I’m not suggesting that – like I said above, I’m 100% sure that Sera’s outsold me. 
(And outselling me at all would mean she’s brought in hundreds of thousands to CoG.) I just don’t think we’ve got the evidence to speculate that she’s outsold me by 2x to 8x per game, the rates you need to get to $1m in revenue or a million copies sold.
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Don’t think anybody is saying that, just your assumption of a million sales is false
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Read my above post. The fact is I’m very certain I’m correct that Wayhaven has sold several hundred thousand copies minimum, and made more than that in dollar amounts. HG or the author can back me up if they want but I don’t want to put anyone in a tough spot if they don’t want to divulge that info.
I just found it downright insulting that people are suggesting it has sold 30k copies as a justification for not raising royalties. I’m not making up numbers, I was literally taking 70k x5, reaching 350k, and going damn! Maybe it’s more or less but close to a million right?? That’s a lot more than 30k. And remember each title makes considerably more than a dollar per sale.
If you’re saying it has earned $1 million gross, it seems high but not impossible. But you literally said you thought it had sold a million copies. I have to have someone prove that to me with receipts before I buy it. I don’t see that potential based on the available data.
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Every single author who has divulged sales info here has several times less ratings than sales. So I just multiplied the ratings by 5 and went “wow, almost a million, plus like several times more than that in dollar amounts. That’s like a million!”
I make a sliiightly iffy guestimate (that is more than likely accurate, but could be lower or even higher) and I get burned at the stake. I really hope I get vindicated if anyone wants to present hard numbers
I highly doubt we get the hard data for a definitive answer one way or the other. But where you’re seeing a million copies, I’d project it more like…250,000-450,000. It could be over half a mil. I’d be very, very surprised if the number of copies even approached 750k. A million feels way out of the realm of possibility. If you had stuck with it earning a million instead of selling a million copies, I don’t think number nerds like myself would have blanched quite so much.
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That was Lan’s initial calculation. When you challenged it, they agreed with you and revised their next estimate upward. No one else has suggested it only sold 30k. But I disagree with you that we can be sure the series sold 300k or more, on the basis of my own sales experience. Review to sales ratios vary so wildly that I just don’t think we can place as much confidence in them as you are.
It’s possible you’re right about it all. But if so, Sera’s series has earned half as much as virtually the entire CoG library over 10 years ($2m in royalties, per the reminder above). That kind of wild outlier seems unlikely to me. I don’t mean to insult you, just to disagree with you.
Like I said above, after discounts, mine has earned me $1.15 per sale in royalties. Wayhaven 2 and 3 will have earned more than that because of their higher price point. Maybe WH1 will have too, despite the similarity to XoR.
Edit: Glancing back at the bestseller list, if Wayhaven has turned over a million, then @JimD is low-key Scrooge McDucking it over in the shadows.
Edit 2: And having just downloaded the HG omnibus, I note that Safe Haven, the #1 HG bestseller, has half the ratings (almost 10k) of the two main Wayhaven games (about 20k each). That’s a useful reminder that sales numbers aren’t proportionate to omnibus ratings in any but the roughest sense. I’m happy to agree with you that Sera’s sales comfortably exceed her ratings, Sam, but as soon as you want to put a “5x” on it you go beyond what I think we can know.
Finally, even taking 5x 48,000 – which is the total omnibus ratings I see on all three WH books to date – doesn’t get us all that close to a million sales, or necessarily even to $1m in CoG revenue. Doubling WH1’s rating numbers to account for it coming out pre-omnibus adds 100k sales to your estimate; given the much more modest numbers people have shared for other successes (FH as well as XoR) I’d be surprised if that were accurate.
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Point of order: I didn’t argue (nor do I believe) royalties shouldn’t be raised, and I conceded that 30,000 units for WH1 is far too low an estimate.
No insult intended.
I am genuinely curious how ratings get counted in the omnibus then, because my initial guess as to how they work appears incorrect.
I had assumed this meant the number of omnibus ratings reflected all platforms (because why would you have the rating be an aggregate but the number of ratings not be?), but if the number of ratings in the omnibus only represents people who rated in the omnibus, that would track with ratings being roughly 20-25% of units sold.
Though that would seem to imply large percentages of people are buying games on the omnibus and never completing them. Given my backlog of unfinished titles… fair enough.
Good point, perhaps most players simply close out/restart the game without answering the rating prompt.
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It is perfectly possible to complete the game and not rate it. I do it all the time. I’m terrible at rating. 
(I don’t know if it’s also possible to rate the game multiple times, though, or if it is, how that’s counted.)
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So if we assume those are lifetime figures, the entire writer base made an average of $200K a year for the past ten years. Assuming about 100 titles on the CoG list (I think there’s more than that) the average earning per CoG title is less than $2000 a year.
Of course that’s an average and is likely skewed by the big earners, so the median might even be less than that.
Why would you multiply it by 50k ratings? I estimated 70k. I said Book 1 came out in 2018 and the omnibus came out in 2019. And CoG makes several dollars a copy…they make 75% royalties. Let’s say her games make CoG $4 each, that means if you assume Wayhaven has sold 350k copies by multiplying the ratings by 5, that’d be 1.4 million dollars.
@everyone look at my numbers above. this is a joke that I’m not being taken seriously. Is this team sports?
Choice of Rebels, the fifth highest earner last time CoG shared rankings, has made $50k in six years.
