Like a multi dimensional being who is creating a team of all villans of all dimensions and all the heroes have to fight them in different dimensions like CCH hero fighting zombies and zombie exodus hero fighting gargoyles and golem of unnatural and stuff like that.
Ooh that would be awesome.
Eventually some authors will get together and do that. It’s just a matter of time. They could theoretically pull in readers from two different audiences that wouldn’t generally overlap.
Damn, robot zombies vs pirate vampires would be really cool and funny.
At least in History, they don’t.
My take on the royalties (from a non-author perspective, so take it with a huge grain of salt) is that HG gives really good royalties. We have to take in consideration 3 essential things: the costs the company incurs in order to publish and maintain them (which is a lot more than I imagined); the niche nature of the market (which makes the risk of publishing a book bigger for the company than if we were talking about a non-niche market); and the fact that every other publisher pays a lot less (my experience is academic and Portuguese, but I can guarantee that, at least in comparison to that, the royalties are much better here and there is complete authorial liberty, something that we do’t find anywhere else).
So, I am not sure CoG can or should increase the royalties of the author. Everyone needs to gain money from it, otherwise the company will go under and then there will be 0% royalties for everyone. Of course it would be nice if they managed to pay better, especially for authors that do this practically full-time, but a niche market has its disadvantages for everyone, the small number of buyers being the biggest of them.
Apparently, there has been a steady increase of the CoG’s share of the market, which is good for everyone.
But hey, as I said, this is only by take on the subject, and an especially “outside” one.
Now I want that too. Come on guys, you can’t tease us with that kind of epic ideas, it’s too cruel.
I might die from all the drooling you guys are causing me. 
It’s true that CoG has some better amenities; but as an amateur writer, the hosted section is probably preferable. Some people start in romance, whatever write in column, interactive fiction, fan fiction, ect, ect. In this way, they are allowing people to cut their teeth and gain critical feedback entirely free of charge.
I know a lot of other people have already gone into the nitty-gritty of numbers and publishing ect. Honestly, as someone in the same position, I really am curious when I see other newbies making such a heavy emphasis on immediately profiting off of game/writing sales. Believe me, I can see the appeal as a college student. However, as untested writers, it seems a bit backwards about worrying over compensation before developing the skills needed, first of all, and then the fanbase.
They make a great point about just the sheer visibility on a site that new writers and hopefuls would not even have access to otherwise.
Again, another user making a great point on both royalties and the logistics of having your work seen at all by writers and those that really enjoy consuming interactive media.
On the other hand, @Szaal made a point about demos and how that can adversely affect sales. No preview and that’s likely no profit. Too much, and people won’t pay. I personally think this is a problem that ails mainly untested writers, because their patrons have no idea what to expect from them at all. More experienced writers can afford, and likely should keep their hard earned plots and the like close to the chest, so they will actually make a profit. Again, the idea of new writers obsessing over money, how much, ect…that seems like biting off more than they can chew yet.
For now, I want to see what people think of my writing and will worry about that when it comes. And to be honest, it may never become a source of revenue because it’s a hobby for all but a very few and is more enjoyable when shared with others. It should be fun, right? 
While Mary covered some of our costs, there’s others too. A number of games get ‘indefinitely stalled’ along the process due to multiple reasons. Just since I’ve been hired, I had to reject a few games for being too short or copyright problems, and I’ve had a few different authors putting off publishing indefinitely (for various reasons), and in at least one case, just stop answering emails entirely. All of those games still cost us time (and therefore money), even though they may never actually be published.
And then what do you do when something goes wrong? e.g. iTunes rejects a game because it’s “a book and should be published through a book portal”, (even though most devices that use those stores flat out don’t have the memory to address the billions of pages a CS game would need to rendered in a readable format). Or Google says that “the are you are using is under copyright” (yea, I know Google, I got sent the art by the copyright owners). There is a ton of little things scattered all over the place that we have the time and resources to navigate, that a single person might not be able to.
Basic CS errors (such as incorrect information) gets passed to the author. Any other errors get passed to Dan and me. CS errors are more common, but technical errors generally take a lot more time and effort to fix.
