Each to their own I guess. 
Anyway on topic, I wouldn’t mind a DLC with a right amount of content and not for aesthetic purposes (Yes, I am looking at the Dynasty Warriors series)
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I’d rather not derail the thread too hard–when the game first came out I put my thoughts in the main discussion thread for it and one of my big issues was that in the first choice about disarming the bombs, regardless of what my stats were, only one choice turned them off for me, so the rest of the game I was pretty mistrustful of whether it was a case of stat checks or just what the correct option was. I also remember at least once getting punished for a choice that I hadn’t had any indication would be punishing–it’s been a while since I played through or I’d be more specific. And it’s possible there’ve been bug fixes, small edits, etc, that would mean playing through now I’d be fine.
I think my point stands, though–clear writing to one person isn’t always clear writing to another. I didn’t benefit from the HR hints and you wouldn’t benefit from HU hints but the other way around it can be helpful. Not saying every single game needs that kind of add-on, just that it feels like something that’d be attractive to authors
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Agreed, I want more story dammit! Dragonage Origins had story DLC that covered your companions that join you in the game. I wish they would actually promote this type of model for the dlc in choice of games.
Not sure If any DLC has been developed besides the Hero’s rise handbook.
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I don’t think it’s much of derailing. After all it’s when do IAPs make sense and when do they not.
Though I can’t agree with the notion that I’d benefit from the WS in HR. Mainly cause Sergi’s wording often still is a complete mess to me.
Which I think is part of the question about IAPs:
No hint system will help if the hints are misleading.
Example: HR3 in the battle with rebellion has a bit where the hint is “do what crrespondenses with your regain points level”… wow great… how much of the total do i have? There no clear indicator there, and it’s easy to assume that a high number would call for a strong attack, right? Wrong… cause it was just a pinch too low.
Now had the hint read “execute a medium attack for points within x range” or show the corresponding numbers with the choice or something. Ok.
So… hint systems, as choices themself call for clear wording i’d say.
You know what I think in app purchases would work well with, if you had a story in episode format. Like if you had a detective story with different cases and you could buy the episodes one by one depending on what cases you wanted to do. (Would work equally as well for other types of stand alone episodes.)
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I think Choice of Romance’s DLC could have been more interesting if it had included an alternative storyline into the second and third books with de Mendosa instead of the Queen rather than the stat changing stuff.
Also not sure what the Delta Force Operative DLC is like for Choice of Zombies but I assume it doesn’t change that much…
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Fair enough. Like you said above, ymmv–I didn’t have any issues understanding what was up, with or without the hint system
I do feel like authors should do their best to make sure such a hint system isn’t necessary in the first place, but in terms of IAPs, doing an add-on like that seems like it’s simple to implement and wouldn’t take very long to write into the game, which is my only point when I say that I’m surprised more games don’t have that type of DLC, or more authors aren’t developing it
I think there are other choice-based (non-choicescript) game apps that do that kind of thing? I’m not super familiar with them, though. Given that the standard with CS is “pay once for a full game” I’m not sure how the pricing would work with that type of game. It does, again, sound similar to something the CCH author was floating a while back, though, with an episodic story published low-price chapter per low-price chapter, and I think he wound up deciding against it
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And an option where we could buy the whole package for a discounted price.
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Mhnnn… i’d still say additional episode dlc/iap should be worth it.
The minimum wordcount (with code) for CoG is 100k. So a sidestory/bonus chapter should at least be 25k? 50k?
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I’d love for some games to get more chapters. I think it would work really well with something like Study in Steampunk since those chapters already had an episodic feel to them. And it wouldn’t even need to take place after the end of the game.
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Mmm I’m always wary when it comes to saying yes to buying IAPs that include extra scenes. I feel like if it’s something that will help the story/bolster the player’s connection to a certain character then that should actually be in the story itself.
I mean, I guess it depends on how necessary it would be for the story? I’m of the mindset that anything relevant to the story (or character’s story, if it’s character based) it should probably be in the original product.
