But Jason has already said that the Google Play Omnibus will NOT replace standalone Google Play releases. It will just be a second place to find them.
So we’ll be okay!
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That’s good to hear; I must have missed that. Thanks for the update 
Edited: Though the concern there would be (upon reflection) that dividing sales like that will stop new games from trending on the Google Play store because many of the week one sales are from already existing fans who are more likely to use the omnibus. This will keep games from trending on GPS and result in lower week one sales. For example, Fool! was trending at #1 for a surprising amount of time and got a lot of attention as a result. A friend of mine who doesn’t follow CoG releases even saw it and downloaded it because it was trending. People actually look at that stuff.
Maybe if new releases were only released on the omnibus a week or two later? This could be viable since apparently they will be having a mechanism in place to transfer purchases to the omnibus after…
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Where was this said? I have been told standalone apps on iOS are no longer being updated.
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Google Play, not the iOS store. Apparently the Play store omnibus will be optional? The only reason the iOS versions are confined to the omnibus is because Apple forced CoG to do it. At least that’s my understanding. Google isnt forcing anything unless there has been a very recent change in policy.
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It’s confirmed here:
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For the omnibus app, it could help if they switched to a Bayesian system.
In the Bayesian system, you find the average number of ratings ave_num and the average score ave_score.
Then you replace the usual average ratings (total ratings/number of ratings) with a modified form: ((total ratings+ave_num*ave_score)/(number of ratings+ave_num))
This is what IMDB uses, and many others. Basically, it floods every game with the average rating. The only way to escape that averaging factor is to have many ratings higher than the average. One or two 5/5’s aren’t enough, but 1000 4/5’s are.
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I’ve been saying this since the omnibus came out. That is one of the more popular ways to do it on mainstream successful stores, and the best way to maximize overall sales. I’m somewhat baffled as to why it’s not being used. I was told that it was done this way to promote less popular or less well-known games that have low engagement but high scores from those who play them, but having watched ratings over the last several months, those games continue to be promoted and get barely any more ratings. It’s essentially promoting games that don’t sell. It’s a nice idea, and I understand it in principle, but the mainstream stores do things the other way for a reason–it maximizes sales.
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So far writing for Hosted Games have been by far the most lucrative writing job I’ve ever had (far better than comics or books). I still get a nice chunk every month, and that is just with a single game under my belt. 25% is very generous, because the infrastructure and the free advertising of being with other cool games REALLY matter. I was a swedish nobody when I started, wouldn’t have made any sales at all if it weren’t for the people here. Worth every penny.
But with everything, it depends on how well something sells, which is very hard to predict.
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Ok omnibus- in my opinion it’s a bit of a double edged sword. On one hand where apple’s concerned, it’s HARD to convince people who don’t know what COG is to download the app as there’s this send your phone number thing, you can’t see most of the games in it before download, and there’s no alternative. Nothing that can be done about that one and no point in debating it, because it’s down to apple being a pain as usual so moving on.
Yeah it will divide sales on google play, I’m not sure how much the lack of “trending” is going to affect sales compared to having more loyal (but non forum) fans notified whenever a game is actually released. I was originally very skeptical of the whole omnibus idea, but since then I have an omnibus (from another company since I’m not an apple user) and I get notifications for new games that I probably wouldn’t have seen for weeks to months after release, or even just missed entirely once they got buried deep in the expanding pile of new games. So yep, for me at least, the omnibus would have benefited that company from increased usage from me. I’m not convinced the whole thing is doom and gloom. I think it has the potential to actually keep players that don’t compulsively check the app store each week in the loop.
The other thing is for android at least, unless you follow COG on twitter or frequent the forums here, there’s a good chance you’d miss a HG release. A notification via the omnibus could be very useful to correct that. (I get this may be a lower concern for GreekWinter (or other official authors) who are releasing through COG though, since more COG fans are likely to be on their FB page or email list and they are featured on the front page of this website, but I still reckon there’ll be casuals out there who aren’t checking those things that a notification would poke into checking the store if they got a notification.) I guess it’d be a try it and see what it does to sales thing.