Ok, here’s the premise…
Doctor Mad over at EvilCorp has been working on a modified version of the zombie virus and has made a breakthrough.
Heroes are now able to be infected and become zombies, while still retaining their original powers.
The offset is that the new zombie cannot ever develop or grow their powers more than what they currently are.
The plus side is that all infected heroes obey Doctor Mad’s every command.
Finding out how this is possible is part of the story.
Telepathy, maybe? Or a receiver embedded in the flesh of the victim? Perhaps even… (gasp) … a hive mind?!
However they are being controlled is irrelevant.
With a new super zombie army, Doctor Mad continues to capture and convert the town’s heroes.
You are one of the few remaining heroes who has managed to avoid capture.
It’s your job to gather the remaining heroes, establish a base, get a bunch of alpha-grade personalities to embrace teamwork and function cohesively, go on successful missions to capture an infected hero for study and experimentation.
The particular zombie-hero you want to capture will dictate how you have to build your prison in order to be able to contain your subject, because of their different powers (you don’t want a former hero who can control metal in a metal prison, etc.)
The raw materials to build your base and the prison can be found in various missions.
The specialized components can either be found in advanced missions, or manufactured in-house, assuming that you are a science-type hero, or at least have one who is willing to work with the team.
(Who decided that you get to be leader, after all?)
This is much easier if you’re a leader-type hero.
(But who will lead the missions?)
This is much easier if you’re a combat-type hero.
I have high hopes that the question of royalties won’t even matter because this will be a great success.
So, what do you think? 
@Eric_Moser glad my numbers and yours add up. And yes, that is just pure time spend writing and coding, and does not include hours of me riding my bike/sitting on train/walking around thinking about my game. Often my strategy was to go to gym while thinking about the game, write a scene in the gym cafeteria, some exercise while thinking of the game, write another scene, walk to a starbucks thinking about the game, write another scene, walk home thinking about the game, etc… so in what I just described in each “seating” I would do one hour of writing, but there would be another half an hour of thinking before. And yes, there you have to add talking to artist, time on the forums, etc. But, same as you I hope that slowly I build up a reputation, and that eventually I might manage to “half re-use” templates and some of the code for later games (basically I feel I’m still learning with all this)
@Mary_Duffy, @RETowers, thanks for the clarification, confirms what I thought (basically that $1000 is a complete underestimate, and likely much higher… )
@idonotlikeusernames don’t even get me started on academic journals! But… you did, so I will rant! I have published over 60 papers by now, did I get a penny of them? No! How much do people like Elsevier charge for them? A fortune! Elsevier these days has something like a 20-30% profit margin, can’t quite remember the exact figure (and I’m sure that CoG would love to have such a crazy margin, or any other company on that planet…). Every month I get contacted several times (4-8 times) by journals to review papers… do I get paid for that? No! But Elsevier still makes their money… with some colleagues we’ve set up an open source journal these days, which has an IF of 1+ by now (not that Elsevier will index it or anything like that), so it is my way of fighting against a complete scam system (as you say, as after all my salary comes from public taxes, just so that a company makes a killing from it). I was complaining yesterday to an editor of Nature about this (the poor girl… though to be fair their practices are far better than those of Elsevier, who these days I CANNOT stand). Ranting mode off… once again, dealing with CoGs is a completely different experience. Their practices and ethos clearly show that they care dearly about how they are seen by people, and anybody with any experience in publishing elsewhere will not believe how nice and generous they are! (the discussion in my opinion could be about whether they are too nice and generous, rather than the other way around… but as an author I’m happy that they are nice and generous!)
@JimD, @Eric_Moser now those are some nice ideas for a game! On top of that I’ll set mine in Tokyo, just to also potentially capture anybody who likes anime…
Heh, asked the big boss today, the reason he gets royalties from Kluwer at all is because when he wrote that for them he was a “consultant” contractually entitled to 5% royalties on all his works, they had figured journal articles were excluded but my boss successfully fought that. They’ve sharpened their contract clauses since, but that’s why he gets those ridiculously low amounts from them every so often. So always watch the exact wording of your contract clauses when you employ greedy, amoral jurists is the object lesson here.
