To my understanding, that causes a noticeable drop in GPS sales.
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I cannot speak for all, but in Europe cash is the king. Meaning that credit or debit cards are not as popular as they are in US. Now, even within Europe there are differences from country to country, so i can hardly speak for all. But i can tell you, in my whole high school (and i was in a private school) no one had a credit or debit card in their or their family’s possession. Because cash, cash and cash. So i had to wait until i was 18 myself to apply for a debit card (and boy the whole procedure was so long as if the bank didn’t want you to get one) before being able to buy anything online. So, the minor me tried to avoid paid apps…
The point of all that rant is that sometimes it matters how you pay as well
I’m glad I got in COG early on and was able to get a lot of these games when they were cheap or on sale(first released). The prices of some of these games would have scared me off from playing COG if I had discovered this site later.
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You can buy Google/Apple store giftcards with cash and then use that to buy stuff on the appstores
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Haven’t looked through the responses but I’m sure other people have brought these up:
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Length- most of the COG games (not HG) games released recently have been much, much longer. If I remember correctly… Choice of Rebels, Choice of Cat, and Tally Ho were all 500k-600k words long? That’s a lot more effort and time for both writing and editing, and it provides a much longer or more varied game experience.
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Publishing- publishing is really expensive. Hundreds or up to a thousand to get it posted on all of the platforms COG and HG put them on, and not all of their games have been successful (considering that they seem to have an incredibly basic process for submitting a HG, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve lost a lot of money on some of the less polished works). So they’re putting themselves at risk and the money is a cushion, in my opinion.
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Last time i checked they sold those in certain stores in USA, Canada and UK, though i last checked a long time ago so they might be sold on other places as well, but i can surely say i haven’t seen them be sold around here. Though i did get my card so i do not mind it anymore 
Me when reading 1 star reviews on “free download and then pay to finish” CoGs that say shit like “just put ads in there and make money that way”:
If paid games weren’t far more lucrative…they wouldn’t be implemented. Why would anyone choose to have a fiftieth of the readership otherwise?
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I’m always dumbfounded by such reviews.
When you install the game it tells you BEFORE you can play that it is only a demo.
How the fridge are these people even playing a game that requires READING( whether reading yourself or via a text to speech prog) if they miss that?!
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If they’re anything like my brother and two of my friends, they click next without reading and then they immediately scroll down to read the choices, and then maybe, sometimes, if necessary skim the text if they need/want context (which isn’t very often).
…I know, right??? I have been witness to this Sin™ with my own four eyes!
Separately, I asked them why they didn’t just read the text before reading the choices.
All three of them answered, “Because it’s too long.”
I don’t understand and honestly, I’m bit too disgusted to want to understand it. 
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To be honest, those people who give one star are just trolling at most and I don’t think they understand interactive fiction at all. I have a hard time sharing these to my friends and officemates because they are just not interested. XD
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This doesn’t surprise me. I recruited beta testers from this forum for a WIP and none of them read a ONE-line instruction bolded on the first page 
you can’t trust people to read anything, ever
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And then there’s me who might easily tell you
‘oh, this bit in ch8 breaks continuity with a bit of info we get in a side-sentence in ch2’
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Our examples are two extremes but I’d much rather have a beta tester be ridiculously stringent :'D
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I once had a professor who was tired of students not reading the instructions on exams or various assignments he gave. One day, he handed out a test and it had some 200 questions on it. The instructions on the very top said something like “The first 100 questions are required, but the last 100 are optional.” As I got up to turn in my exam, I saw several students still working on the extra questions as they didn’t read the instructions on top. It always kind of stuck with me; I assume he eventually told the students who were working on the optional questions as I think he was just trying to make a point.
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Honestly? Like that it proves nothing.
Optional translates to many as extra points.
It’d have proven a point had the instruction said to skip certain questions.
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What i understand is… even though the paper’s instruction was answer 3 out of 5 questions, the students still chose to answer all questions in a hope that, the teacher will award the marks based on the best 3 answers :-)
But i understand what you mean… some of my former classmates never bother to read the exam instruction as well 
I may forget the exact wording, but it essentially was written in a way that said only do the first 100 questions as those will be graded, the others would not be graded, but your free to work on them. I would have been upset if I missed that instruction, though it is not the worst thing I have seen a teacher do.
But technically it still proves nothing. Well, except for a different psychological thing rampant in western society. But that’d go too far off topic
I guess I was just trying to give an example that people don’t read things even when it is important (Exams, Contracts, etc.).
As for people being angry and giving it 1 star reviews. I have never understood 1 star reviews. I have seen some bad movies, but very few would ever get that low. I read a lot controversy about one movie (1 star reviews, people not liking it), so I was a bit hesitant to see it at first, but when I did go see it I was pleasantly surprised and ended up enjoying it. I think people rate out of emotion or anger. Angry that they thought the game was free, but wasn’t (even though it clearly says that at the beginning) or they expected something, but got something else. I don’t know, I think people should take time to write reviews. You can’t just give something a 1 because you don’t like a single aspect. Also, I am not sure how we can force people to read instructions at the beginning. A few people mentioned just having the game not be free to download (no trial, or have one say demo in the title), I don’t think that works, because the whole point is to try the game and see if you like it, and leaving on a cliff hanger seems to work. I have seen plenty of games do similar things like releasing Episode 1 and then when you finish they give you an option to buy additional episodes (Telltale Walking Dead.)
Personally, what upsets me more is micro-transactions in games. You buy a full game and then you have to pay for additional things to “enhance” the game. For COG, you get everything, no surprises so I think the price system is fair.
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