Jacic
450
Hey @Mary_Duffy. I wasn’t complaining about pricing and I hope it didn’t come across that way (which it seems it has. No tension at my end on this topic.) If I want a game I’ll budget for it and get it, but by the same token if there’s a game I’m on the fence about and I missed it on sale, I’m less likely to buy it when my exchange rate is bad unless it’s something I really want (which is totally out of your control, I don’t expect you to try and individually price based on the economy of every country in the world, especially as it’d work out to be a bad deal for you for extra work. ) I was only makeing that comment in support of occasional sales as I suspect if you’ve got someone who missed the release (or isn’t aware of an old game that’s sunk to the bottom as it’s older, that you might pick up a few more sales 
Anyway, is this only for official cog games? I’m guessing so unless they’re part of a series?
Edit: subscription wise, if I couldn’t choose the titles, I wouldn’t sign up for it myself. I’d rather go for a bundle of similar genre games if the price structure was exactly the same. (Not sure if that goes for everyone though as bundles are pre-existing games, not new ones.)
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Subscription is less consumer friendly you pay for the chance of getting something worthwhile. Something you have zero idea of what it will be. I could like most of catalogue but imagine that i don’t like in the slightly the next six games released. i had to eat them with ketchup i suppose. Each company that change to that dropped quality like crazy. because the only point in subscriptions areQUANTITY get more games in the less time possible to people consider the subscription worthwhile. If you are a small company wel some sacrifices have yo been made to increase the releases. Because not everyone is netflix to buy subsidiaries to keep the production going.
That is also a not incentive to authors if they will be pay anything they get as is a subscription based. I want rewarding the authors that make content i like not everyone like their content or not.
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The way we’re conceiving of it is access to X number of games of your choice. So a subscriber would look at our current catalog and decide on that basis that yes, they’d like to play at least 4 of our 100 games this month. Authors would still receive royalties. None of this is set in stone. Let’s drop this for now anyway.
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Right now we’re experimenting with COG sales but HG sales could be happening in the future. Also…we’ve done two themed sales so far, plus The Nebulas sale, not just sales within a series. Did you miss those?
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Yippie
454
I’m sorry this spiralled a bit into a pricing discussion I didn’t mean for it to go there. The main gist of my point was that I would welcome sales on some of the older games since I can’t really justify paying that price for it.
Now price is a sensitive topic, I get that. You and the rest of the staff (and also the writers) need to be fairly compensated for the time, energy and effort that you put in your games and stories. And also the opportunity to make a good living from it (I know for the writers that isn’t the case at the moment but it’s a good goal to aim for.) While on the other side also a fair price for consumers so we don’t get shafted. (I’m also aware you can’t influence prices as much as you’d want with VAT and all that blabla).
You are completely right with your current standpoint. Buying a book is more expensive, hell I could even buy 2/3 games instead of watching a movie at the cinema where I live. However I don’t go to the cinema 2-3 times a month or buy 3-4 books a month. But I might buy 3-6 COG games a month depending on the release schedule. So the price can add up.
Now let me make 1 thing really clear. I don’t mind the pricing, it’s good and fair and I would also not balk at a price increase in the future. And the release discount is a great method!
We are in sort of a symbiotic relationship, you need us (consumers) to sustain you and we need you because you produce the best “choose your own adventure” games around. (In my humble opinion). And sales on older games would certainly make me a happy consumer. I know the Psy High sale is a instant buy for me 
.
I’ll also sign up for the mail, since I’ve missed those. And once more thank you for all the hard work you and the rest of the staff put into this.
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One thing I do is to budget an amount every month for the CoG/HG that carry over if unused. I do agree though that having sales deals will help a lot since you will be able to have some money left to be use for get other titles.
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adrao
457
I guess (as mentioned her and in other threads) that part of the reason is word inflation in games (and I’m also pay off this problem, even when I complain about it). Average game word count is getting better, making the average game more expensive… This drives up reader expectations… And prices. But, I guess the string dollar isn’t helping either…
Maybe time to make some smaller games or release them for free? Mmmmmm I’m going with an idea along those lines myself…
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So I said this a bit earlier in the thread and I’d probably make the adjustment to the average consumer is like $14 to $16 (in USA currency).
I don’t think that the price increases (for increasingly longer and more complex IFs FYI 
) are unfair at all! It just mean that, as a consumer, I’m more stringy with my money.
For instance, I’ll play the available demo if it’s an IF from the CoG brand and probably pour over reviews from trusted sources (i.e. what people say in the forums) before I think about buying it.
If a prospective purchase is an HG publication that I’ve played via the forums or if it’s from an author/series I trust, then I’ll undoubtedly buy it (discount or no discount) since I have a good idea of the quality.
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Thr problem with that is people will still giving bad ratings because they are TOO SHORT and compared them with the paid ones. There are Hosted and Cog free. And I have read people complaining about BEING TRASH and not long enough. The ratings of free games are public.
