Yeah, you’re completely right on all points!
(Plus, I would say that even though it might have took them 30 hours to your 600 hours, they do have A LOT of games to go through, and if they’re spending 30 hours minimum on each, the hours rack up quickly for them!)
I hope to publish my game through HG, and the royalty amount is very generous when compared to other publishers. Though, again, if you look to publish a book then there are more costs involved such as physical products- CoG work in digital products, which even though outlay can cost is still going to be less than physical paper books- something to be considered in royalties too.
I think the service they offer and interaction with customers and authors is brilliant, so it’s worth trying to get a game published through them just for that 
But, I also think people shouldn’t undervalue their work just because it’s in the creative market. A lot of people are just grateful for anything when it comes to creative works, because it’s long been told you can’t make any money off of it. My thinking is that there should be a move to people valuing their own efforts more, no matter what level they are it.
Starting as a hobby is brilliant, but you still put it out for sale. If it was purely motivated by love of a project, you could have offered it for free on Dashingdon or other. But, it’s nice to get back something for your huge efforts, right? So, I think it’s nice to ask for fairness in what you receive, when you put so much work into it. It’s just about balance, again.
Though, as I said, I am more than happy to put my game up through HG with the current conditions they provide, especially with the enthusiasm that the people who run CoG seem to show! 
Just throwing in my random thoughts!
Sorry if that came across the wrong way. and let me re-affirm that I’m not undervaluing anybody’s work. Just, like everything in life, there is a learning curve, and it is necessary to work a lot (with writing, as with anything else) in order to perfect oneself. I was lucky that my first game sort of did ok, considering the number of problems with it (grammar, structural, etc). I’ve learnt from those, and I’m sure I’m about to make new mistakes. Each time you learn something new, and the hope is that eventually I’ll become a decent enough writer of gamebooks (I have no illusions about my capacity for writing great text, so I’m trying to see where my strengths reside, and playing to them). The reason to publish (more than the actual money I’ve made at this point, as my daytime job pays a lot more…) is that this is the ultimate test by readers. Most people in forums (especially in such a great forum like this) will provide at best constructive criticism, and at worst often remain silent. It’s when you face paying customers that you really learn how well you are doing. And, let me be clear, criticism is something everybody needs to welcome in life! (I’m an academic, and academic criticism can be VICIOUS!, so I’ve learnt to develop a thick skin, and move forward… you need a thick skin when facing comments by paying customers, and try to understand between everything that they are telling you what is the actual problem, and improve for the next game!)
You didn’t come across the wrong way at all! That was just my thoughts on it.
Constructive criticism is a writer’s best friend, I find. (Though, the academic world sounds way tougher than I could manage, and I’ve dealt with a lot of criticism on writing over the years, lol. Glad to see it hasn’t put you off continuing!).
But yeah, back on topic, in the end the set up CoG have going at the moment obviously works and it means amateurs get the chance to publish their works.
It’s difficult to know what the income or losses and we can’t even really guess. It would be nice if the royalties were higher, but then that’s the same with any service- it’s always nice to get more of a return for your work! 
CoG seem honest in their approach to authors and encouraging, so I’m sure we can trust that if they could give more they would (after all, they probably want to encourage people to actually put their works forward, as that’s the products they sell!).
I mean…I don’t see how Hosted Games as a label not making any money could possibly be right. I hope no one is taking that idea seriously. Let’s look at the math.
I’m going to go off the figure that each HG costs $1,000 to publish, because that’s what I think I remember Jason saying, and that seems like a reasonable number. Now, there are a total of 81 HGs, which would mean it would cost roughly $81,000 to publish them.
When I said that the best sellers like Zombie Exodus, Life of a Wizard, Way Walkers, etc, probably made tens of thousands, I meant that the author probably made tens of thousands. And Choice of Games makes three times more money than the author off of each HG. So as far as the money that CoG gets off of HGs, I would be willing to bet that the costs it took to publish all 81 titles would be covered by 2-3 best sellers…leaving the other 78-79 titles to make money that would be returning the Hosted Games label investment.
Now, this is all just speculation, but I would be surprised if I was wrong. And of course, the CoG label surely makes more money overall, but the best selling HGs are still far more successful than the official CoGs that are not very successful.
[quote=“adrao, post:20, topic:28673”]
Yes, I spent around 600 hours to write Tokyo Wizard (my estimate was that it was 3-4 hours per 1,000 words of code and text… typically 1 hour per 1,000 words of text, plus 1 hour to code it, plus another hour to tidy it up, plus another hour for post-processing, reading it all, etc. I didn’t keep exact track, but that was my feeling, and I’d be interested in what others have to say about this). So, that would have been 15 weeks working full time (about 3 months). My game hasn’t done so badly (probably it is a middle range game that sells nicely enough, but not one of the famous games around here, though ratings on it are not so bad), but so far I would have made more money working in McDonalds (eventually as sales continue this feeling will probably decrease, and maybe by the time I publish several games each of them will bump the others…[/quote]
I think your estimate of 3-4 hours per 1,000 words rings true for me too, although certainly probably on the high side of that range. CCH was about 170K words long, so that would equate to 680 hours, divided by two years it took to write, equals 6.5 hours per week. Now some weeks I got nothing done, and other weeks I probably worked on it for 12-15 hours on the weekend, so it all evens out. But to be clear, this is just the writing and coding. That’s it.
This number does NOT include brainstorming ideas. Hell, I easily spent 200 hours doing that over those 2 years. And this number does NOT include my CoG forums activity. Hell, I easily spent another 200-300 hours doing that over those 2 years. Probably much more. And this number does NOT include spending time on social media, making a website, talking with my artist, etc.
