The problem is, it’s incredibly hard to make a living out of just writing games. Like I’d be lucky to make cents per hour by the time I tally up my time for return. I literally can’t afford to write as anything more than a hobby. Better performing authors will fair better, but unless you’re on the top tier, you’re likely still better off going and working at a minimum wage job. It’s just not that lucrative to publish stories (whether IF or books). Audience interaction and involvement on places like patreon is where the draw is. The other thing is without pateron, even high performing authors who will get reasonable returns on a game, you’re asking them to potentially spend months to years writing with zero income. How do they keep the lights on? They will need to spend less time writing in order to pay bills.
I 100% agree pateron is almost certainly slowing release schedules for HGs down and possibly funneling money away from actual game purchases, but if that goes away, so do the hyper popular authors who need to write for money. You can’t have it both ways.
I definitely agree with you, and I’d never ask anyone to be a starving artist! Like I said, I want all authors and artists to be able to make a decent living off their work. I might be wrong, but it was also my understanding that most if not all IF authors have other jobs to sustain themselves beyond just IFs, but regardless, I subscribe to a few Patreons precisely because I know their work pre-publication isn’t being compensated (and I want them to be able to eat in the meantime! )
I suppose I mostly just feel bad for authors if the dynamic is such that now they feel pressure to do even more writing beyond their WIPs for engagement/promo, and then that larger trend simultaneously means decreased engagement with/ demand for (and income from) their published titles, especially because a subscription model means an expectation for regular output. For authors that aren’t interested in the subscription stuff outside of their publications, I’d imagine that must be frustrating too. You guys already have to be experts at writing AND coding AND your other day jobs (AND sometimes at visual art too! Which as an aside, I’ll never understand why some readers expect that from you when the boilerplate COG specifically says “fueled by your imagination!” haha), it just seems unfortunate that portions of your audience want even more from you when you’re already doing a whole lot for probably not enough comp, as you say.
The company has nothing to do with the demo site. The patreon access plug-in was put out faster than planned because the paid demo links were being leaked to pirate sites.
Well I guess nobody has to run a patreon, but it is one of the few ways to run a viable writing career (even part time) for HG. So yes it’s a choice. You do the extra work and get money, hype, and better selling games. Or you take your chances writing for free on the forums, with everyone fighting for the same small amount of attention that is largely concentrated in the popular game threads, and ultimately have to treat it as no more than a “when I have time” hobby.
But yes, unfortunately there isn’t a good answer. Unless IF unexpectedly becomes wildly popular with massive returns on projects published, it will likely remain sharply divided between those who rely on pateron money and all that entails, and those who don’t and are doing it as a hobby (leading to long delays in updates, periods of hiatus, and high rates of abandonment of WIPs.)
It’s fine! I see hobby authors as similar to dung beetles. Dung beetles enjoy rolling a big ball of poop. If other people want to chip in some money to see the poop ball, that’s great! But if they don’t, that’s fine too. The poop rolling is its own reward.
If I didn’t have a patreon, I couldn’t finish Fallen Hero. Simple as that. I nearly killed myself managing full time work and writing Retribution, I don’t have anybody to fall back to, I am the sole bread winner in my family. Like it or not, the royalties are very little but a nice addition once the first year has passed.
Honestly, I feel that if Patreon wasn’t a thing, CoG would be in a lot of trouble. Patreon is what keeps writers who can drum up engagement around, and draws new ones in.
Without Patreon funds as a pressure valve to handle cost tensions, I wonder if more authors might have taken the gamble of moving to another engine even mid-series to get more freedom with how you monetize. Especially people doing this tougher time…
This is essentially where I’ve ended up as a WIP author so far, since I generally don’t have long enough periods of consistent time to write in order to manage a real patreon (not just a tip jar) with side content or paywalled content.
I do have my day job, so I’m quite happy to just roll my ball up over time, as has been said, and see who else wants to watch along the way for when I get to finally let it go down the hill of publication.
Hey, does being in the best-selling category mean anything? It seems every new release lands in best selling. Is it just for show, or does it actually represent a statistic?