I think the amounts used to be a fair bit higher (else why would he have sued them over it), but like I said law is a fast moving field and what is ground-breaking and highly useful today is outdated in couple of years.
Exactly academic journals are one of the worst kinds of “public-private partnerships” I have ever encountered where the public is kept from works the public by and large paid for through their taxes, but it gets sent to companies who paywall it and get to make a profit off of it in perpetuity (well forever minus that single day, as that seems to be the utterly sick philosophy behind intellectual property policy today).
As a socialist politician (even if I’m not practicing that right now) these kinds of practices naturally rankle me. 
Good for you!!! Many jurists, including one tiny piece from me will post on and to several prominent law-blogs these days, almost as good or better than journals, except not officially “peer-reviewed” (though note the comment section behind some of them and you’ll see that informal reviews can be a fair bit harsher than the official ones at times) so the universities do not tend to view articles from there in the most positive light. Fortunately now that I’m a practitioner I get to filter my own information.
I really appreciate all the information on this thread…especially from the authors! I am thinking of writing a game…have my idea and have become familiar with the code. But I am trying to get a handle on the potential revenue.
Bases on a 50,000 download and price of $3.17 that would be a gross revenue of about $158,500. The author gets 17% which would be around $27,000…is my math correct?
@Art_online
Yeah, but the game was free to download. Most titles don’t end up selling 50,000 copies overall.
I wouldn’t bank on getting 50,000 sales for a HG TBH, (other authors feel free to chime in, I could be wrong for the most successful titles?), but I suspect the majority wouldn’t net the author anywhere near that much. (Downloads do not = sales). I believe it does work out to 17.5% of the sale price so IF it sold that many copies I think your maths are correct.
Edit: Ninja’ed by Samuel_H_Young 
I would assume that the best-sellers like Zombie Exodus, Way Walkers, Life of a Wizard, etc, do actually sell 50k+ copies, (and that’s over multiple years) but most HGs don’t come close to that, as far as I can tell.
Just for interest (including mine), I had a look at the absolute numbers of sales from paid only apps. While I suspect you may get more sales from the trial ones (but I don’t have figures on that) it’ll give you an idea on what to expect if you’re writing for a purely financial standpoint.
Paid apps: (only android sales so could probably double these figures). I think none of these have ever been trial before buying.
Fatehaven, Lost heir 1 & 2, Samurai of Hyuga 2, Waywalkers 1 & 2: 5-10,000 sales
Divided we fall, First year demons, Life of a Mobster, Planetary quarantine, Somme Trench, Volunteer firefighter: 1-5,000 sales
Lost heir, Waywalkers and Samurai are all considered very successful HG games.
It was probably the reverse a few years ago. I know that Zombie Exodus drew in a ton of people. Especially the period of time we had Life of a Wizard, Way Walker, and Sabres all one after each other.
In regards to sales, I’d be interested in seeing sales figures for some of the more famous games, both Hosted and Choice. I’m 90% sure that Choice of Robots is still the best selling one, but I’m not sure how many copies have even sold.
Do a forum search but I seem to remember it being said that android makes up somewhere between 40-60% of sales (I think it may be on the higher end of late but check that) so with the figures I gave you, you could definitely work out approx sales and income for some of the more popular titles.
It’s interesting because I believe CoG said that most of their titles make like 60% of their sales on Apple, but with my two HGs so far, Trial of the Demon Hunter and Captive of Fortune, I seem to make like 60% on Android instead. So it may just depend.
Yah, I’m the same, I seem to sell slightly more on google cf apple. I think apple used to have a larger share of the market but in recent times that’s been changing.
Tokyo Wizard also makes a lot more from android… not exactly sure why. But yet, almost no games have 50,000+ sales (note that downloads DO NOT equal sells, so the numbers you see in the websites are misleading…)
3-4 years ago, there were more Apple devices than Android. The reverse is true now. More users means more potential sales.
For new game makers, your goal is to build a fan base. $ will come later. I made $100 a month from ZE for years but now with 3 games and a fan base, I make more.
Things have changed substantially in the past two years w/r/t platforms.
GPS is now about 40% of our revenue, up from about 20%.
Apple has remained stable at around 30%, or maybe declined from 35%.
While Steam has dropped from 35% to about 20%.