Since anyone can publish in HGs, COG may not know even if the game is worth pushing… and if it is they might push only the good ones and leave that “bad” ones behind which might not be fair. so I guess it makes sense…so how are COG games advertised more?
From a mobile market perspective: Both “Choice of Games” and “Hosted Games” have a large catalog of highly rated apps, so the ranking algorithm treats them favorably. Ratings and reviews do play a HUGE role in how long they stay highly ranked. I don’t have raw figures, but Critically-acclaimed Hosted Games can perform just as well as their CoG counterparts.
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@Redditz
Yes, there are definitely some HGs that have performed better than some CoGs, like Life of a Wizard, Life of a Mobster, Sabres of Infinity, Zombie Exodus, and Way Walkers, just to name some of them.
@RockStarPenguin
I think thinking critically about which titles to push more isn’t really unfair. And CoGs are advertised on Facebook, whereas HGs aren’t. CoGs get sent in the mailers, whereas most HGs don’t. Lastly, when you click “Play more games like these!” it always takes you to the CoGs.
@Samuel_H_Young I also have a sneaking suspicion (not that it’s a bad one, it’s just that I strongly suspect that this is true) that COG does a “Press Release” campaign for its COG’s and not for its HG’s. (Evidence for this goes back to when HR was releasing on Steam and someone found a PC Magazine (or PC Gamer I can’t remember which) Article talking about it, and posted it in the thread.)
@Malebranche this is, in fact, the case. For all the good it does. 
@jasonstevanhill if I may be so bold as to ask, did you go thru a site like http://www.24-7pressrelease.com or did you do a direct buy from PC Gamer/Magazine.
@Malebranche Err, neither. We don’t pay for advertising/press hits. We send out the press releases to a list of journalists/outlets, and they either write about it or they don’t. Sometimes, we can get TouchArcade to do an exclusive, but that’s only happened, like, twice.
Moreover, since we’re releasing more games (ie more frequently), people seem less interested in covering them. There were several outlets that covered every release for a while, but most have just stopped covering us.
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@jasonstevanhill did the coverage work well in the past? Pardon me for asking so many questions, I don’t mean to be intrusive.
Something that has surprised me is I just put Hosted games into the search of google play stores and #1-8 have nothing to do with Hosted Games then you get #9 which is Unnatural and searching for Hosted games llc only gets 5 returns #1-3 are nothing to do with HG then #4 is a Choice of Game (The ORPHEUS Ruse) and #5 which is again not HG game. How the play store works is beyond me lol
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Yup. I also got the same result when I searched Hosted Games LLC.
Would be interesting to see if the algorithm is at fault, or if the other games have added “hosted games” metadata to grab a high place in that search.
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@Malebranche I don’t understand your question.
@jasonstevanhill I’m asking if the coverage of previous years (i.e. when you had more sites/articles covering COG and COG games) helped to drive more awareness and customers to COG and its games than it has been doing in more recent times. From your first reply to me it seemed like A. That COG has been tracking the results of its latest COG Press Release campaigns and that B. COGs current efforts to create results from “Press Release” campaigns has presented less than stunning results.
@Malebranche I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “tracking results.”
All of our press hits go here: http://www.choiceofgames.com/press/ (if you ever notice that I’m missing one, feel free to send me a link, so I can put it up).
You’ll note that our older games received more press hits than our newer ones.
I don’t know if this is because a) we’re releasing games much more frequently or b) that our games aren’t for free anymore, but whatever the case, we get noticeably fewer press hits on releases these days.
I can’t speak to how many new customers we receive from the press hits. All I am “tracking” is the press hits themselves.
@jasonstevanhill Allow me to elaborate. Firstly, I am going to assume that by “press hits” you mean “articles published” (please do correct me if I am wrong). By “tracking results” I mean specifically tracking how many clicks to a link came from that article (this is assuming you have a click tracking service at your disposal and that you can ask the publishers to use links created by aforementioned click tracking service (Like http://clickmeter.com which is my personal favorite, 1. because it’s free and 2. because it’s very user friendly) and then how many of those clicked the buy button (which you could track by connecting a tracking link (which redirects to the game in the app market) to the corresponding button).
It sounded like you knew that the “press hits” were not bringing fresh customers from your first reply to me when you said: [quote]this is, in fact, the case. For all the good it does. :/[/quote] So I presumed that COG was tracking the results (i.e. how many clicks you got) from the “press hits”. On an optimistic note, if COG indeed was not tracking clicks then there really isn’t any way to say that the buyers on a recent COG game could not have come from whatever few “press hits” were published 
.
