This is my first time posting here on the forum, so I apologize if I’m ignoring some rule. But I wanted to ask how many copies the more recent games (released a year ago at most) have sold. I checked the numbers on various stores and it doesn’t look like much. I was considering writing for HG but I’d like to clarify this topic before making a decision.
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We don’t know. It is up to individual writers to share their sales figures.
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The only publicly available data we can glean sales from is the user reviews on individual marketplaces and the omnibus apps. Other than that, as Chance said, it’s only if writers share sales data. The company, historically, has not.
I’m always willing to put mine out so people can have full transparency about it, but if you’re wanting info on recent releases I can’t help. Nothing new the last few years.
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This is actually something I’m really interested in. If you wouldn’t mind could you please share, and if its not too much to ask can you share how many sales you made on the first week specifically, and at what price? Also what determines pricing of the game?
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Like hustler, I don’t have anything recent to give you. Choice of Rebels was a pretty successful CoG when it was published nine years ago (with a promotional push that, like a few things about the game, was more like a HG than a COG – no promo video, just the email announcement).
Rebels has sold nearly 47,000 copies to date, and earned me $55,700 in royalties. These days it still sells 70 units in an average month, and I’m hoping for a bump when I finally finish writing the sequel (plus of course the sequel’s new royalties).
From the last time that a bunch of forum-active authors compared notes, we know that the most successful HGs (Wayhaven, Fallen Hero, Zombie Exodus, Samurai of Hyuga, etc.) all have sales numbers that put mine in the shade. 
There’s likely been a dip in sales after the highs of the COVID years, and there’s no guarantee that anything any of us writes will be financially successful. But yours could be the next blockbuster.
For most of us, COG/HG is a way to make a little money writing stuff we love. It’s not easy to get paid to write, anywhere. My earlier book got me a $17k publisher advance on royalties of 10.6%, but despite promotion on NPR, Fox, and a NYTimes review, it only sold 7,000 copies, so the advance was all I ended up getting. Compared to that, my CoG earnings look pretty good – and I get to write fantasy, the genre I love, a much harder market to crack into sales-wise.
If you’re coming at this as more of an indie game designer than a writer, you might find better ways to make money off your creative work. For writers, your odds with HG/COG are about as good as you’d get anywhere I know of.
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Damn man, that’s really impressive! Werewolves 1 has sold a bit over 37k copies to date. Parliament of Knives sold a bit over 51k units plus 18k DLC sales.
Lesson? Writing these is fun, but most of us aren’t exactly going to be quitting our day jobs any time soon 
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Because no one has addressed this, specifically, yet, I feel like I can offer an explanation. The specific pricing model, if they have one, is not shared with Hosted Games authors (or at least not with me). Just looking at the store, though, you can tell that pricing is based on things like word count and what type of product it is (a DLC as opposed to a full game, for example).
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Never shared with me, either. It’s always a bit of a surprise. It’s clearly based on word count, though. CoG authors do not choose our own price points that I’m aware of. If anyone does, I haven’t heard of it.
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Sure!
As of April 2026, the latest data available (at least for the next day or two until the May stuff hits), my sales are as follows:
Nuclear Powered Toaster, released October of 2018: Total net revenue $2,516.43, royalties to me $630.36. Total copies sold: 1,365 (459 Steam, 381 Google Play standalone, 360 iOS omnibus, 102 Google omnibus, 39 web store, 21 Amazon, 3 Amazon Omnibus). This regularly sells between 1-3 copies a month. Last month (meaning April, the last month we have data) was 0, which has only happened a couple of times. It made me a whopping $.07 on my share of the ad revenue for that month.
The Parenting Simulator, released September 30, 2019 (released on Steam May 2020): Total net income $68,997.10, royalties to me $17,256.53. Total copies sold: 23,052 (8.877 Google Play standalone, 5,576 iOS omnibus, 4,817 Steam, 2,150 Google Play omnibus, 1,434 web store, 172 Amazon, 25 Amazon omnibus). This regularly sells between 70-90 copies a month now. Last month was 95 copies sold, slightly better than average the last year or so. TPS has had a very long and gentle tail.
The Day After Ever After, released November 2022: Total net income: $14,337.44, royalties to me $4,022.72. Total copies sold: 3,587 (1,706 iOS omnibus, 1,107 Google Play omnibus, 550 Google Play standalone, 219 web store, 4 Amazon omnibus, and one lonely person who paid for the skip ads once option on Google Play standalone). This one never had a standalone Amazon sale, likely because that marketplace barely ever existed and even less now, and was not released on Steam since it was a free-to-play title. Last month it sold 13 copies. It sold well at release but dropped off sharper than TPS, with notable bumps every time it places in a Most Underrated HG Title poll.
@Writing_Fever beat me to it; the pricing is decided on by the company. You can make requests, and they can (and, in my case, did) ignore them. Were they right to do so? Impossible to know for sure.
I think they were wrong with Toaster. I wanted it cheaper at $1.99 instead of its original release price of $2.99, and it would almost certainly have sold better if it had, enough to make up for the small loss of income per sale. I assume it simply was not allowed to avoid setting a precedent for other stories of a similar length.
