I know what you mean. UnNatural Season One was around 250k words, and then Season Two ended up being around 700k words, which is literally the longest thing I’ve written. Then I see projects surpassing a million words, and I cannot even fathom that many words.
But most certainly, writers are working on creating bigger games, which obviously take longer to finish.
And longer for the company to review (and edit, for those eligible), or whatever the appropriate term in English is.
To be fair… I’m not quite seeing it in the data
19 games were released in 2023, with the average wordcount being 446k words. So about 1.6 games per month on average.
12 games (excluding the two pulled for AI/copyright issues) were released in 2024, with the average wordcount being 454k words. So exactly one game per month on average minus the pulled titles.
Counting the next SoH which I think is due in May, that’s 6 (I think 4 of which got / will get a Steam launch, counting SoH) games in 9 months which I thought was interesting.
I don’t know how long SoH6 is, but if we take the last 5 titles, they average to 376k words, which is substantially shorter than the 2023 and 2024 average, while still adding up to less than one game a month being released.
Fields of Asphodel is 1.4 million words and received copyedit and a steam release. I think the time between submission to HG and release was about 3.5 months.
I’m not sure why the number of releases has gone down. Anyway, it’s just me being a math and numbers guy here.
I think it’s all just part of the natural ebb and flow. I think everyone involved would prefer new releases come along at a consistent rate, but that’s just not how it ends up happening.
As a person who participates heavily in official betas, the main pattern I’ve observed is that there is no pattern. Sometimes there will be four or five betas active at once. Sometimes there aren’t any.
I’m less tapped into the Hosted Games side of the community, but even so there have been times I saw three authors in a week posting that they had submitted their game for publication, and sometimes months go by that I don’t see any.
Sometimes little trends tend to emerge. A year and a half ago, HG had a lot of high-word-count debuts within a few months of each other. For a while before that, they seemed to have a fairly steady sprinkling of short games. In 2023, there were three huge HG releases (the latest installments of Fallen Hero, Wayhaven Chronicles, and the Dragoon Saga) spaced a month apart, but CoG went through a dry spell that year. CoG has three new games this year (already released or expected soon) about superhero teams, and two about organized crime with magic and 1920s vibes. That’s what randomness looks like up close. It’s only when you stand back that you can see the peaks and troughs balance each other out in the long run.
I did take a look over the last couple of months, and I do think that there is slightly more to this than randomness FWIW.
By effectively every public-facing metric we have (such as they are), something does appear to have changed / be changing, even when we ignore 2026 releases (which I think is fair - year is still ongoing, and data in 2025 showed a skew towards releases in the latter half of the year for COG in any event).
Apologies - the below will be imperfect as the inputs were hand-generated, but I think it works well enough to bring things to life a bit - if anyone has better data than me (not a difficult feat!), or data from years prior to this, I’d love to compare notes.
Releases per year since 2018.
Reviews on the COG / HG apps since 2018.
Releases with 500+ reviews since 2018.
*Rolling Total should say rolling avg, oops
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there (for a massive nerd like me, at least…) IMO, but one thing that jumped out me is that arguably the big 2023 'launches discussed above masked a broader fall-off that took place around that year. There are certainly other ebbs and flows - see 2021, straight after COVID - and of course the late-25 games will be somewhat impacted by recency meaning fewer reviews, but I don’t think it’s wrong to say there seems to be something more sustained over the last couple of years.
I’m not really sure what my conclusions are yet, if any, but I’m curious as to whether anything interesting happened over that 22-23 period. The 19-20 supernova of reviews / engagement also stands out, but is of course easily attributable to COVID tailwinds, so that’s less interesting - just a black swan for all forms of digital entertainment.
Could be as simple as swathes of the mobile gaming taking a hit in general since then, to be fair - I’m not at all certain this is a COG-specific thing.
I did this a good while ago, although it needs to be updated with the latest figures, which you have already done.
I also did notice rating counts decreasing quite drastically since 2024, and they have remained very low this year.
This was raised on the Published Author board two years ago, and nobody had an answer. I’m guessing COVID likely did give a massive injection to sales and engagement which we’ll never see again. The economy has also been pretty rough starting late 2022, and it’s just been downhill from then to now.
9 out of 14 HG releases in 2025 came out in the first half of the year. Just sayin’. 
I’m not sure if we’ll see a huge surge of HG releases later this year. The HG release schedule is still nowhere in sight, so I’m not sure how many games are in the publishing line now. (I can only name three at the moment.)
Agreed - or at least, that it would take another similarly surprising event (not necessarily world crisis related, but still extremely unlikely - could be as simple as a massive author agreeing to a COG contract and raising the brand’s profile, or a big COG or HG game getting some kind of show or movie).
Yep! Meant COG releases specifically which were back-loaded last year, but I wanted to point out the possibility that it would apply to HG this year in the interest of fairness - didn’t want to cast an unfairly negative portrait of things. Though yeah, it’s hard to really take a strong stance without the schedule.
Question: In the ‘2025’ column of ‘reviews on the COG/HG apps’, does that mean ‘ratings that were handed out in 2025 to all games in the catalogue’, or ‘total number of ratings on games released in 2025’? I know how to access the second data point, but the first data point would be interesting to analyze, and I’d like to know how you found it.
Latter, unfortunately - the former would be extremely interesting!
Ah, I see, thanks for responding and thanks for assembling the data! I spend a lot of time on IFDB (a database for IF games including parser and choice) and when I joined in 2015, there was a similar ‘mega bump’ from 2007-2008 (when the database was created). There, games made before 2008 had 400-500 ratings, but everything since then had < 100 ratings. Kind of like your 2019-2020 bump.
In the last 10 years, things haven’t completely caught up, but they’re better than they were before (some newer games have high ratings). You can see here how the highest-rated games are still almost all before 2008:
Not really super relevant to your discussion here (so don’t feel obliged to check it out), but I just wanted to explain my interest/backstory.
Edit: Actually, there we did have more info on when ratings were given. Even if only looking at recent ratings, there was still a ‘rich get richer’ problem where most new ratings were for the old, popular games instead of newer ones: ifdb_review_counts - Google Sheets