But then there are things like extra codex bits or something that really isn’t necessary to the story itself or the characters but is just fun? Those I feel are fine, but it’s that distinction between what’s necessary/relevant to the story and what really is just extra? If that makes any sense, aha.
As for hint-guides that you can buy… I mean, I suppose I’m neutral. I would expect it to be written in such a way that you wouldn’t especially need them but I can also see the appeal of not having to worry about making any bad choices so, y’know, to each their own with that one.
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I’d originally thought that one of the biggest winter missions in XoR would be an IAP, but the wholesale revolt against it changed my mind.
This was also back when we were sorting out the business model, the games cost $3 with little variation based on length, and CoG had only just discovered that using an IAP to buy the rest of the game in Android significantly boosted sales (albeit at the cost of a 0.1-0.2 point drop in aggregate review score due to extra 1 star reviews).
The discovery that the market would bear higher prices for longer games changed the picture. Back in 2013, I think our assumption was that if the price went above $4 or so, piracy would eat up the margin. That proved untrue.
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I guess what I’m talking about is something similar to self contained tv episodes, so the trial is the first one, then following on from the detective example there could be different cases you could investigate. Like one might be a bank robbery, one might be a missing person etc and you could either pay for a season and get them as they are released each week, or pay per “episode” and that way future content could be added on if it’s popular much like a new tv season. Anyway, was just a thought 
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I’m reading through the old IAP thread and it’s some interesting stuff, but it also may or may not be out of date. I’m looking at this post specifically …
And it’s interesting to see the numbers laid out like that. @jasonstevanhill ends the post saying that he’s encouraging authors to consider IAPs for their work–but, thinking about the games that I’ve bought, I feel like I haven’t really seen a lot of them. Is that still something the company encourages, or has their stance changed in the years since that thread?
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Encourage? Sure. If they ask, I suppose. But it’s not something I sit down with authors to build into their games from the outset.
The thing is, most authors are just thrilled to have their games done. Trying to initiate a conversation with them at that point about additional content is usually a non-starter.
Though, if @PaulGresty or @kgold wanted to go back and add in an IAP for Metahuman or Robots, I’d be happy to facilitate.
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On that note:
I’m currently considering having a full-fledged city map and illustrated character database as IAP, + a bonusmission that’d take one back to the big battle…
Would that be too much?
So, Sam got a lot of negative reviews for his “media” IAP in Captive of Fortune. I suggested the idea because I thought the game was fairly short, and people would be unhappy paying $4 for short game, regardless of the fact that it had interior art and music. We did the media IAP so that people could choose whether or not to pay for the art and music, and he was lambasted in the reviews.
On some level, you can’t win in this regard. Players will always think that the content should be already-included and/or free.
But I’m also happy to experiment with Hosted Games.
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Captive of Fortune’s IAP seems to have been successful since roughly 20% of the game’s revenue is made from the IAP, if I recall correctly. Still, I’m not sure if that managed to offset the sales lost from all of the 1 or 2 star reviews where people were mad about the IAP to begin with. It was an interesting experiment but in the future, I’m going to stick with paid downloads and no IAPs so my ratings don’t take a nosedive.
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To pay or not to pay, I ask thee why would one place such in their story, why one writes to companion to the same games in different tones? Perhaps, for untreaded territory in narrative, but for enhancement in existing narrative and cheats, never.
Tough thing to calculate. XoR has the usual slew of 1-star reviews on Google Play based on the “free game plus IAP for the rest” model, which has dropped its rating to 4.4 from 4.6. (Or 4.5, assuming that some share would have left a 1 star anyway). But it’s also getting by far the greatest share of its income from Play, and I suspect the free demo model is a key part of that, outweighing the damage from the people it annoys.
Yes, in general we live and die by review scores. On the other hand, I suspect there are probably a few different things out there that bring in more income than a drop of 0.1 or 0.2 loses. The right kind of IAP might be one of them.
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