So when you add in “all tasks related to CCH,” I’m easily at 10-15 hours week for the past 3 years now, or 1,950 hours total, which is the equivalent of a year of full-time work.
And even with strong sales, the $ I have earned is nowhere near a year of full-time work.
But it is passive income, and I can use the social media, website, reader email list, etc. forever, and I hope with Part 2 coming out, the math will start to look more favorable. And I keep in mind that other paths I could have taken would have resulted in even lower revenue. This was definitely the best option for me.
And trying this back to the topic, I am grateful for CoG for doing what they do. Yes they make money, and they should. They have built a GREAT fan base. That, all by itself, justifies them getting the majority of the revenue.
If I would have written CCH as a regular novel, which I considered doing, yes I would have control over pricing and such (unless I would have been picked up by a traditional publisher, which is very unlikely) but I would have been earning a very HIGH percentage of a very LOW total number. That math just doesn’t work. My ‘real life’ writer friends are astounded that I have sold as much as I have. Few ‘regular’ writers sell even a fraction of the units that a moderately performing HG sells. That can be chalked up to CoG/HG’s reputation and devoted fan base.
I’d like to think Unnatural is one of the higher tier sellers over 50,000 downloads on Google alone. Royalty wise in its first year it made just over £2,200. The second year it dropped to just over £2,000 and last year it was just under £1,600. I’d have to check later roughly what I made so far this year.
@nocturnal_stillness
Yeah, it was a free download, though, so it can’t really be compared to paid downloads which usually sell anywhere from 1-10k on Android.
Thanks for the insight. So based off your numbers, CoG probably made about 18k pounds, which far and away covers the $1,000 publishing cost.
Yeah. I’m considering having season two as a straight up paid app just to compare the difference.
I think $1000 per Hosted Game is a conservative estimate. Let me give you one example of how an HG game costs money after it’s been published.
Last week, an issue cropped up with an HG game, a bug. The staff person handling customer service, Abby, dealt with the support email, then brought it to the attention of Rachel and Dan. Rachel had to stop her work and reproduce the bug. Once it was reproduced, Dan had to stop his work and figure out the problem, which ended up being quite abstruse. Then he had to fix it. Then he or Rachel pushed out a new version of the app. I would guess that that single issue alone cost hundreds of dollars of staff time. Multiply that incident, a fairly common one, across however many Hosted Games you like–whether it’s fixing bugs or responding to support queries (a job which takes so much time, that we’ve now hired Abby, so that I can edit games full time).
It’s $1000 of staff time to publish a Hosted Game, and an inestimable amount of money to simply run a company that can continue to function as a publisher of games.
In terms of the advance against royalties structure for CoG titles, the comparison here is really with traditional book publishers. The average royalty rate for books is at most 12-15% for the very best and most successful writers. I think 7-10% is typical, but most first time novelists do not earn out their advance, and our advances are comparable/better than what publishing houses offer say a debut novelist. Most books do not earn out their advances; most CoG titles earn out their advances.
Academic (legal) journals have become a corporate scam, particularly for legal “research” since that tends to already be funded and all its actors paid either way and those journals are largely a means to shake down students and lay-people as well as very small law offices who need the information.
Of course I’m a practitioner, not an academic, but if I ever do write something that is generally useful and publishable, let’s just say I lament that there isn’t a release into the public domain option available in our rotten system of intellectual property. Note that it would still not be entirely altruistic of me, but if I ever did want to start my own firm, greater name recognition, whether through publicly available articles or else, would do more for me then an academic publisher keeping it under lock and key and paying me about 4.37 euros on a yearly basis for 2-3 years.
Of course compared to other fields law is fast moving and highly useful information today is liable to become outdated in a couple of years, unless you take care to already write only about legal principles and philosophy or historical (roman) law only.
Sorry for the rant, it’s not related to CoG specifically only to academic and legal publishing in general.
Do you involve the authors at all with bug hunting or is it purely done in house? Just curious.
It depends on what the issue is.
My only other point is that genre (for lack of a better term) is very important. Zombie Exodus still makes 3x more than A Wise Use of Time. ZE is an HG title, while Time is CoG.
That’s why my next game is Choice of Robot Zombie Pirate Vampires.
I thought most journals didn’t pay authors. Maybe I should write for legal journals and go after the 4.37 euros/year deal.
On a more serious note, you should check if your local university has an unlocked computer terminal they don’t mind non-students accessing. Sometimes if you need an article you can find it there. (Although if it’s all the time, you’ll probably just have to pay the subscriptions unless it’s not a pain to go to the uni I guess. I don’t know anything about the deal with legal system journals.)
That’s why my next game is Choice of Robot Zombie Pirate Vampires.
@JimD - That sounds epic lol
<— If there are emojies for your genre, you’re good to go.
I have everything I need back at the office, but that’s not always convenient for me when trying to work from home, and for some (security) reasons the firm won’t allow me to connect to all their subscribed databases from home, which is what is annoying.
Still that doesn’t make the current model of academic legal publishing feel any less like a scam to me.
I believe that 4.37 was from the Kluwer online things, you’re right in that they don’t even pay you for the paper publishing, but online the deal is apparently slightly different, or maybe it’s just slightly different if you are a renowned enough lawyer, I’d have to accidentally write something both useful and publishable in order to find out, and I’m not in any particular hurry to do that.
Paying for all those subscriptions myself is not an option for me, that would amount to thousands off euros on a yearly basis.
Jim you never said yes or no to Community College Hero vs. Zombie Exodus: Nebraska Bites it!
I would do a 49/51 royalty split!
-vague as to who gets 51%-
Very elucidating thread. It’s always nice to read from CoG staff and authors about the details of the developing and publishing world of text games.
OBS:
Can we get a Crisis on Infinite Choices game were all hero-based universes meet to stop some kind of multiversal threat? 