Short answer: Apple has become a pack of snobby turdburglars.
Long answer: That, but with more colorful descriptors for Apple’s penchant at poop pilfering.
All seriousness, it was Apple’s draconian policies that first held up games being published, and then outright outlawed all titles coming as solo apps in the guise of marketplace control. This necessitating the omnibus app as the only way to even publish on the platform anymore.
Google’s not a ton better, I remember years ago COG got banned from Google ads because we all were clicking on the ads to be supportive and it flagged their account somehow.
I think Apple mostly hated the one app per game thing. I’ve noticed other apps I follow got mashed into an omnibus too. Their sex negative censorship is also annoying. I follow a few authors here on tumblr and I notice them talking about toning down their writing in order to get past Apple, and I feel like if they want to write smut and I want to read it, it should be my decision to do so. Not Apple’s.
I’m trying to think of what structure has been imposed on me from above in my writing of CoG’s. I have to have gender choice, and I have to avoid binary choices, but I don’t know that either of those are fencing me in–just the opposite, really. Those two make me have deeper games. I also need to have the vast preponderance of my choices have meaningful story/stat results, but that too isn’t really fencing, except in the narrowest sense, where I’m forced to do something that makes the game have more meaningful choices.
I guess the only thing–and this is a real thing–is that I am asked to identify deadlines for chapter milestones, which keeps me writing so I hit deadlines, but also could prevent an author from expanding chapter one endlessly, polishing it perfectly. Whereas HG authors have no such external deadline process that I’m aware of–even though the CoG deadlines are quite flexible and modifyable according to need.
Aside from that, I’m hard pressed to think of what CoG requires that could lead to a narrower range of possibilities. Maybe I’m too close to it? Choice of Robots, of course, certainly pushed the limits of what ChoiceScript could do code-wise as a CoG game, for example.
I feel like in general there was a bit more discussion about the CoG house rules when the contest was running, given that it was being entered largely by folks who had written/started writing for HG and who then had to work with restrictions. I have done neither of those things, and never really familiarized myself with the ins and outs of the CoG house rules, so I can’t speak to whether or not they’re really that constraining. But I think I might agree that you could be too close to it–whatever guidelines CoG does and doesn’t have might feel natural to you because your CS-writing career was spent in them anyway. Or, maybe they just are your natural mode of writing and your games would’ve been roughly the same with or without the CoG guidelines, but another author might have to take a hammer and chisel to their game to make sure it fits
And there might be something to be said for HG authors not really having to answer to anyone. There’s the rules in the book for CoG games, but there’s also that the authors need to work with an editor who is, presumably in most cases, a stranger. I don’t know how much of a “final say” the editor has, but that might be a part of the “CoG authors are allowed to take fewer risks” vibe. Whatever the editor’s/company’s advice, rules, requests for change, etc, are, HG as a platform can give the impression that it’s games are more of a product of an author’s undiluted artistic vision–as opposed to CoG, where even if the rules aren’t as strict as people can feel they are, the author isn’t necessarily in control of every creative decision, if that all makes sense?
Or I might be way off the mark because I’m largely just talking about vague impressions I’ve gotten from lurking around. I’d be interested in hearing more in depth thoughts from folks who have written CS on their own and entered the contest, and/or have been published by CoG and HG both, given that they’d be the ones who would have the best sense of how restrictive or non-restrictive the house rules are or aren’t
I think of it mostly as an upstream constraint, similar to how TV shows have bottle episodes because of budget constraints. Like, you couldn’t replicate Scott Westerfield’s Leviathan while just changing the protagonist gender; Deryn Sharp pretends to be a man named Dylan to join the air force and this creates a whole host of later logistical issues when needing to get fitted for a dress uniform that requires her and her co-protagonist to think fast to avoid giving the game away. Dylan Sharp would just join the air force.
But if you’re planning on it from the beginning you can easily do the Choice Of Broadsides thing so Dylan Sharp pretends to be a woman named Deryn so he can join the air force. That’s the same story, basically. Just very slight variations in the logistics.
