Full time writing and CoG

You can do it!!! Rob Schnieder voice :grin:

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I am really rooting for your story, both because I love unique and niche ideas the most and because skewed tales involving holiday figures are fascinating. About ten years ago I did a 50-strip webcomic called Hellidays that had Santa as the immortal head of a crime conglomerate populated by a homicidal Frosty, lecherous Little Drummer Boy, and a reindeer Cerberus, among others. The art was rough (although that artist had a lot more dedication than any other I ever worked with), but it was tons of fun to write.

That said, while niche stories always have that small chance of being runaway hits, it is not the likeliest outcome. Oedipus sorta proving that as well of late. Sometimes you shake up the status quo and sometimes it shakes you instead.

@Jacic While that is true, those indy authors would be getting a lot more for each of those copies than we do. Although in either case it is an amount of money that makes this more a hobby than potential employment for lower-selling titles, to circle back to this thread’s genesis. I think we scared the OP off with TMI here.

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That’s awesome!! You’re almost at the finish line. As someone who’s barely getting through the first chapter, I feel immensely jealous.

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Metahuman is …successful, sure. But it’s on par with Choice of the Pirate. It’s not single-out-able based on genre.

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For sure Mrs. Claus is penciled into our release schedule for early December. Now, I just need to do some code review on the romances @Brian_Rushton has written for it…

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Hi there, OP here, just wanted to say thanks for replying and for the numbers. They were very eye opening and I had no clue how abysmal the rates for writers are (part of being inexperienced, I guess).

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Thanks–I’d got a wrong impression somewhere that it was a blockbuster. :slight_smile: Terrific game, regardless.

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I mean, Marvel and Star Wars are sci fi and they’re as big as you can get.

When I was researching which game to make a couple of years back, it seemed that the most popular choices were between fantasy, zombies and superheroes. Zombies have slowed down a little since then I think, but urban fantasy is on the rise?

Have there been any successful historical ones?

Um, bringing up Marvel in an argument that superheroes tend to make more money than sci-fi is just going to prove that point more. Fun tidbit: the MCU is not only the highest grossing film series of all time, it would be the highest grossing film series of all time even if you only counted from 2017 to today. It made more in two years than Star Wars in 42 or Bond in almost 60. I still have a hard time fathoming that.

That said, we are talking about IF, not movies. Not all the trends correspond equally; fantasy movies are not always the huge market in film that they are here, likely in part because so many early CYOA-style gamebooks were fantasy-based, allowing similar games here to scratch a nostalgic itch.

@malinryden History is probably akin to sci-fi, where there may be one or two that broke through and reached the upper echelons but many more can be found towards the bottom of their respective…omnibuses. Omnibii. Treasury app.

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Well, obviously Marvel’s main genre is Super Hero, but half the cool shit in their stories is sci fi. Time travel, space ships, androids, metal suits, etc.

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I think what superheroes did for scifi was to make it more colorful. I remember seeing Guardians of the Galaxy and being in awe of the design and color and sheer life I saw there! Same with Ragnarok.

I feel that superheroes took over the old space opera genre, and that what a lot of people talk about when they mean SciFi is hard SciFi, realistic and technological and… a bit dry. Because Cyberpunk took the more gritty down to earth variety.

EDIT: I could just as easily have labeled Fallen Hero as SciFi, changed a few terms and uniforms and it would have worked.

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In my gaming perspective:

Superheroes are a cross-over genre, like IF itself – Buck Rogers, Battle Star Galactica and Star Wars related games are the modern Space Operas, while Star Trek and its many shades of games are pure SciFi sagas.

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Metahuman was a big hit, but there were other non scifi games in the same range. I remain skeptical that scifi just as a genre does as well as [any other] genre executed extremely well. See: Tally Ho, Grand Academy, etc.

Versus is scifi and has done well. Mecha Ace likewise did well. Ratings War, The Martian Job, and Rent-a-Vice did not do as well, despite being award winning/nominated.

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Earning out the advance is not to be sneezed at!

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It helps when HG authors don’t get advances. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

He was referring to the cost it takes to publish a game because of man-hours.

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Well, I assume the $1,000 number is a combo of manhours and the initial fee to submit on each platform that HG covers.

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Uhhh… I knew that! cough Anyway, I still think it’s impressive.

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I agree. The “superhero” tag isn’t really a genre tag IMO. These stories can be viewed/written as adventure, or sci-fi, or fantasy (urban or otherwise), or even something like a thriller or suspense story. Heck, with Watchmen diving so deep into history, you could almost call it historical fiction. Superman for All Seasons and Daredevil Yellow are basically written as a memoirs and they are all sorts of awesome.

So to tie it back to the thread, I think superhero writers have flexibility to take their stories wherever they want to go, and frankly I’d love to see more romance/thriller/memoir approaches to CoG/HG superhero tales. I think such intimate, smaller-scale approaches could sell really well.

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Tom Ellis is a great Satan for you to sell your soul to.

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