I notice there are a lot of demos but I am curious when a full game is submitted how long does it take till is put on the appstore or steam
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There is to my knowledge no set timeline for such its based more or less on a first come first served kind of thing. Plus there could be issues with a potential game that need addressing before it can get to a potential release date and the bigger the game the longer it might take to get gone through. As well one wing of the company is different from the others and they each have there own rules governing games that can be released under there name.
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It varies based upon many factors including the amount of submissions they’re getting and how long your title is. If I’m recalling correctly, Trial of the Demon and The Nascent Necromancer took five months, Captive of Fortune took nine months, Foundation of Nightmares, The Magician’s Burden, and The Mage’s Adventures took seven months, and Meteoric took only two months. I have submitted The Cruel Guardians and so far it has been in the queue for two months
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When a game is submitted, they do a content review, where someone reads the code in its entirety to determine if there’s any “grossly offensive” content. It’s rare for a game to be rejected outright on the basis of the content review, but sometimes the writer will be asked to make changes. If a game is long enough and judged to be of sufficient quality to merit a Steam release, HG pays for “copyediting.”
So a lot depends on the specifics of the game. A short game that doesn’t require any content edits and isn’t going on Steam can go through the entire publication process within a couple months. A game that’s a million words long can easily take several weeks for the content review and several weeks to copyedit before they even begin the process of putting it on the app stores. It also depends on how many other games are in the queue. When there haven’t been many submissions and there really isn’t any queue to speak of, things go a lot faster, but they like to space out major releases a bit, so if there have been a lot of games submitted in close succession they might be spread out over a couple of months instead of being released at the first opportunity.
I don’t pay a lot of attention to most Hosted WIPs, but the ones I’ve paid attention to have tended to take two to six months to go from submission to release.
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I’d be a little careful about equating steam release with quality necessarily. Games on steam are usually there because they are of sufficient length and genre that they think it will appeal to steam users. There have been a number of (IMO) very well written or otherwise worthy games that have gotten releases later on proving popularity or merit, but did not get one one release (like Grim and I, and Aether for example.) There are others that got one on release with a mostly negative reception.
I don’t have any steam releases personally so no editing or changes has ever been required, and my quickest game went through in about 4 months from memory, my longest was more like 8 or so months. Both were of approx same word count, and on the second longer one, they already had all my details set up in the system. So there are likely a lot of additional factors that come into play, including how busy the staff are, how many other releases are slated as mentioned, and not running competing HG/COG titles together.
Short version is there’s no set time frame you can predict.
And yes there are a lot of demos, but the vast majority will never make it to submission which is why there seems to be so many compared to number of releases.
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No, a Steam release isn’t necessarily a direct reflection of a game’s quality. There are a few games that ended up on Steam that really aren’t very good, and there are some that aren’t on Steam that are, if not exactly unheralded masterpieces, certainly more worthy to be there than some that are.
Length is the first consideration - games below a certain word count (I’m not entirely sure off the top of my head, but it’s in the very low six figures) aren’t considered for an initial release on Steam no matter how good they are. But not every game that’s long enough automatically ends up on Steam, regardless of genre. It’s a subjective judgment call, and I don’t know what exactly comes under consideration, so when I say “quality” I mean some combination of existing popularity, perceived sales appeal, good game construction, and good writing. The details don’t really matter for the purpose of the point I was making, to wit, games that are selected for Steam take longer to go through the publication process because there’s an extra step.
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Just in case someone is browsing this thread in the future, the number is 150,000.
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