Apologies for the necromancy but Chance linked this on the business model thread and I found it a great read + thought it seemed like an appropriate place to respond / pick back up, since I’m mindful the business model thread is a storied old thread that has had like 100 other discussion topics over the years.
I did some of my own data slicing this weekend without knowing this thread existed - my analysis is more high-level and cursory than Chance’s, but it is very up to date so I’m posting it here for reference - the short summary is that it seems like the trends Chance pointed out did end up propagating through 2024 and 2025, and seem on track to continue into 2026 (though it’s very early days):
Releases per year since 2018.
Reviews on the COG / HG apps since 2018.
Releases with 500+ reviews since 2018.
*Rolling Total should say rolling avg, oops
Something also on my mind is that we have had, IMO, a couple of very good books over the last 18 months, both on the HG and COG side, including some by established and very capable authors, and they are not always exceptions to these trends.
Thank you for sharing this (two years belatedly…) - it’s an interesting thing to bear in mind, it’s possible rating behaviours have shifted and this (partly?) offsets the reduced rating amounts.
But, I guess, whilst I’m increasingly confident in my observations (it helps a lot that Chance picked up on this literally whilst it was happening, unlike my Captain Hindsight powers - I missed this thread back when I was just an accountless lurker, clearly…!), agreeing that there might be a problem isn’t the same as having a solution in mind…
Maybe we need to just doing the best we can with any writing projects of our own and keep revisiting this thread and doing our best to contribute to it!