What, you didn’t appreciate Henry’s warm smile? 
What if he didn’t know? It is written there that he himself confirmed the use of Artificial Intelligence. If he knew at all, he wouldn’t have confirmed it.
Then he didn’t read and understand his contract, and shouldn’t have signed it.
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To publish a game under the Choice of Games label, you must go through an entire process, such as making a pitch to the CoG staff about your game.
One of the benefits of going this route is the amount of support you receive as an author. You are assigned an editor, provided with internal and external feedback regarding your story as you write it and an official “beta” you know about from the news letter.
To publish a game under the Hosted Game label, you just need to write a game over 30,000 words (I believe) and have it reviewed in a WiP thread that includes a public accessible demo.
You can then send it in (submit the game) and there is a minimum amount of review and support at that point.
The “beta” for the Hosted game is the demo being reviewed by “peers” (to get feedback from other people outside of yourself or your immediate social circle of family and friends).
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Got it. Okay. Thank you for that. If that is the process for HG titles, then I am definitely going to think long and hard before future purchases. Because that is a terrible process for evaluation.
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It is but remember most of the titles are of really great quality so this not become a Hosted are bad thread. Mostly there are not
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There are some very successful Hosted Games titles and there are many reasons a good author might chose the HG route instead of the CoG route.
There are some real gems being written by Hosted authors, so don’t go nuclear in your screening. 
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Agreed. Released games also have free demos, so it’s easy to choose titles that are to your taste.
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Yeah, I purchase a lot of HG stories and I’m a huge fan of some of the bigger titles. However, I’ll most likely just stick to the HG authors and franchises I know are worth it moving forward. I’m not a gambler, so I don’t enjoy risky purchases like this. We will see. But this really kind of put a bad taste in my mouth.
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I think this is true for almost everyone in the community.
If you ever get an hour or two of leisure time, look into some Work in Progress demo threads and sample some of the linked demos … Your feedback really might help an author, and you’ll get an idea of future authors to keep an eye on.
Just a suggestion, no pressure intended, of course.
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I thought the story felt weirdly written. The conversations and dialogue just felt so… unnatural.
The whole point of HG is to be as open as possible, letting freelancers piggyback on (and, when they’re successful, enlarge) the audience CoG has built around its coding language.
Unlike the CoG brand, HG is meant to be seen as a platform, not a publisher. CoG doesn’t do quality assurance for HGs beyond the basics that a similar platform like itch.io or Steam might. They’ve tried to keep barriers to entry as low as possible, rather than making judgment calls on which HG games are likely to succeed (like they do with CoG games).
There’s no shortage of fans who’ll say that the lack of editorial interference has made HG overall a stronger brand, with more labor-of-love authors willing and able to do distinctive things with the medium. There’s also little question that the least popular games written in Choicescript are also HG, due to the lack of a quality floor (beyond the very low one that the beta test requirement is meant to establish).
CoG is a small business, trying to square its goal of giving freelance game writers an opportunity to be published with its limited capacity to screen and edit all the games people submit to it. To date, the very light-footprint editorial approach to HG has been core to that balance. The need to screen out AI material might be the thing that pushes the company in a new direction; but I would expect that to reduce the number of HGs published per year, not because lots are caught with AI material, but because of the additional strain on CoG/HG employee hours.
We’ll see what they decide. But regardless, “think long and hard before future purchases” is the right approach for any of these games, doubly so for HGs…and the chance to play the first chapter without a purchase makes it relatively easy to screen out the ones that don’t meet your basic quality expectations.
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Whether HG ought to have tougher standards is a conversation that comes up in the community every year or so. And what it always comes down to is that the bar is set as low as it is on purpose. The Hosted Games mission, from the very beginning, was to allow anyone to use ChoiceScript to become a published game developer and earn royalties from the sale of their work. The only requirements were that the game be written in basically comprehensible English, not violate anyone’s intellectual property rights, and not contain grossly offensive content or game-breaking bugs. The only significant change they’ve ever made to those rules was the addition of a 30K minimum word count. They are committed to this mission/business model, even though it means regularly publishing games that they know they’ll lose money on. Whether it’s a wise or worthy mission may be debatable, but it does need to be pointed out that the current standard is a considered and deliberate one.
That said, please remember that you can always try a game - usually about three chapters - before you make a decision whether to buy it, so you don’t necessarily have to stick to the tried and true to make good decisions about what’s worth your time and money.
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Since the games have usually been at least partly uploaded to the forum for a good amount of times, I find it very useful to keep an eye on what people here are saying about the new releases, and which games people seems excited for, when I haven’t played the WIPs myself.
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thank you for supporting real authors and artists
I personally may be tempting to use AI-generated arts since I have no skill on producing it on my own, but AI-generated text? that’s just lazy imo
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There are really talented artist than for 20 euros can make you some work and you can have a professional cover for 50 euros or even less if you commission a bundle of assets and negotiate well you have art for an entire game for a very affordable price.
Made for someone with real creativity and that can create in based your story something amazing that compliment your style.
No single Ai can do that.
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HG games are the best
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Speaking of ESL, does that in practice mean all English-as-foreign-language, or only English-as-second-language? I consider myself as English-as-third-language-but-the-first-foreign-one, although the lines are a bit blurry.
But those are the best parts! At least when you’re using it for brainstorming. The most nonsensical things give the best ideas.
Sometimes you can even see the training material bleeding through, in a sense. Like comments after “the end”.
I’d personally still call that freelancing though, since CoG writers don’t become CoG employees, I believe. Maybe it has different definitions in different countries?
The former. It’s become a kind of catch-all term that doesn’t always get used precisely literally.
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I mean. I do agree but coffee chocolate is tasty though…