Also a generalization of a programming saying I like: the easiest bug to fix is one you haven’t written yet. Rewriting that hypothetical game would be a nightmare. Like, easiest step is fix the pronouns, right? Just add a new value to the pronoun variabl- wait, you don’t have pronoun variables. You need to make all the pronouns variable.
Agreed - when I was outlining Blood Money, a lot of the revisions I made when figuring out the plot were about expanding its scope and giving the main character a wider range of goals to achieve. I haven’t ever felt constrained by the process, and the editors have been brilliant (and not at all draconian) at every stage. In my experience the game design guidelines aren’t restrictive - they give a useful structure to build a game in, which is very helpful when working on such a long project.
I have found lot of CoGs to be repetitive in design like they have very similar choices initially about character creation and initial stat bumps, only CoGs that stand out for me are, Mid Summer Night’s choice, Tally Ho, Choice of Robots and Choice of Vampire(or something like that I probably don’t remember the name).
and, I believe HG authors aren’t bound by some creative constraints that CoG authors have to abide so they can basically write to their whims. And don’t have any deadlines to meet so they can slog through it for however much time they want to take, until they’re ready.
I don’t think anyone is calling them draconian. The limits are not large and terrifying, but they do exist. You can look at HG titles and say “That one couldn’t be a CoG”, but the reverse is never, ever true.
And we shall call this TED talk…
“Emerging Brand Differentiation Through Perceived Styles”
I’m not sure that it’s necessarily useful to compare Hosted Games and Choice of Games on artistic grounds, that is the “house rules” or whatever. I mean, that’s comparing a set of design standards against…well, no standards. Is that useful? I also don’t see how those standards stifle creativity. They’re there to ensure that the player has a good experience.
So far no one’s hit on what I think makes CoG’s design particularly special (compared to other IF, including Hosted Games): which is that every option in a choice must be an equally valid option, which doesn’t confer a greater benefit on the player than any other option–the stat impact must be equal, if one option is “easy” and another is “hard,” (that is, a difficult test) the option must be written in a way to signal that to the player. CoG Games do not trick the player, there isn’t a “correct” option, and offer multiple things to pursue, despite the fact that many people prefer doing only one headcanon playthrough.
One difference for me personally, in the games I find interest enough in the demo to buy, is that Hosted is less stat-focused, in general. Exceptions, exceptions, naturally. That is because I rather play a good character-orientated game than trying to balance stats in order to achieve an ending I don’t feel is more or less of a let-down.
When it comes to CoG titles I often find the older ones more appealing. Choice of the Vampire, Slammed and such. They appear, to me, less hung up on stats, but I might be mistaken. Just my two bits and bandwidth.
Honestly I think there’s considerable narrative and structural advantages to formatting it that way.
Narratively, it means that if you start out focusing on physical rather than magic, the story can include that more smoothly; you won’t switch from being a knight to being a wizard. Choice Of Robots doesn’t have a hard “character creation” chapter, because your design philosophy changing in response to events isn’t part of the story.
Mechanically… well, the standard way of doing percent stats in Choicescript to keep them in a reasonable range has really irritating consequences when they’re frequently updated. I frequently play a specialist where I try to max out one stat (soft max of 80%; you can go higher but it’s glacial) and when you’re in that range taking a single option that reduces it requires a lot of increases to compensate. So if I want to play an elite wizard I have to stringently avoid any option that could reduce my wizarding stat. I mean, I could keep it in the 60-70 range easy, but if there’s a choice that requires 75% wizarding I want my wizard to pull it off. This gets worse when choices aren’t clearly mapped to impacted stats so I keep going to the stat screen to make sure I didn’t drop eight points. Choice of Magics avoids this by having the five schools be largely independent and by having in-text feedback, so I’ll have Stern The Starlight Destroyer use magic that’s not negation when I don’t want to deal with a death cloud right now. When I play Stern The Starlight Destroyer in games where magic and physical are interlinked whether as opposed stats or just a lot of options that raise one and lower the other I’m afraid to ever close to melee combat.
