Not that I’m here for the money (and even if I was, I still have a looong way to go), just wondering if anyone could potentially make a living out of these…?
Also, would anyone pay to have their games translated into other languages?
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A living? No. Only the people who actually work for the company live off what these earn. But it’s supposed to be a healthy side income for many authors, especially those with multiple titles out there.
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“supposed to”? I wouldn’t say that. More “can be.”
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Sorry, I meant ‘supposed to’ not in the sense that it always is, more that without anyone putting out sales data it is more of a speculation as to the numbers involved.
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I’m happy to report that Choice of Rebels is making a generous side income. Not enough for me to live on, but enough that once my current job finishes (should be in 3.5 years or so) it’s realistic for me to switch to writing full time as long as my wife is working at least part time and we don’t live too exorbitantly.
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Ah that’s good to hear. Would have been a shame if all that effort you put into XoR hadn’t paid off. Here’s to hoping the rest of the XoR games you write are just as successful.
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I think it has the potential to become a full time career. Most of the authors don’t make much, but if you’re a best seller, with like 20,000 downloads in the first year, with each copy selling for $4-6, that’s a very significant amount of money. It also helps if you’re able to release works frequently, like one title per year.
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Do you mean that in the context of continuing to live in Nepal?
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I’ve made more money on this than I ever did on anything else creatively (comics, table-top design, short stories). Enough to quit my job? No. Enough to give me enough of a side income to have no more monetary problems? Yes.
Gonna be interesting what happens to the next game, since then things start adding up, and I am a debut writer here.
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I’m so happy to hear people are doing well with their games!!
I’m currently unemployed (I’m a freelance translator), so I’m looking for ways to make some extra money in the future. You know, for situations like this when I don’t have a translation job to do. So it’s nice to hear that this might be helpful. 
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People who work for the company, and me, I guess.
Royalties from the various Hosted Games and Choice of Games titles I’ve written make up the majority of my income (especially now that the lion’s’ share of the writing work for Burden of Command is over). Coupled with the graphic design work I do on the side (I do a lot of the chapter header art and occasionally a storefront icon here or there too), it probably counts for a good two-thirds of my current income, at least.
Mind you, I’m a professional in my mid-twenties who shares an (admittedly spacious, and rather expensive) one-bedroom apartment with his wife, and I do live in a country with public health care and the like, but the money coming in is enough to pay for necessities and still have enough disposable income to fund at least one or two expensive hobbies on the side.
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While it’s great that it provides such a meaty share of your income, it would still be a trifle misleading to call that making a living, given that it sounds like you would have difficulty living solely off of what you make in story royalties.
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Honestly, if it were just down to royalties, I’d be making about as much as a lot of my contemporaries are working minimum wage* (or slightly above it) at a shop counter or over a grill. It’d still be a “living” in the sense that I could survive off of it, it just wouldn’t be very pleasant or comfortable. It’d be sustainable in the short term as a “starving artist”, but that’s not a very high bar.
*NB: Minimum wage in British Columbia is $12.65 an hour, and set to increase to $15.00 an hour over the next two years.
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Gotcha, thanks for the clarification!
I’ve yet to to actually publish something and I’m nowhere near that stage, so I probably aren’t as introspective as some about it. Nonetheless, here’s my thoughts.
I would love to publish my game one day and make it completely free for everybody. I would also love to have a place on my own, get food and water, and have things like heating and electricity to be completely free for me. But that has yet to happen, and money doesn’t generate itself by magic.
But let’s be real, a good number of the people who complain about things not being free, are generally minors who while complaining about it, are spending their parents money anyway so it’s not really theirs, in the first place. Not all of them, but there is an amount.
Course, I think if you are planning to make an HG solely for profit, it’s not really feasible compared to other platforms to do that. I like writing. But if I can get paid for doing it too? That’s just an added bonus.
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What I get out of this is that the way to make a living from COG/HG is to have a large and persistently popular backlist. Which does not surprise me in any way, but it is predicated on being able to make that enormous up-front dedication of time and effort, before seeing any sizable profits. Which, again, does not surprise me. It’s consistent with everything I learned over the last three years about making a living from writing.
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Absolutely. It took me a good six years of writing to get me to where I am today, and for the first half of that, I was more or less subsidised by my parents (mind you, I was also still an undergrad).
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I’d consider myself an average author (not as good as many others on this site, but and to produce average games). At that level each title I take pays for a nice holiday or two, over the period of several months. No way I could ever lived of it in Tokyo, but a nice hobby!! (Love the fact I get paid for writing fiction, so much more enjoyable that academic writing!)
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Yeah, it’s really healthcare and rent that are the the killers. And the rent/land value makes everything else expensive or not.
Well, for both our sakes then, I hope the V2 of the omnibus…and its subsequent marketing push…10xs this. 
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Revises estimate down to 2039.
Pinch me! 
So Langley will just let you off the hook by then, eh? 
And there is the loophole. Though with education in the US costing what it currently does I would have thought it would have been a necessity to scrape every bottom of every figurative barrel you can for cash to pay for their future tuition.
Are you planning to keep your head in the clouds, and by that I mean are you planning to continue living on top of the world in Nepal even as a full-time writer?
Don’t underestimate that one.
House prices are through the roof and the housing market in most major cities from Sydney to Amsterdam to Vancouver, I guess seems to be hugely dysfunctional at least in part due to being made into a toy for billionaire investors. 
Trouble is no rise that the Liberals, Conservatives and various pressure groups would accept will be enough to keep pace with the rising cost of rents and housing at the moment. Unless Canada’s dynamics on that front are really different.
Amen!
For the most part this is a uniquely American problem, aside from there being some very expensive and/or experimental treatments in addition to “cosmetic” surgeries that the government will not cover.
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