You mean on the omnibus? The best selling category ranks games by the amount of revenue they have made on all platforms, even outside the omnibus, in the last week.
Practically, it increases the visibility of your game, since the omnibus displays the bestselling games prominently on the first page.
When a game is first released (or put on sale), it is pinned to the top of the bestselling category regardless to sales, to give it that visibility boost. Since new games tend to sell a lot of copies in the first few weeks, they will usually stay at or near the top of the bestseller rankings for a few more weeks after release week, before predictably disappearing down the rankings.
It’s a statistic which translates to real world visibility in the omnibus, if that makes sense.
Well your particular poo ball happens to be one of my all time favorites! Sophisticated writing and mechanics, amazingly good pacing, and a unique yet familiar world that’s completely engaging, so I for one am happy to wait as long as it takes and look forward to purchasing it!
EDIT: now that I think of it, you know what might be a decent way of maintaining longer term interest during the WIP process? Slightly changing update announcements. So I really love it when authors stick to the standard forum post format (editing the changelog in the original post with word counts and dates etc), but I sometimes have trouble remembering IFs. Especially since many are similar in terms of titles and tropes (not that that is a bad thing at all bc I enjoy many of them!), sometimes I have trouble keeping them straight and I end up thinking, like, “wait which one is this? Is this X vampire title I liked or y vampire title I didn’t? Have I read this update yet? Have I read the previous?” Etc etc. Sometimes going back and reading the character descriptions or previous posts helps, but not always. I’ve even considered making a spreadsheet to try to keep track haha! But with limited time to read, I’m sure I’ve missed some that I’d intended to follow!
So if for example in an update announcement, an author put “update: we last left off with MC and Companion Y leaving Companion Y’s village after solving the mystery of ABC, and starting on the road to Capitol City to find the wizard. This update contains their Capitol City story arc” instead of “update: chapter 3 part A now available,” I think that might help a lot in retaining interest. Only if that doesn’t create more work for you guys though!
Thank you! I’m glad I’ve rolled up an interesting one over the past couple years.
I haven’t done this before, but I can see that it might be helpful to readers. Putting up a little chapter summary, short and simple (avoiding spoilers, of course), as a way to hook people back in sounds like something I could do going forward.
That sounds lovely. Do you have any other thoughts?
I can never tell if frequency of forum posts without an actual update helps. Should I do weekly or monthly? Monthly updates yield for a lot of information, but only boosts your WIP thread once a month. Weekly updates boosts your thread weekly, but often small updates.
For what it’s worth, I do fortnightly updates and I think that feels pretty good. And I think it was helpful early on to show readers that meaningful progress was still being made on the demo after the initial release (I think that one is less of a concern now, 8 months in). But it probably depends a lot on individual workrates and how easy you find writing the updates.
Two weeks between updates means that I normally have enough progress / news for the update to be worthwhile, and I still get the occasional message asking me for an impromptu chapter release timing estimate in between fortnightly updates, so I get the impression that my audience mostly doesn’t think I’m updating them too frequently…
I think my ideal pace would be once every three weeks, but the hassle of tracking that feels like it would outweigh any convenience benefits. Plus I don’t like changing a status quo that seems to be working!
Some don’t do Patreon/crowdfunding OR do it intermittently as a hobby, and might work it as seriously as any job (and then some), but they’ll often be independently wealthy, have robust support systems, and/or have a spouse or family member who supports them.
I did monthly updates the entire time I was developing Turncoat Chronicle (around five years) and I still got mentioned in the “abandoned games” thread.
Honestly, I don’t know anyone in that boat. You’re talking about no income for a year or more, and then no guarantee if you’ll even make anything close to minimum wage. That’s not a job, that’s a wish and hope.
COG is different as authors get advances and minimum income guaranteed. HG are pretty much all hobbyists and/or patreons.
Those advances aren’t enough to live on either, you’re effectively getting something a third of poverty line for 18-24 months of work, with more only if you earn out that advance.
The only way that works is if you have an immensely successful backlog giving you royalties to tide you over at the same time.
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