Unsure if anyone here is thinking it as well, but given that Cakes & Ale was split up due to size and all the WIPs steadily approaching 1M+ these days, it has me wondering. Does anyone know if a maximum word count might be likely in the future?
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Not sure why there would be. Text weighs almost nothing in terms of megabytes, and long games sell like hot dogs. The only drawback for the company would be increased copyedit and quality review times.
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Right well that’s what I’ve thought for years until apparently now there’s a game too big for the app. Just has me curious when I see WIPs out there with humongous sizes.
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Was it too big for the app, or just too big for the people involved to deal with? Although I can also imagine that the price could have climbed too high…
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Hmm, maybe there are other reasons. I think it’s unlikely to be the size, since a ChoiceScript game is just plain text.
This makes more sense. Or even if they put a price cap, they might not want to establish the precedent. Just speculating.
Fixed it!
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Argh, you immortalized my typo! 
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There’s one in the queue that’s well over 2mil words. IMO its crazy as this increasing word creep is going to get to the point where its almost impossible to properly edit and test games. Paying for copyediting for steam is going to get increasingly risky for super long games to make that back in sales. But words are king and considered a primary metric of quality and value for money around here, so unless COG chooses to cap it, expect a 3mil+ word game at some point, then 4mil… and so on. I’d honestly love to see how COG is going to start pricing these behemoths.
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In the long run, it’s a losing strategy, because it milks current readers at the expense of writers and new readers. But the short-term appeal of the money is too hard to resist.
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Most CoG games still aren’t behemoths. Longer than they were, but I find it pretty hard to imagine 1 million+ becoming the real norm. It just takes too long to write.
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It’s actually the opposite. Because the price per word is curved, it means shorter games are more expensive than longer ones “per word”.
Because the model is quality of games has zero impact on their cost, it comes down to a simple “longer games = better value”.
This is actually very bad for authors from a time spent making them and income per hour pov. It’s worse for anyone who doesn’t make long games as they are considered increasingly worthless. IMO it’s going to encourage use of AIGen to keep up with the word longer counts in those struggling to get there. And in the end will deliver poorer products to consumers if people are just making their games long purely because that’s what sells, rather than that’s the length the game needed to be to tell the story well, and because they can start getting hard to properly test and edit.
The entire LOTR triology is less than 500k in total. One single game book is increasingly over 1mil words. Even taking out code and accounting for extra paths, that’s still a massive amount of text for a single game.
(I’m not including all long games here. Some have obviously been designed for that length in mind, are well edited and have released without significant numbers game breaking bugs. But the expectation of ever longer games being normal and expected and better value for money is increasing, and something’s gotta give sooner or later as they go upwards of 2mil.)
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If you find yourself writing 2-mil games simply to get rich, I recommend you think long and hard about your career choices! I’d imagine most find themselves in that situation simply because the story they want to tell ends up being that long.
I’m sorry, but this assumption that writers are primarily just greedy and do anything they can to get rich, as opposed to just trying to make a living, just irks me so much.
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I mean the short-term appeal of the money for Choice of Games.
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From the forum guidelines:
Alternate accounts (sometimes referred to as “sockpuppets”) are categorically forbidden. If you want to change the name on your account, contact an admin.
Kinda hidden, but it’s in there.
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But they don’t tell people to write long games either! It’s the readership that does so.
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Don’t think so, but if there were, I’ll just split the game into two games. Problem solved. 
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To be fair - if Frodo could do whatever he wanted, I have to assume the series would be 2m+ words long… (Taking the crude metric of ‘one IF playthrough lets you see 1/3 of word count’ , then adding some compounding for reactivity over time with sequels). And LoTR was fairly concise compared to many fantasy stories published since!
I think that’s the source of the tension as much as reader sentiment. People write what they love in non-interactive fiction, and what a lot of us love is big sprawling epics. To get a story that feels as though it has that scale in an IF without completely discarding gameplay and choice and consequence, you need loooots of words.
I’m sure there is an element of genuine word count bloat in there too, but mostly I do think it’s people trying to write what they love. Sometimes with intent, like you say, sometimes because we/they need and lack an editor! 
Edit: there is of course such a thing as going too far, but I’m not convinced the audience will actually reward ultra-long games, so unsure it will become an insurmountable trend. I think the OMG lots of words appeal is already hitting diminishing returns, and a lot of the best received books lately have been in the 300-600k range (which is still impressively long!)