Because that’s how many Wayhaven has, and I think bumping that up to 70k is unwarranted. I’ve been looking at your numbers. It’s not that I’m not taking you seriously, it’s just that I disagree.
Are you taking seriously the fact that ZE Safe Haven has more sales than WH 1 or WH 2 with half the ratings of either? It’s not clear cut, man. We don’t have the numbers to make confident guesses here.
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It’s absolutely 100% incorrect to base Wayhaven Book 1’s sales off of 20k ratings. But even if we do that facitiously by not acknowledging the majority of the first game’s sales, that still means Wayhaven could have made CoG $1 million by basing it off of 50k x 5 for the total copies sold. Again, how am I wrong for this math or the reasoning behind the rough numbers??
This is feeling increasingly like team sports where I’m getting dogpiled for having an unpopular view that is correct so I’m out
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I think this line of argument is futile, and this is the reason. We don’t know the numbers. The best we can aim for is an educated guess, and as long as we’re all starting with different figures and sets of assumptions, we’re not even going to be able to agree on an estimate, let alone what it means. It’s starting to feel like watching theologians argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
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My fundamental argument is that it’s incorrect to base confident sales estimates off any number of omnibus ratings, because the omnibus rating number has no reliable or consistent correlation to sales numbers. The dubiousness of the “5x,” for me, is much more significant than how many more ratings WH1 would have had if the omnibus had existed a year earlier.
I also think we can make better guesses by extrapolating from the sales of other bestselling games, rather than omnibus ratings.
I recognize that might be wrong, that Wayhaven’s wild outlier status in omnibus ratings might correspond to a wild outlier status in sales as well.
I’m sorry that you don’t just disagree, but feel I’m obviously wrong and picking on you.
Edit: And I apologize for “Besides vibes, what are you basing your sales guesses on?” I’d not expected it to land so hard, in the midst of the cut-and-thrust of a discussion where you’ve been tossing around plenty of scornful comments yourself. In the post-viral fug I’m currently operating in, I’d missed the source of the numbers you’d put in the previous post. As soon as I saw them, I amended it to, “I see you’re basing your estimates on omnibus rating numbers, sorry for missing that before.” But the damage was clearly done.
I’ve been trying since then to pay close attention to your numbers and be clear where I disagreed. Sorry if that failed, mon frere.
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I obviously don’t have a clue about actual sales. But I do know we can roughly estimate the amount of sales per reviews generally. Not all the time, but most of the time. With youtube videos the interactivity of audiences falls around 2-3% most of the time. For games, the general rule of thumb is that 5-10% of people bother leaving reviews of a game. Now, these calculations are based on this theory, so they may be wrong! Honestly, I just like numbers and graphs and find this kind of stuff very interesting. That, and on the google play store, there are websites out there that track downloads for items on it as well.
So I took the median of average interactivity with games ((5+10) / 2 = 7.5; Rounded down to 7%. So 0.07) and I divided the total number of reviews by 0.07 to get an estimate on what the total would be. Base equation is we’d be trying to solve for X. X being “Total Number of Units Downloaded” and we’d be calculating that based on the number of reviews being 7% of downloads. So:
0.07 = Number of reviews / X
With this formula, I got estimated downloads for Omnibus + Google Play (Supposed exact numbers from a bit of research) + Steam Sales (only applicable to Wayhaven Book One because steam sales, using this formula, would not be statistically relevant to the total here. They would be a drop in the bucket, comparably, to the other platforms).
WC: B1 - (285k + 150K + 5k)
WC: B2 - (285k + 38k)
WC: B3 - (110k + 11k)
Total series ESTIMATED downloads due to this theory = 894k Downloads
So, not exactly 1mil, but pretty close to it based on this. Again, I’m not even certain I want to participate in this conversation further than this, but I did enjoy doing this little math problem and doing a little jigsaw puzzle. And tbf, omnibus may not follow that trend if it asks people to rate the game at the end of the book. Ratings may evaluate closer to 20-25% of people that have played, but that’s a much more varied statistic of what amount of people finish/start the game they buy. And that, I feel, varies to extreme variability depending on the game.
But hey, if these estimates are correct, then I say congrats to Mishka in advance for when Book 4 comes out and the series most likely hits 1mil downloads across all platforms!
EDIT: Also, apologies if this goes against too deep into anything or upsets anyone. Definitely not my intention. I’m just a nerd lol
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I hesitate to ask, but how much work would it be to run the numbers for Zombie Exodus and ZE: Safe Haven and see what estimates your model gives for those?
Came out to about 678k Downloads for both games combined.
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Thanks! Eight months ago, those were the #1 and #2 bestselling HGs, with WH 1 and WH 2 bringing up the next two slots.
If I’ve got the model right, then Choice of Robots, the top-selling CoG game (with 2589 omnibus ratings and around 2400 Google Play Store reviews) would have sold around 71k copies, and XoR would have sold about 56k copies.
I suspect the model is off, because (like you said) omnibus ratings = most people who finished the game they bought on the omnibus; that’s a totally different level of “bothering” than “bothering to leave a review on an App store.” It would be especially inaccurate for games that sold most of their copies pre-omnibus.
But if it’s on and the top HGs are selling that much more than the top CoGs, then the company should definitely revise its business model.
Do you have a link to the site with GPS downloads data? Just curious, because its estimates seem higher than would be predicted by # GPS reviews / 0.07.