Also,anyone correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t the Omnibus allow sorting by bestselling or rating from what I’m told? (The bestselling list would pull a game with 300 ratings at 4.8 starts up above a 5* game with 10 so it isn’t penalising a game that is obviously very popular but doesn’t have a perfect 5* record which is going to happen eventually even to the best game when someone gets cranky it’s not free.) I thought COG’s rational on that one was to stop less popular games from being buried at the bottom and never seen again. That 5* game with 10 reviews with visibility will either continue to collect good reviews and stay at the top, or get more mixed and poor reviews and fall towards the bottom of both lists. I kind of hoped that would be the case if it’s also made for android so both have a chance to be seen (but I haven’t seen the apple version so I don’t know for sure.)
Anyway, just my thoughts. I could be wrong. We’ll have to wait and see how it pans out I guess
That was what was said, yes. But it doesn’t seem to be happening. There are still, after all these months, several games sitting up near the top with a handful of reviews. I’ve been watching it very carefully. As @Brian_Rushton and I said earlier, other sites use a more standard sorting algorithm for a reason.
This is the biggest issue by far though.
Basically, if your new game sells 1000 copies in the first week now on Google Play, Google sees all 1000 of your sales and adjusts you in its algorithms accordingly. Your search ranking goes up. You trend. Now imagine if half (or more) of those sales happen in the omnibus. All of a sudden Google sees that you only sold 500 copies, and you don’t trend, and stay buried in the search results because Google only promotes the best selling games. Google won’t recognize game sales within the omnibus. Those are just IAP to them. As far as google is concerned, you only sold half of what you really did and they’ll adjust accordingly. This is very, very bad.
On top of that is the problem with reviews. User engagement and reviews/ratings also help make games rise in the algorithm and promotion. If most of CoG’s most ardent fanbase are omnibus users (the people who buy week-one) then all of those potential reviews will be lost. Google doesn’t see or care about in-omnibus rankings. So instead of getting 100+ reviews in week one, you might get 20, because the biggest fans are only rating it in the omnibus which Google doesn’t see. On the Play store that’s a death sentence. This is immensely important.
CoG already sends out emails when new games come out. Isn’t having the omnibus do the same simply a redundant system? It strikes me as a very paltry gain in exchange for an entire host of problems, lost revenue, and lower user engagement.
If we must have an optional omnibus system, why not do what many other major publishers do? Take comics for example: Release the individual book first and allow it to get its early sales and reviews so Google will raise it in its algorithms. Then, after a period of time, release it in the omnibus. Users who already bought the standard version can import it there, which is functionality they are already implementing.
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Discussion regarding the Omnibus app and its affect on sales is certainly a relevant and interesting topic, but I believe that discussion would be better suited for either a separate thread in the Meta category or on the Android Omnibus beta thread. The topic of this thread is more focused on the possibility and concerns of writing full-time for CoG.
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I am lucky enough to have a job that gives me a bit more than 4 months of vacation each year, and so I am able to actually be a full-time writer for 1/3 of every year. I’m able to sit down at a desk and write for eight hours a day, which is paradise. During the rest of the year, I take a lot of notes, and get in an hour or two on weekends or sometimes early in the morning.
It’s working wonderfully for me–but I recognize that not everyone has a job that can accommodate that! the $20k I have made from my two published games have been lovely, but I don’t think I could ever make enough from my writing to sustain me without my full-time work.
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Ok sure. I can’t see anything that happens in the apple app as I don’t own an iPad or iPhone so I was just assuming that was how it was all working which seemed like a good system in theory otherwise you’d have the same games at the top of both lists. If you think it’s not working as it should, maybe bring it to the attention of the devs again? And can’t you still sort by popularity (where your game would be close to the top) or is that not an option anymore? (I’d rather have a game at the top of the popular pile than just a star rating personally as that’s what I’d be more likely to buy, but can’t speak for everyone out there.)