Stern is a specific character from a specific story as part of my habit of replicating characters from other media, so she never completely fits, (for instance she literally does not have biological parents) but she’s my typical start point for “possibly unethical blasty wizard” and I usually feel like any story that allows for unethical blasty wizards could have a recognizable version of her. And she’s basically a palette swap of my go-to ethical blasty wizard, too.
I would say there are ‘unwritten’ rules for HG, too. Like ‘you really should communicate with the community while writing and the community should communicate with you’
A lot of the groaners this year for HG seem to have gotten little feedback and the result… well, you are all prolly thinking of one title or the other now…
Likewise I feel the main difference between CoG and HG IS that HG allows for different structuring in terms of when to ask things of the player, and how stats are built.
Going by experience as beta tester, I feel though the former is shifting with CoG lately? As in, I felt like it once was that the gender question as well as a increase-decrease bit are now rooted into the initial scene (if that makes sense)
heavy coughing sorry, got something in my throat cough
Incidentally, most of the time promising HG WIPs get flooded with great feedback whereas more poorly made ones or ones that are just super niche end up getting little or no feedback. Which makes sense, of course, because people only test stories they enjoy. So betas can be very useful or just slightly useful depending on the original quality.
Granted, an alternate timeline story where the russian revolution is fought with steampunk-zombies would have been awesome if done well…
True. 
Actually, I fully expected Mass Mother Murderer to be a flop because of how completely outlandish and macabre it is, but go figure, it’s by far my most popular story.
I’m honestly looking forward to Jason giving us another ‘top 10 sellers of 2018’ next year
That would be really interesting, though not entirely meaningful. One 2018 title could be out for a day and another for 12 months. 
I enjoy a lot of HGs, and I agree that one of their strengths is that they can try outlandish things. (Play as an iron atom, anyone?) At the same time, as a CoG reader and fan, I don’t recognize the depiction of CoG-brand games popping up in a bunch of these posts, talking about homogeneity or “having to appeal to everyone as widely as possible.”
CoG regularly publishes weird, ambitious stories that bend genres and go in unexpected narrative directions. Blood Money, Tally Ho, Silverworld, Road to Canterbury, Rent-a-Vice, Choice of the Cat, Heart of the House… homogeneous? Even the “horror” themed ones in that list are all utterly different from each other.
I’m an amateur CoG author myself, not a pro, and my work bends some of the design guidelines. As an author there are things I want to do involving risky exploration (and thus bad endings and unforeseen consequences) that are an uneasy fit with the CoG brand. But even though there are a few things I enjoy as a writer and reader that are more likely to crop up in HGs, as a reader I certainly wouldn’t accuse CoG of homogeneity. They try new and unfamiliar things all the time.
There should really be a FAQ item on this, it comes up every year at least once. 
The world of Choice of Romance/AotC was very deliberately written so that characters of any gender can be put into roles that in our world were considered feminine (or masculine, in the case of the monarch). People who complain (or suggest, but it’s usually complain) that it was written with a female MC in mind are missing the point. It’s not the MC, it’s the gameworld. Fair enough to gripe about the gameworld if you think it was done poorly…but to complain that the authors didn’t put enough work into reskinning a female MC is to completely misconstrue their intention.
It certainly wasn’t switched out of genderlock due to being CoG rather than HG, since it was coauthored by a CoG partner as one of their first flagship games.
I wouldn’t say that Choice games are “the same” but generally I expect two random Choice games to be more alike than two random Hosted games. It’s a tighter subset of all possible games, but it’s still an enormous set of possibilities.
And aside from the stuff I assume are guidelines because they map to parts of the announcement that are always more-or-less the same (“Play as male, female, or non-binary; gay, straight, or ace.” has very minor variations, for instance) it’s mostly just not trying to reinvent the wheel like the character creation I mentioned. Hosted games are more likely to try to reinvent the wheel with rather varied success. On the occasions when Choice tries it’s usually a good idea.
Though I’m still mad about Heroes Rise dinging me on Legend for using a mix of offense and defense.