Yeah, coming from romance spice ratings, that was… underwhelming.
I agree that content tags/warnings would be very useful.
Isn’t erotica the very middle ground between romance and porn?
The classic dividing line is the focus of the piece. If the focus is sex and titillation, it’s erotica. If the focus is the characters’ relationship arc and their emotional state, it’s romance. You can have romance with erotic elements, and erotica with romance elements.
Just a quick note to say that I’m still keeping up to date on this stuff as we move more deeply into the latter half of the year.
I’ll probably share some updated tables early 2027 with refreshed numbers for 2025 and 2026 releases - nothing too interesting to flag / update on since June, except that:
Release Count
Ratings
As before, I still have no idea whether this speaks to people using the apps / buying stuff less (which would be a big issue), or a trend in audiences of being less willing or able to finish COG games and / or rate them (a much smaller issue that could be entirely benign).
Of course, it’s possible that the aforementioned audience is still reading and as such hasn’t had time to rate yet.
It’s been only a week, after all.
I think that it’s extremely unlikely that this will have a massive impact on rating counts, FWIW.
I’m sure it will go up, as it deserves to, and I’m sure positive WoM will give it a better tail than most games, but a very substantial amount of a game’s ratings will come from the first week the game is out, regardless of all that; this has been proven out pretty much consistently on every single release I’ve monitored
Maybe, but a 1mil game takes longer to finish than a shorter game and you can’t rate until you reach the end, was my point.
But I’ll defer to your expertice on this.
FWIW- I do agree that could be a factor (plus the fact there’s only been one weekend since release, too) - I mentioned finishing rates as a potential influence in general at the bottom of the post.
I’m just also confident that, even taking all of that into account, this is the kind of release that would have seen much higher ratings numbers on the apps even in its first week or two, just a couple of years ago.
And one gap I will admit in my experience is that I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing a game go mega hit yet, so it’s possible such games exhibit different trends to the ones I’ve seen so far…
Yes please. We’d love to see that.
Other than Writing Fever’s two games, I’m not sure if there’s anything else in the pipeline. (If anyone knows of any other games in the HG pipeline, feel free to add on.)
While I’ve seen publishing times as low as 1-2 months, note that a HG game will usually take about 4-6 months to go from submission to release. So anything submitted within the next month might go to 2027’s publishing schedule.
Tricky… I suspect Velocity sold way better than the rating counts would suggest, given the difficulty of completing the game.
Games with save systems tend to get lower rating counts relative to sales. When my game first game out, some published authors on the published author board projected low sales for my game based on the early rating count, but my actual royalty check almost doubled those projections.
I do agree that rating counts have declined massively from previous years though, and I admit I’m concerned. (Especially after seeing some recent sales numbers.)
On a brighter note, it is the highest rated HG title released this year. 
Another factor is how much the game branches, and how long a single playthrough is.
True! And how many playthroughs an enthusiastic player wants to complete before rating.
I personally want to take my time enjoying the writing if the prose is something I find particularly enjoyable, so I’m going to finish games I enjoy slower than games I won’t where I just end up skimming.
I know this is way late but that’s unlikely to be the whole story. COG’s get far more promotion on both steam and the website than the average HG. They also all get professional artwork and videos which I’m guessing help with promotion. Also all COGs get a steam release, only some HGs do, so you’re also likely getting some migration over from people buying on steam and then rating in the apps. As chance also pointed out, COG almost always (with occasional exceptions) has a hard minimum word count that is much higher than HGs.
Not sure if I’m totally off base here. But the increasingly major assessment of length = quality and therefore price has always concerned me for HG games in particular given the lack of editorial control. The forum does not represent the sole buyers of games. It’s hard to say what that might do the association of the brand with being decent games in the longer term?
I do think the world’s economy is pretty shaky right now though. It’s going to be putting pressure on a lot of “optional” (aka not rent and food) sectors for a lot of people.
(Edit- By the way is there a HG release schedule for this year? I’ve never been able to find the thread if its around.)
I’ll admit I was mostly talking about the COG pipeline here, going purely off the number of beta test calls we’ve gotten in the last couple of months! Though like you say - yes - no telling if that’s a 2026 or 2027 event…
Definitely agree that if anything is looking likelier to stay slow it’s HG (though also I think HG release announcements / marketing is a bit irregular - I’ve been surprised multiple times this year to find out something is a week from launch)
I wouldn’t be surprised at all. Anecdotal, but I saw a lot of discussion around the game on reddit and the like, so I got the feeling that people were intrigued by the premise at the very least.
I’ve not really seen many sales numbers (imagine you folk discuss this stuff more on the published writers’ side of the forum), so I’ve always been very hesitant to outright guess that new releases were selling worse in the last couple of years despite the ratings falls. Sad to hear that what you’ve seen suggests it might be the case.
I’m definitely cognizant of this - I didn’t want to go into a very deep and detailed compare / contrast of HG / COG because there are a lot of confounding variables (e.g. HGs are much likelier to have pre-launch fanbases) that would probably take a whole thread to run through.
For what it’s worth - I’m not sure that this concern is as pronounced as we might fear (though intuitively I would 100% have agreed with you). Or, at least, I think the impact of it is starting to tail off.
Word count bloat may be starting to plateau and, whilst present, I haven’t found the correlation between rating counts and word count to be as strong as I expected, especially when you start getting into very high numbers.
I actually think there’s possibly more evidence for the audience favouring superhero stuff above all else than there is for the audience favouring word count above all else…
Nope, unfortunately not. Apparently the people who run it on the company’s side have been very busy.
Which is awesome! I feel like I’m always sharing negative-skewing insights here, I really hope it doesn’t come across with any malice; I sincerely hope that every release this year is selling fantastically.
