One of the key things that we do not want to be accused of–or mistaken for–is being a “vanity press.”
A vanity press is a pejorative term for a small press that offers a suite of services for amateur and semi-pro authors that result in the author never seeing revenue for their work or even finding themselves in debt to the publisher for “services rendered.”
For example, “sure, we’ll publish your 100,000 word fantasy epic! And even give you a $500 advance against 25% royalties! But you’re going to want to get that copyedited, right? Well, we can copyedit it for you, and it’ll only cost X/word. And we have to have cover art too. And don’t forget the typesetting!” And then the novel is published and generates $5-20k in the first three years in print, and the publisher keeps all of it to recoup their “costs” (copyediting, marketing, art, etc etc), and the author never sees any more money. Now, sure, if you really are hugely successful, a vanity press might help you turn a profit. Their work might even actually look good, but (broadly) the authors are the source of the revenue, rather than the consumers.
Thus, from the beginning, we did everything to avoid being labeled or confused with a vanity press; from the first dollar earned, the author earns a percentage. This meant–before Hosted Games even existed–that authors were responsible for their own copyediting and artwork. There also wasn’t any editorial oversight.
This also meant that it was very hard to get people to write for us. I wrote Vampire because I was out of a job. I thought it would be something to do that might make a little money while I looked for a new one. Would I have taken a shot on an unknown IF press if I hadn’t known Dan since 8th grade? Not a chance.
After we published Romance and Vampire in August of 2010, we started to get a few more submissions. I remember wrestling with two games in particular (one that fall, and one the next spring) where I spent multiple days line-editing the game (doing the sorts of things that @tw1stedmind is asking for), only to be told “no thank you” by the authors. Like, hours and hours of work just rejected out-of-hand. That was a real gut-punch, and made me question the idea of editing these games at all.
Now, by this time, Vampire and Romance had started to make some real money. We’d been kicked off AdSense by Google, and that meant that we were doing pay-to-play on iOS and GPS, and that was producing lots more revenue than the beer-money that Dragon had been earning through ads. What’s more, that December, we released Dragon and Broadsides on e-Ink Kindle. With one FB post and tweet by Amazon, we made more in one month on one platform (January 2011) than the entire history of the company to date.
Sure, around this time we started twisting arms of friends to make games. But the promises of money are very different from money-in-hand, and while we did get some interesting games from this particular transition moment (XOR by @Havenstone being one, Star Captain, Reckless, Ninja and To the City of the Clouds being the others), it was hard getting people to sit down and write an interactive novel “on faith.”
It was at this time that our 1% partner, Julian Yap from Serial Box, said, “you need to pay advances. You need to pay for art and copyediting. That’s how you’ll get professional writers to write for you.” It was like that moment in “The Social Network” where Justin Timberlake (Sean Parker) says, “Oh, and drop ‘the.’ Just call it Facebook.” We looked around and said, “oh, he’s right.”
So we individually loaned the company money as capital and publicized the advances. (This is how we found Zachary Sergi, Jonathan Valuckas, and Paul Gresty, for example.) But if we were going to give advances, we needed to have editorial control. Authors could no longer reject our notes if we were going to be giving them money up front.
And so we came up with the spin-off of Hosted Games. (In fact, we considered making it into a non-profit at some point, which is why the domain is still hostedgames.org.) The point was, we were going to professionalize Choice of Games: pay real money as advances; pay for art, copyedit, and testing; and exercise editorial control. For Hosted Games, we maintained the spirit of where we started: keeping the bar for entry low so that new voices can have the opportunity to be published. But keeping the bar for entry low necessitates keeping the costs low, and that means off-loading a lot of the marginal costs to the author: art, copyedit, and testing.
That said, we have to balance the competing interests of Hosted Games: making sure it’s not a vanity press, keeping the bar for entry low, and not losing money. It costs us about $1000 to publish an HG just in salary-hours spent between Dan, Rachel, and myself. There are a number of games that we’ve published via HG which–in their multi-year lifetime–have still not grossed more than $1000. We literally lose money on those games–and continue to do so every month, as we have to spend resources on customer service when things go wrong as well as the time involved in calculating and paying royalties–but we still pay the full royalty amounts.
We’re not going to offer to copyedit games that are submitted to HG; in particular, we can’t say, “send us your game and maybe we’ll pay for it to be copyedited.” More importantly, though, why would we spend money when we’re just as likely to lose money on a project as not? Does that mean we should try and evaluate games, and decide whether to copyedit-publish or reject? Maybe? But that clearly raises the bar and also introduces the possibility of error. For example, @tw1stedmind called out Zombien as an example of a poorly written game. However, Zombien, in terms of life-time revenue, is 18 out of the 74 currently published Hosted Games. Should we have rejected it? Would we have guessed that it was going to make as much money as it has? I wouldn’t have.
Or take Magikiras. The game is almost a million words and a copyeditor would have charged at least $10,000 to copyedit it. That’s a huge gamble on a game that we weren’t involved in the design and creation of. We don’t know the author. He has no prior publications. He’s not a native English speaker. He certainly didn’t read our various guides on what we think makes a good CSG. How would/should we have handled that? If you would have asked me then–or now–if I was willing to gamble $10,000 on it, I would have said you were crazy. (It’s #19 out of 74, and has grossed about 80% of what Zombien has made.)
This is all a long way of saying, I recognize your concerns, but I don’t see a good way of addressing it from our end of things while not going bankrupt and still maintaining our commitment to democratization. The only thing I can say is to recommend that the community be diligent about beta testing games that have been submitted for publication. That said, I hope this post has given you some insight as to why things are the way that they are.