On an entirely different note, COG might want to start “Syndication” of the press hits its games receive (especially from well known press publishers such as PC Gamer or Touch Arcade) by doing this it will 1. Create more buzz around COG and its games and 2. Create what’s called “Social Proof” which will encourage more people to buy and/or become subscribers to your list. This could be done most effectively by employing 1. COG’s Social Media outlets and 2. http://Empireavenue.com and it’s “Missions” feature, where you can get people to “Like” “Share” or “Comment” or “Re-tweet” or whatever the Social Media platform you use calls it, in exchange for points that will allow them in turn to create “Missions” and syndicate their content, and chances are that some of them will get interested in what they see on your social media outlets or what they read in the content you want them to syndicate and buy and/or sign up to COG’s email list.
I was going to start a web site question thread but this old thread is relevant enough.
I’ve been looking at wix, godaddy, etc for simple drop down web page creation and included hosting.
Does anyone have any experience (good or bad) with these types of providers? I really want to focus on SEO terms like college and hero and have a place to post art (fan and official) and sell or link to other products I want to sell/create like a “conventional” CCH novel. I think all the busines sites on wix and godaddy allow for PayPal transactions.
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Personally, I recommend Wordpress 4.1. If you want to concentrate on SEO and SERP’s, Wordpress and ONLY Wordpress Based Platforms will give you an SEO edge. In addition to the vast amounts of SEO helping plugins and SEO knowledgable community Wordpress has. If I were you I’d only use GoDaddy for the domain name, get a $10/mo hosting plan, and install wordpress on it. Besides, a paypal button is only simple embedable html code that you can put on any site that allows you (and some site builders don’t).
I neglected to mention that I am a moron with things like this!
I need the solution to be so easy that my mother could do it.
Oh, don’t sell yourself short, you’ve got a nearly completed WiP with a good amount of complexity to it, so you probably would make short work of simple HTML code 
(made easier with WP’s WYISWYG view), managing a WordPress site would probably be alot easier for you than making a game in CS.
Now regarding solutions…
See, I could tell you that you would have a decent chance at ranking in the SERP’s for keywords like “college” and “hero” easily with a platform like Wix or GoDaddy Sitebuilder and not have to be an Expert SEOptimizer… But then I’d be lying through my teeth. It’s one thing to rank for a newly created keyword (with very little search traffic) like “Community College Hero” and Dominate the SERP’s, you’d just have to get an “Exact Match” domain name from GoDaddy.com (i.e. Communitycollegehero.com) put in some content on the site with your keyword listed about 4ish times throughout the page and spaced between about 180-280 words apart. It’s a COMPLETELY different realm when we’re talking about ranking for COMPETITIVE keywords where there are domains with more authority, keyword density, content, backlinks, social backlinks, and (most of all) AGE. Now think about choiceofgames.com, alright? It’s a domain about at least 5 years old, has MANY pages and (here’s the hint) blog posts, now they didn’t do nearly anything (at least to the lengths that I would have done (Choice Of Games guys, if you’re reading this, GET GOOGLE AUTHORSHIP PLEASE, it would bump up search traffic for you by at LEAST 15%) for it and THEY ARE RANKING around 7th - 5th (just above-below the fold of the page) for such valuable keywords as “adsense for games” and “zombie apocalypse game”, thats the kind of power an aged and many paged (i.e. authority domain) has. No matter who you ask, even the worlds BEST white hat SEOptimizers (I don’t recommend going to black hat Optimizers, pretty good chance that what they do will get you “Google Slapped”) if you want to rank for keywords with any kind of decent traffic, you HAVE to know what you’re doing.
Hey I wanted to toss out more marketing questions/ideas, so I figured I’d bump this one as opposed to starting a new thread.
I’m hitting Wizard World in November (merely as a humble visitor, not an exhibitor), but honestly I’m already thinking about whether it would make sense next year to rent a booth (costs $) or perhaps do a presentation (free) about interactive fiction in general and CCH in particular.
Has anyone presented his/her CoG or HG to an audience before? I know from a purely mathematical outlook, you’d need thousands of purchases to directly make it worth your while, considering your opportunity costs, etc., but still the idea intrigues me because all sorts of folks with industry contacts attend these conventions and isn’t it everyone’s dream to “hit it big” with their intellectual property? My current pipe dream is to send a proposal to Image Comics after the CCH trilogy is completed (they actually take submissions and serve as a brand for hundreds of different independent comic book “teams”).
Is anyone doing things like this? Getting your product directly in front of potential customers, or perhaps more importantly, industry contacts?
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