With Parenting? I also lobbied for a price a dollar below where it ultimately released ($2.99 instead of $3.99). They probably had the right of it here. I don’t know that it would have sold enough extra copies to offset losing that extra buck tens of thousands of times over.
Day After’s price was as expected, the same $3.99 Parenting had (I did not ask for anything else; by then I knew it was folly). It was supposed to be a true free to play game, because the plan I had was for it to sell really well even if it didn’t make a ton so I could put out paid DLC standalone sequels that utilized the game’s high playerbase; I wanted something like War of the Gods that had been downloaded a lot to build from and make those games more feasible than they would have been as true separate releases. Instead the company did a worst of both worlds approach and made it free to play, but only once and a purchase required after that. It fizzled. Would it ever have been a huge hit? Probably not. It was fantasy, but not the right kind; folks prefer swords and sorcery to fae magic and the stuff of fairy tales. And I don’t think I wrote romance especially well. It continues to get voted as a Most Underrated title, which is a mixed blessing; means it sells well enough to not be pushed off eligibility for that title like Toaster did, but not well enough to no longer be in the running at all on the other side.
The end result of it all is just under $22,000 of royalties for my three releases. Not great, but not terrible. I imagine there are more authors here who would trade places with me if they could than those who would not, but at the same time I’m a gnat compared to Malin or Seraphinite. And even a lot of Patreon-only folks have monthly earnings that dwarf my monthly sales, which in the last year have mostly been around $100 with a few dips into the $90 range and some bumps on times like the Most Underrated promotion for Day After or the periodic Steam sales (the Summer one now will likely have an uptick for Parenting I’ll get to enjoy in a couple months when the June and July payments are sent).
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Thank you, this is good information, though not what I would have liked to hear. I don’t actually have a day job anymore, and I haven’t had one for almost a year and a half. I had hoped I could get enough income to live on, but that’s clearly not going to be the case. Still, it’s a lot better than no income at all, and my first WIP is almost halfway done and I really enjoy writing it, so I’m definitely going to continue.
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Nah, money to live on for even one person is a tall order here. A small few manage it but I absolutely would not count on it.
And to be blunt, given your genre choice and the overall response to your WIP, I would expect your earnings to fall somewhere between NPT and Day After.
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People who have tried it have really enjoyed it and said it was excellent, but the trick is getting people to try it in the first place.
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Guys thank you so much for sharing this! It is so incredibly helpful to have an idea of where the bar is.
Also: wow, the money-to-word ratio is so much worse writing prose than writing screenplays! A lot of my previous commissions have been for TV movies, which are pretty much the worst paid screenwriting jobs you can get - so bad that last I checked, I wasn’t allowed to join the UK writers’ union if I wanted to work for them. And they pay $10K a film. Obviously, that is potentially five full drafts plus all the mini production edits, but they also have an extremely fast turnaround- usually about 6 months from commission to release. So when the industry was booming a few years ago, you could fit in three or four in a year.
I was genuinely shocked when I found out how much less novelists get.
But on the other hand, no-one else will let me write about nautical adventures on magical oceans! So, hell of a compensation!
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Well. Duh. Quality can only get you so far, how much a writer earns is primarily determined by what genre they write for, what boxes they tick and how loudly they scream about these boxes.
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I only got flat fees of $300 and $450 for the two Call of Cthulhu scenarios I wrote for publication, so it’s still likely to be an improvement. I didn’t write those for the money.
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I don’t know the numbers for other countries, but an average Finnish novelist makes from book sales an amount that roughly equals the month’s salary somewhere on the range from under the poverty line to lower middle class… in a year.
I don’t think the IF sale numbers sound worse.
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CoG/HG has an internal rubric for game pricing, which I believe is based on word count. If the game is released under a popular IP like World of Darkness, that bumps the price further. I made this pricing chart a while back, but it is not official, and I make no attestations regarding its accuracy.
When talking with Jason about publishing my game, he did confirm that they used a price-based rubric. He said I was free to suggest a price, but I would need a very strong reason to deviate from the rubric.
Never say never. 
Aether’s WIP didn’t get much attention on the WIP thread, yet it went on to become one of HG’s top sellers.
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Nice, didn’t know you had some developed screenplays. Been trying my hand along those lines but it’s so hard to get eyeballs on anything you write there. Did you have representation? And what prompted you to move away from it?
@Jonathan_Bagelman Yes, you’ll definitely far outearn those flat amounts, albeit potentially not right away. But Nuclear Powered Toaster likely represents a game in the bottom quarter of HG titles from an earnings perspective, and it still made almost $300 in royalties just in the first couple months. And that was eight years ago. I think you’ll far outearn that. But as you said, the challenge is in getting people to see the story. And I think your genre will make it tough.
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damn, and here I thought the sales could reach 1 million copies or more and I become a millionaire just from one HG title release 
so what’s your final decision @WinterKing ?
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I chose the genre long before I knew what would or wouldn’t sell, because it’s what I enjoy and what I know well, and because this was something I was confident I could complete within a year. I have plenty of other ideas that may do better, but if it takes me years to write something, I’d somehow have to survive much longer before the income starts coming.
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