Policy towards HG WIPs that place their content behind a paywall?

General
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I’ve noticed people in several threads talking about WIPs for HGs where most or even all of the content is basically behind a paywall, since it’s only available to Patreon subscribers or whatever other subscription services the writer in question requires them to pay to if they want to access large portions of the WIP content. And recently I noticed people in the forum talking about a WIP where all the WIP was only available to Patreon subscribers. From what I understand, the written rules for HGs are quite strict about HGs making most or even all of the content of WIPs freely available if writers want to release it under the WIP umbrella. Yet, if the people commenting about this are to be believed, it seems that many writers who break these rules can do this without any serious consequences or repercussions.

So what I’m wondering is what the current COG policy towards WIPs who break these rules are these days? Do these rules no longer apply and it’s just that the people responsible have yet to write down the rule changes?. Have these rules been relaxed, so that people can go against them under certain circumstances or that it’s okay to do so up until a certain point. Is it just that the people responsible for policing those rules have too much on their plate/are too overworked to do anything about it. Or is it some other reason that I haven’t thought of?

I’m writing this both because I’m curious and because I think clarity about the current policies here would be of great benefit for both current and aspiring writers and also for readers/players. There’s no doubt that an increasing number of IF writers are using Patreon for their WIPs. While I’m not necessarily against that( I even follow a COG writer Patreon myself), when this leads to to some HG WIP writers making some or even all the WIP content available only to Patreon subscribers even if that’s against the rules as written, I do think it’s important to have a clear and explicitly stated policy in place, whether that is removing those rules, relaxing them a bit or enforcing them strictly.

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I don’t think the policy has changed - anything written in ChoiceScript that’s exclusive to patrons has to be made freely available to the public within a certain period of time afterwards, unless you’ve made some other specific arrangement with CoG. I just think it’s easy for people to get away with breaking the rule, since the company pays very little attention to the vast majority of HG WIPs. They’re not going around and looking at the Patreons of people who haven’t published with them yet.

If you’ve seen the rule being violated, you can report it. There may be a better address for this, in which case I hope someone will share it, but support@cog will get the job done.

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I think it’s very unlikely that the company will officially relax their rules, that would be virtually giving away a free license to the engine. On the other hand, I think they know this is the only way some authors can keep working on their projects. So they are probably operating under the rule of “we don’t ask, you don’t tell”. And there’s not much to it than that. Also, definitely true they have a lot on their hands already. CoG is a small company. They probably have more productive things to do than hunting down offenders and issuing cease and desist legal notices.

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You would think they would regulate on Patreon when its kinda killing publishing in cog. Why make money selling when you can make money from subscription. Mind Blind was supposed to be one of the biggest COG but now the finished product is Patreon only.

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Yeah but how can they even do that?

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If they switched to a medium other than ChoiceScript, it’s allowed. Otherwise, they could get in a lot of trouble.