Point taken. I have no idea how relevant trending is to sales of choice games specifically as they’re kind of niche vs visibility to existing players, was just a thought on it. I guess it would be a factor for the top selling HG and many of the official COGs.
This is mostly only done for official games I think. (Either that or my mailbox is screening things out as I haven’t seen an email for most of the recent HG releases, but I have been getting COG ones.) So that’s why I was saying this has the potential to be a lot more beneficial to HG authors that have trouble getting visibility on release, than for COG ones. I know that personally if I wasn’t on the forum I would probably be not noticing a lot of the HG releases as I don’t tend to hunt the app stores for particular games a lot of the time.
Yep ok. I’m not sure I have anything more to comment on the subject anyway, I would need more specific sales data.
FWIW, I did that a couple years ago, probably for much the same reasons. I can tell you, even for that small, one-time fee, it is NOT worth it. First, once you’ve flagged yourself as someone who might give FB money, the site continues to pester you for more ad purchases. Second, it wasn’t even worth it because it got very few “real” notices. It did inflate my follower numbers, but it did not translate into purchases. Many of the pages that ended up engaging with the ad looked like empty bots. And this was back when maybe more people were still using FB than they are now. YMMV, but I wouldn’t do it again.
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Just wanted to put some words regarding Google Play Store and Omnibus.
Most Android users are casual: we see things through big pictures. At least that’s what I get in my college community. To us, individual apps are messy. Omnibus is clean and neat. So we grab omnibus.
In the end, I think CoG consumers who are already exposed to omnibus would prefer it over individual apps. As for sorting algorithm, the formula is still up in the cooking pot.
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FWIW @GreekWinter sales of Fool on Google Play were exactly par for the course, average. I appreciate your anecdote, but no dramatic feedback loop of sales was created by it trending. Pretty much every new standalone release on iOS would trend in RPG/Adventure/all Paid apps when we released standalones there in the good old days, and this too never created an amazing feedback loop of sales. I think the standalones discoverability after release week is diminished, based on what I’ve seen on post-release sales…which is why we continue to have the Omnibus ratings system sort work the way it does. To sell old games. However, the default sort is Bestselling. Second, you can also sort by Number of Ratings, and you’re currently 8th on that sort.
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To the points about our advances and royalty rates:
$7500 against 25% royalties is unheard of in traditional publishing. Maybe an unknown debut author could get a $7500 advance, but getting $5000 or $6000 is just as likely as doing better than $7500. So the advance is good. Also, a writer usually has to write the novel first, on no pay. Here, (like most non-fiction contracts, btw) you create a proposal, an outline, which we help you to write, then pay as milestones come in. Royalties: a traditional publishing contract might have a 7% royalty rate for an unknown, debut author. The best, most famousest, most insanely successful bestselling authors? They still get like oh…maybe 15%-17%. So 25% is a respectable royalty.
For HG, I mean…same math applies. Except that you have to understand that many, many HGs are not going to recoup the cost of staff time to review and publish them. Ever. We estimate it costs us $1000 to publish an HG. You still get 25% of the cover from day one.
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I was wondering, how many readers, average, does a COG game has? What about HG? How big is the audience?
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So, The Magician’s Burden has sold 4.4k copies in its first 9 months. I’d say it’s safe to say it will sell about 5k copies in its first year. I don’t have all the other authors’ info, obviously, but I’m guessing this is an average number - not a best seller, but not unsuccessful, either.
My trilogy, Trial of the Demon Hunter, Captive of Fortune, and Foundation of Nightmares, has sold around 17k in five years.
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Tally Ho has sold about 13,000 copies to date (so after about a year and a half)
Midsummer, around 16,000 (after…three years?)
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