I agree that it would be nice to have a back button that allowed you to re-read (not re-choose). I also think it’s silly to frame that preference as a dire threat
I mean, knock yourself out, with whatever audience you reach… but ultimatums like this would sound obnoxious and inane even coming from the guys at Penny Arcade.
Infinite choice is an illusion and an impossibility. Choice is made meaningful by the constraints on choice. If I can take back any choice, was it really a choice at all, or just a tentative exploration?
On this issue, CoG’s approach wasn’t arrived at “without considering what the customers want.” As they say in the FAQ, they found early on from player feedback that games with a back button turned into a “chore” of tension-free flipping through all options to find the “best” one. The choices in a CoG take on additional meaning and tension from the knowledge that you can’t easily take them back. It’s one of the ways these games improve on paper CYOAs, where you could always keep your finger on the choice until you’d seen whether you liked it.
I imagine you wouldn’t see this as an improvement. That’s fine, but it illustrates that the playerbase doesn’t have a single uniform desire on this point. Representing your own preference as “what the customers want” is unjustified. And it doesn’t seem to me that what some customers want should or can be decisive for a company’s design philosophy.
Finally, you also ignore Mary’s point above that, given the number of games CoG has published on multiple platforms, it’s no simple thing to update the UI. I’d appreciate a re-read button, but I’m not at all sure the benefit would outweigh the cost of installing it in all their current games–I’ve got no way of accurately estimating that cost. Perhaps as a game developer yourself, you’ve got a better idea.
PS - if you happen to be the reviewer of Rebels who just noted on Google Play that you missed the whole description of Harrowers, I feel your pain, but I don’t think this post is the best way to seek change.