Should Hosted Games be vetted more thoroughly?

[Eiwynn]

@Aereath

And COG could polish up the game themselves (If they are willing to do it on their own instead of hiring an editor. Money saved, but lots of man-labor needed) or get an extra group of volunteer beta-testers that focus on the correction of language instead of bugs, where you pay them a small fee and give them the game for free, to do the spray and polishing.

Here is the crux of the issue: it already costs CoG at least $1,000.00 to publish a game. And that is minimum cost. Adding editorial review would at least double that and more likely quadruple the costs involved . As said above, some titles don’t recoup the $1000.00 even after years worth of time being in the catalogue.

Here is more specifics:

@jasonstevanhill

You have to remember, it costs us about $1000 to review and publish a game to the different platforms. At a bare minimum, the game has to be long enough that readers will find the ads sufficiently annoying that some portion of them will pay $1 to turn them off. And it has to be in sufficient quantities so that we at least break-even on that proposition (so, > 1900 people have to pay $1 on a 20k word game in order for us to not lose money on it).

@jasonstevanhill

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.

From this quote in-house non-professional editing isn’t an option any longer.

So, adding additional costs to publishing games that 2,000 people may not even purchase is not a cost efficient change.

Price point is a major engine driving the sales of this niche and as the information given on bundles shown, the relation between that and quantity sold is such that they cancel each other out.