Basically every time I run the numbers I’m hoping that something has changed from the last time I’ve looked - a massive surge in reviews for the latest releases, or proof that the ratings tail has gone up a lot, or somebody mentioning that their sales were amazing despite the rating count (e.g. it would have been awesome if my check had showed that a few of the games from earlier in the year had massively increased in reviews versus where they were in June)…
I just also feel that honestly charting this information is valuable, given how little information we have readily available to us as authors, reviewers and interested readers…
The ultimate wish fulfillment power fantasy. Shouldn’t surprise any of us really that’s what sells.
I had the same experience here. Initial sales were better than ratings suggested. Players can be disincentivised to review a game if doing so wipes progress when, instead, they can reload a previous checkpoint to explore another branch without starting all over again. Although this won’t affect the Steam reviews.
A way around this, using code, has been suggested. I’m not sure if anyone has implemented this yet.
(EDIT: I will add that while my game bounces up and down the sales rankings, on the app, the number of ratings has remained almost static for a while.)
Looks like it’s in the cash cow or decline stage. Word count inflation throttles the number of new authors and thus new games in the long term. And on the audience side, the word count inflation increases the barrier to entry, meaning fewer new readers.
Basically the focus is on maximizing revenue from existing customers. We can draw our own conclusions on what this implies for writer profit-share rates.
I do fear initial signs point to us being in a downturn or trough, yes (caveated that we lack the metrics to call this with confidence, or to say how steep it might be).
I’m less confident in calling a cause. If I were forced to blame something, my first guess wouldn’t be word count inflation.
I think word count is easy to point to because it is so visible and we have so few quantifiable data points, and do think it is something that can demoralize and discourage us as authors, because it has the most direct read-across to our own labour, so I think it’s especially tempting for us latch on to it as the be-all and end-all problem.
With the info we have, it’s as easy to blame broader market forces and / or a decline in the mobile gaming / recreation segment as it is anything else, combined with general post-COVID digital entertainment travails. Cost of living might be making fewer people at either label, COG or HG, able to write full-time. Or, for HG specifically, it might be discontent at the author rates relative to the risk and labour costs.
On the reader side, it could be the macro issues already raised, and / or evolving reader tastes as the body of historic body of work they have access to grows and their choice grows accordingly, letting them be more discerning re:which genres, writing styles, gameplay mechanics and, yes, word counts they’re interested in.
Well I’m going to throw my short game out into the submissions pile sooner rather than later. We can see what it might achieve for encouraging first timers (or anyone else who feels so inclined) to give shorter games a go. (It may do the opposite if it gets one starred into oblivion, but let’s try to not be too pessimistic here 
). The issue is, I if I’ve estimated correctly, unless it really goes against predictions I probably won’t make much if anything from it, so if you need to write in order to pay bills, you’re still going to have to go for the super long epics which have become the norm.
I’d recommend re-examining your career choices at that point, but it’s not like the job market is too good currently either.
I think that (the long awaited) When Life Gives You Lemons was submitted one or two months(or so) ago, so there is a chance that it may actually be released before this year has ended. There may be others I’ve forgotten outside of that, but that’s the HG(outside of the ones that have already been mentioned) that I know might get a release this year. Personally, I have to admit that that up until recently there have been few released HGs and COGs that have caught my attention this year and out of the few I’ve tried, they been at best just fine, but just as often very average. So to me this has been a lackluster year so far, though Diaspora and, to a certain extent, Hunter’s Vigil, make things a bit better and with at least the second part of Jolly Good releasing later this year, I at least know there’s at least one great release to look forward to. But there may be others who feel the same way as me and the lack of releases in the(currently) most popular series also play a part in the low numbers this year, I think(SOH, while quite popular earlier, seem to have become less popular, maybe even much less popular with recent relases, so I’m not counting that among the most popular series).
I’m intrigued, do you have some examples?
Zip! is an interesting case study:
Superhero story by an established celebrated author of other best-selling superhero games. Made the 2024 underrated COG games list, but is free to win. Steam and website release, but omni-only on mobile. 48k words, ~800 ratings.
However, I think there are too many confounding factors for it to say much for or against a Superheroes Above All theory of things. I’m skeptical there exists any one factor consumers favor above all else, other than maybe romance.
There haven’t been many games in the last two years that appealed to my weird preferences, and my willingness to buy stuff outside my wheelhouse is blunted by the size of my backlog and the catalog.
Hard to justify buying a new superhero game when I already own multiple I haven’t played, no matter how good it is. And is it really likely to be better than the older community-acclaimed superhero game I haven’t gotten around to buying yet?
I own a silly number of magical/superpower/supernatural school games at this point, and experience has taught me I’m not that into the Humans+ [Premium Subscription] in SCHOOL! genre unless it’s doing something unique. (For what it’s worth, I’m looking forward to buying Pactbinder.)
I haven’t bought many new games, but I’m not out of the market. I don’t know how representative that is, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if the consumer base is shrinking.
Isn’t it possible that existing fans have just grown tired of IF? HG is still okay, but with COG games, even though the settings are different, I get the impression that they’re all pretty much the same.
I see “they’re all the same” thrown around a fair bit, but I never really understand why. There are very different genres, and different takes on similar genres, and different styles of writing and subjects. Plucking a few of my favourites randomly as they come to mind - Tally Ho, Siege of Treboulain, Professor of Magical Studies - they’re just really different stories and I’d never say they were alike.
Or narrowing it down by genre to some epic fantasy I’ve enjoyed - Stars Arisen, Tower Behind The Moon, and A Crown of Sorcery and Steel - again they’re very different experiences. Even the multiple Vampire: the Masquerade games are distinct from each other.
