Congrats on the llc. I’d just like to say, that maybe word counting the pricing is probably a tricky thing to do, if only because, unlike an a-typical story a storygame should in my view have some equality in terms of distribution of the story paths. It’s all good saying there’s 100k words in a game but if I’m not going to see a substantial amount of those words…
But I’m just being a sour party pooper anyway. I very much hope the ethos of lowering the bar for writers continues, I have forwarded in the past COG to certain university students around in Wales in case they were interested - I may actually notify my university but I’m no English student soooo…
@Dorian - well yeah, but if the pricing is based on the word count, it’s aggreviating for the person whom spent the cash and though it was a sub par short changed effort?
@RVallant - Right, but that’s no different than any other form of fiction, is it? If you spend $35 on a 1000 page hardback and $6.99 on a 250 page paperback, and decide you hate them both after 50 pages, I’ll bet you’ll be more aggravated by the former. My contention is that a policy of pricing by word count (or size, or weight, or any other common metric for products of any sort) doesn’t seem particularly out of line for story games in particular, for an unsatisfied customer. And satisfied customers will replay the game and see a vast majority of the word count. Does that make sense?
@RVallant@Dorian
Interesting point I’ve been thinking for some time. I tend to side with that word count isn’t really the way to go though. Quality aside, a work of 100k words with 4 sub-plot/ending is going to end up roughly 25k words for each? (keyword here being roughly so don’t butcher me on this) which means the reader-player is going to see only one fourth of the total content unless there is a repeat playthrough?
Not sure if this is something to be measured in a linear fashion, unlike the less interactive variety of the work. I’d be tempted to recall how people (or the media, actually) use # of hours for AAA titles. We need a more specific metric, lol.
Well the one difference from other forms of fiction is you can return them after fifty pages. Can you return COG’s offerings?
I don’t suppose it matters much, I’d rather a payment model on quality linked to length rather than length on its own I suppose, but I do see your point and on that note, I am going to crash before my soul is devoured in the pursuit of studies… ;_;
im with you @rvallant quality sure matters most in games take an example minecraft when i first see it i say ‘‘wtf what kind of game uses this graphics’’ but when i played i sucked into endless time of gaming same goes for cog if cog just priced the game by it’s length COV will be 5 dollar maybe but by quality it’s better broadsides,Cov and others will be worth a book cog games i think is basically a novel quality matters most but this is only my opinion
@FcA@RVallant: One more thing to consider: a typical paperback novel is 100k words, and costs between $8 and $15. CoG games in the 100k-150k range cost $3. So the fact that you might not read every word seems to be already baked into the price. And part of what sets story games apart from “normal” fiction is the replayability. So, if you only see 35K words on a single play-through of a CoG game, but play it through twice, you’re still getting more words per dollar than a typical paperback. Play it three times, and you’re getting 3-5 times more.
Also, regarding returning CoG games after 50 pages: sort of, yeah, in that they let you play the equivalent of the “first 50 pages” for free.
@FcA, I suspect that if we took a poll, we’d find that the vast majority of CoG readers try at least 2-3 readthroughs – unless they really don’t like the story. So it’s likely they’ll see more than 1/4 of the content in your example.
Having just (finally) bought Eerie Estate Agent and played the whole way through it, got to say… both it and Star Captain are great material from this reader’s perspective. Easily as high-quality as anything else on the site. Totally worth my £1.25.
Opinions vary, and it’s fine to gripe about games you didn’t like. But keep in mind that, as Jason said, not every game is going to be written for you… if you read through the free demo bit and don’t like it, then you shouldn’t buy it, but hang on for the next game in a genre you do like.
Hi im new on the forum. I dont have problems pay for your games, in fact i tryied but the app store dont allow me because i have a older iphone 3G but i have older ones and its the same game engine !!! And there its a lot of new of grafical games i can purchase that doesnt have any sense. I think choice of games should open marquets in consoles marquets like XBOX or nintendo, their sistem of points make easy the buy off small games.
I have only one comment, whatever you do please avoid the DLC model.
Personally, as a customer, I find few things more frustrating then an incomplete product that has obviously been chopped up to be able to sell DLC (I’m looking at you Bioware/EA and Paradox Interactive). If I have to wait a littlelonger and pay a bit more for the complete experience, so be it, but please avoid DLC if at all possible.
The only game related problem I have yet encountered with the business model was Hero’s Rise, based on the demo I decided I liked the setting and the way it was written, however had I known beforehand that character development and real choices would be mostly absent I would not have bought it. However in that case I was not completely without blame myself, for had I waited for some proper peer reviews instead of relying solely on my own judgement the situation I found myself in could have been avoided.
On the other hand Waywalkers University is one of the game’s I would not have bought if not for the demo (I’m not a fan of Harry Potter in particular and the magical school of fantasy genre in general, however Waywalkers turned out to be one gaint exception to this rule).
@jasonstevanhill, you said that “if you can write good *choices, I don’t care what the actual content of your idea is.” in your post; I wonder, does this apply to text RPGs (or simply other types of games than storyline-based ones, like Turn-based Strategies) as well (i.e. would CoG host these types of games that aren’t heavily relying on a storyline) that are made in ChoiceScript ?
@AlexCosarca I don’t see why not. We probably wouldn’t fund such a game (via a WFH contract or an advance), but as long as it was written in ChoiceScript, why not?
That said, if it was truly a deviant from our core mission, we might have to make a new imprint for it (like how we made Hosted Games), but I suppose we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.
This literally just occurred to me, have you guys ever considered porting your games to Facebook Apps? There are plenty of ‘games’ already on there and whilst you can’t (afaik) charge for the game from the outset I’m pretty sure you can allow in-app purchases (thinking of all those games that let you trade real money for in-game money), so the demo/buy full-game structure would work nicely.
And in this day and age, a lot of people have Facebook…
That already sounds good to me without even considering the possibility for ‘shares’ and ‘likes’ to promote the games.
@CJW The problem with Facebook is that they change their specs more often than Apple. We’d literally have to hire someone full time just to keep our games current with their SDK. Clearly, we don’t have the resources to do that yet.
Talk on a different thread has reminded me: not everyone on the forums is aware that Choice of Games was shafted by Google AdSense, and that’s highly relevant to the topic of this thread. The whole discussion we’ve been having here is really a follow-on to this blog post from a couple years ago:
To clarify, Google protects it’s system for AdSense by not giving any real information out on how it works. This mean that its review process is (from the banned point of view), you ask them to review, and they either say either yes or no.
As Wired said, it’s probably the loading/sitting with one open page time lead them to believe that CoG were asking for clicks, or possibly people were spamming clicks thinking that they were giving CoG money. (Just to note, if you like a site, don’t click on its ads unless you’re actually interested in the ad. You’re not giving them any significant amount of money, and you’re risking getting their ad revenue taken away.)
As for what can be done, unless someone magically appears with connections to a number of companies that are looking for sites to advertise on, there’s really nothing that can give CoG ad revenue besides expanding it to the point where it can start hiring full time staff. That means CoG needs more games and more exposure. I wonder how viable street team marketing would be? Something like stickers with QR Codes. How common are QR Codes in the rest of the west anyways? I mean, I’m just barely starting to see them out here in California. Of course with something like CoG, marketing of any kind probably needs to be a bit more targeted.