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Perhaps, but by that metric you’re looking at less than 1.5mil words + some code. You’d be lucky to make it to 2mil for a massive epic of a series. And because this is looking at it with one single game/story, there is no compounding. If anything if it was broken into 3 books, it would potentially drop the expected wordcount due to the endings having to come to a semi-matched point at the start of each one.
If you mean LOTR was well and tightly edited, then yes. So I guess you could have a point. Every word in LOTRs has weight and does work to progress the story. It makes it a denser read per word that means you absolutely cannot skim any of the chapters and still understand the whole story at the end. Don’t know about you, but it took quite a while to finish them. They’re not designed to be read through in a week. Personally I’m not certain that makes for an argument that exponentially increasing game length is a good thing.
My personal feeling is that with certain exceptions from authors who know how to really write behemoths and keep them tracking along tightly (and there are a few authors who definitely can do this), most games work best kept under 500k (with my preference being for under ~350k) as the right mix of keeping the story moving and ability to edit/check. That’s my personal option though, and does not have to be shared, as I realise others to prefer stories to move slower than my preference which tends towards books that are on the lean side, though it’s interesting you mention that some of the better received ones have been under 600k lately. And yes 300-600k of text is still crazy long when you think about how much writing that is.
Would be fine for some of the more linear games, but for complex ones with tonnes of stat tracking or behaving more like wheel of options (think more nightroad perhaps from memory? It’s been a while since I’ve read it), could be significantly more difficult to break it into bits without messing with the story flow and game structure, though not impossible, and risk more bugs by trying to make sure every needed variable is saved and ported over to the new game successfully.
I do wonder what the backlash of breaking stories up that don’t have any resolution arc like a typical sequel story, and just kinda stop might be in cases where they are just too long, with the audience that might see it as a cash grab they’re released to buy in 2-3 installments rather than a whole, rather than what the reality is of them just being too long to start handling properly. (Especially as breaking them would increase the overall cost due to the “word curve/cost”) I guess if its known in advance, authors could try to bring games to a point, then jump off from the sequel.
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Well, we’re about to get a test case with Jolly Good part 2:
The first million-plus-word “day” of the narrative will be released in December, and the second and third later as DLC. As a playtester (and big fan of the Tally-Ho-verse) I can confirm that Day One ends very much in medias res, still opening things up rather than resolving them.
The reason is, apparently, that the full 4m+ word project was “just too long for the app.” 
I don’t know to what extent that’s a literal technical limitation, and to what extent we’re really talking about the difficulties discussed above in pricing, the extraordinary proofreading costs, etc.
I certainly hope people don’t react as if it’s a cash grab, since that’s plainly not the motivation. I’m sure the core audience for Segall’s work will show up with bells on. But this is one point at which some backlash might conceivably bubble up.
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You know I had you on my list of authors who can plan out behemoths right? There are a few authors on here who can and have successfully pulled off very long games that feel like they were always planned to be that way . Even asides from the lower cost per word thing on long books, as an author who knows how difficult it is to keep games together the longer they are, I’m the last person to say making’em longer is a cash grab.
Huh ok, there we have our answer as to how long is too long! 
Are you going to release them as a single 2 parter close together (if you don’t mind me asking). There feels like pros- in that it allows people to buy the second game and keep going while its fresh in their minds, but cons in that it could come across as that ‘cash grab’ assumption to anyone not aware of the situation with super long games causing issues for the app. If they were released months apart, it would likely just be assumed it was a normal sequel thing. (Feel free not to answer and tell me to stop being nosy or if you don’t know yet. I genuinely am curious how these really long games are going to get handled, but I can also mind my own 
)
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…did we read the same LotR? There was so much that disappeared from my mind approximately two minutes from reading it (what would I need all the descriptiond for if I don’t visualize anything anyway? Why would I need to read all songs line-by-line? What has Tom Bombadil to do with anything that I’d need to remember every word? And I even liked it!) and I’d think I could still understand what was happening in the story.
Well, I would say you’d still need to have the cutoff at a natural cutoff point, instead of just cutting it at wherever. You need some kind of plotline resolution. Why would I buy the next one if you let me feel you’re not going to bother with endings and are going to just stop writing once you hit your wordcount goal?
I get having to cut the story in two, but that doesn’t mean you can literally just cut it in two without any thought about the reader experience!
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