That’s too kind/unkind (depending on whether you think said trend is awesome or destroying the economic viability of CoG writing). As this thread points out, Rebels arrived in a late-2017 cluster of games that all blew through the 600,000 word mark. The first was Choice of the Cat, which is I believe longer than Rebels due to more efficient coding. Tally Ho came out shortly after.
Rebels I believe sold the most of those three because it’s in a clearly identifiable, commercially popular genre, which boosted its prospects more than word count or writing quality did. (The prose quality of the other two games is for my money higher than Rebels, as is their character development.) I also think it helped that I wrote it on the forums and built up a dedicated fan base that bought/recommended it in large numbers from day one…but until another CoG author does the same it’ll be hard to say for sure how much that moved the needle.
It’d be interesting to see how Magics does relative to Robots (if @kgold is ever happy to share) and whether its higher word count brings a corresponding bump in sales…
Also worth noting that in this case authors don’t choose the price point–the publisher does. Rebels cost a lot not because I had more chutzpah than the average writer but because CoG was betting it would find a big audience at that price.