Seriously WTF!

Full disclosure: I’m writing a “front-page” fantasy game for CoG myself in my spare time (w.t. Choice of Rebels), so I will eventually be one of those authors everybody complains about, assuming I ever get it done. But I’m posting this as a reader… and indeed, a cheap-ass reader who hasn’t read Eerie Estate Agent yet, despite the near-certainty that I’ll like it, because it costs money. (I will buy it one of these days, really…)

Writing isn’t my day job any more, and I don’t expect to make back anything remotely close to the time I’ve put into the CoG game. But some of the people who write for CoG are professional writers – Heather Albano, for instance. They’ve got to weigh the time they put into writing CoG games against the money they stand to make from it – otherwise their electricity gets cut off.

And most CoGs sell for $2.99. About the same as a venti coffee at Starbucks; half the price of a paperback novel, and way less than most games with high levels of complexity and replayability. Anyone who relies on CoG (even in part) to pay the bills is probably going to have to keep their games relatively short and tight, because they don’t sell for either a high enough price or (yet) at a large enough scale to keep authors fed and housed for the months it takes them to write one.

So I’m not sure the people who expect games for free or long, novelistic yet full-of-choices games for $2.99 have got the economics of this genre straight. Personally, I try to think of it in terms of the pleasure I’m buying; I get a lot more pleasure out of a good short CoG game than I do from a coffee, and comparable pleasure to most genre paperbacks (counting re-reads/re-plays). I think it’s a pretty good deal.

Of course, the customer is always right; anyone who doesn’t think these games are worth $2.99, well, they’re not worth it to you. But if most people feel that way, we’re going to have a lot fewer fun stories.

Personally, I think Star Captain is one of the best games on the site. Of course I’d love it to be longer and have a more sandboxy feel, because then I could spend even more hours enjoying it – but I wouldn’t expect to get that for $2.99.