire actual staff makes me delighted! The fact that it might be because of me (in part) makes me even happier.
5: Authors support employees the same way as companies support authors. Neither would make money without the other.
Well, not pensions. This is America, it’s undoubtedly a 401k and/or SEP IRA since it’s a small business. But yes. The employees are necessary, deserve everything that comes with being a full-time employee, and that’s expensive as heck. But you also said yourself you had considered going out on your own in part because of the royalty split. And let’s be real: they’d miss you more than any other author who has posted in this thread. Possibly more than any two of us lumped together. That’s the kind of thing a royalty raise might combat. It’s about finding a balance between making enough money to keep the company thriving and giving enough to authors to keep them happy and productive. And most importantly, not interested in leaving for self-publishing or writing for some other outfit.
Each Wayhaven game makes HG hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe people are missing that fact. I’m wondering how many employees people think CoG has and how much they think they get paid because that series alone should be able to cover wages comfortably, and then there are hundreds of other profitable games to cover the bills if those three games somehow don’t manage it
But I’m going to tuck it behind a cut so it’s easily skippable.