Public is entitled to Free mentality. They don’t go MacDonalds Saying WHY THIS IS NOT FREE? A cog is roughly the price of a small menu in Spain. You could read a cog an average of five six times with areallydifferent playthrough and replaying in years to come.
People compared them with games that are freemium but tend to forget that those games aren’t free you pay with giving your privacy data to publicity companies watching advertise. And you don’t own those games. Like lifeline has clearly shown. They go offline. You lost all you have invested on them.
Cog has to be compared withElectronic books I bought electronic books all time. And last one was 15 euros and have barely 60,000 words and not interactive content. And was on sale. In Spain new e books are about 18 or 20 euros same a good indie.
So say are expensive with the amount of content and the growth in size. This games need months of preparing and editing and I don’t want the writers and editors starve as they are really professional of great skill.
To those that complain in google DO YOU WORKING EVERYDAY FOR FREE? do you want hear how entitled you are for asking money for your hard work?
Sorry for the rant but i am tired of hear how gamers complaining about indies and ebooks cost when most time they piracy them. Piracy is stealing authors and negativees them the value of their work
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@poison_mara yeah, it’s hard to make comparisons on pricing. A Kindle ebook, depending on the title, and how new it is, is generally $8 to $15 USD. There are much cheaper ones, of course, but if I’m looking at new books out this year–literary fiction and memoir–that’s what I pay for what I like to read. I’m a library user mostly 
So for me, a COG is almost always cheaper.
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It so, so hard to know how word count affects things, though. Certainly we have evidence that longer games sell better but there are now a few extremely long (over 300k word) games that I thought would sell better than they did. Genre matters too! And not just genre but what the game is about and how it’s written! * throws up hands *
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We did the Furry Fun Sale: Moreytown, Choice of the Cat, Congresswolf, and Werewolves: Haven Rising and Nautical Adventures Sale: 7th Sea, Choice of the Pirate, Daring Mermaid Expedition, and Sea Eternal. Future sales are going to depend slightly on having a week free to do them in. In general, we don’t want to put out a sale when there’s a new release or a pre-order sale going because we don’t want a sale to “step on” those.
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Interactive fiction is quite in middle between tradition narrative and games and different people compared them with different things. And public is mostly young with mobile games. And they don’t think in costs or in fact there is no microtransactions. or gold currency. and how in a freemium you don’t own your game and the content associated to it.
In Spain the taxes make e books a little more expensive than America but situation is more same.
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ihauk
465
I pay whatever the price is.
Doing it to support authors and the company
And (read/play?) interesting stories.
I dont mind prices going up.
Getting paid for hard work is important.
30$ is not that much. around 133 NOK could get a yellowcheese x)
Is it wordcount that set the prices??
Anyway this is my opinion
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@Mary_Duffy
Has CoG ever considered a reward scheme? Something like for example, if you buy a game you get a token (for this example let’s call them bookmarks). So each purchase gives you a bookmark and a certain amount of bookmarks can be exchanged for another game.
Maybe 3/4 bookmarks gets you a free game?
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Honestly, to me it is what it is. Do I like forking out $6.99 buying a game? Nah, but I do so when I must because I generally want to play the games. These days I just pay better attention to the release schedule so I can make sure to have the money to by them on sale upon release. I mean yeah it takes me a while to get it when I have to buy it full price because ya girl isn’t rolling in cash but I waste my money on a lot of things I don’t really need anyway which. I feel like the complaints that center around “well I choose to spend x amount of money on x thing already so this thing needs to be cheaper so I can do both” kind of unfair. How you choose to spend your money on things that aren’t necessities (ie. As in things that are not things like rent, food, clothing, utilities etc.) Isn’t that any company should feel the need to consider. If I want to spend $200 a month on puzzles and can’t afford a game because of it then that’s no one’s problem but my own.
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We are discussing a subscription and/or passes system. I’m not going to talk about it here though. I’m too busy today, and nothing is set in stone. Price Increases
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Honestly I think I prefer being able to buy each game by itself at a reasonable price. Subscriptions sound like they will complicate things, since I assume that there would be a limit to how recent a game can be included, or end up like Episodes where we’re paying for chapters rather than complete books, and I assume most people don’t want that.
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Idle speculation, do not take this as a serious inquiry to CoG about this since I know it’s still in the planning stages:
It seems like tokenized subscription method seems like it could work. Let’s say $7.99 a month and the person gets tokens that allow them to purchase up to three stories for ‘free’ (which they would keep even if the subscription ended). The author whose story is purchased still gets royalties as normal, and CoG would profit both from the money left after the royalties (since there’s no combination of three stories out there where the author cut would approach anything close to $8) plus all the people who subscribe but don’t remember to use some or all of the tokens. Could also allow them to roll some of them over if you felt like being nice about it. It would eventually juice sales of lesser stories, as longtime subscribers started having to go further back in the catalog to find stuff they don’t have yet.
Not saying that this is a good or bad idea. Just saying it seems like a doable one.
