For what it’s worth, this has actually been talked about for a decade. Search “deleting saves” and years of threads will pop up. This has been a recognized quality-of-life improvement need since basically the week after CoG started publishing series.
Arcadie has absolutely been successful, and that’s great. Whether that’s a success model others will be able to follow, especially if they start in Twine and don’t incubate their game for two years on this forum with a WIP thread that draws in the HG audience, is an open question.
As an outsider looking at the reasons some HG authors give for leaving the company – whether we’re talking Price of Freedom, Arcadie, or Relics – it seems to me in each case there are lessons the CoG team should be learning and changes being made to keep future relationships from getting to that snapping point.
That said, it’s also inevitable that as a company grows, the number of occasional flare-ups, mistakes, and broken relationships around it will also grow. I miss the lower-drama CoG community of a few years ago, but on the plus side there are loads more people engaging than there were then. The drama isn’t an indicator of failure. Notwithstanding the handful of authors who’ve chosen to work elsewhere (plus an additional couple handfuls of writers who might one day complete a WiP) there are still more writers than ever choosing to work here, and more fans reading the work.
I won’t revive the “misreading of GreekWinter” bit of the thread except to say that the best comeback had already been made a few posts up:
That’s all you needed to say, gang. Or “the fact that it’s not literally unplayable is a pretty low bar.”
I’m no coder, but I’d have thought the fact that save plugins have been made as an unpaid spare time project by @CJW (original author of what has increasingly come to be called the Dashingdon save system– though I don’t know how much Don may have tweaked it/added his own version) or @cup_half_empty suggests that it’s not only possible but economical in terms of coding effort. Maybe that’s mistaken? I dunno.
I agree that for non-coder authors like myself, there’s real effort involved in adding checkpoints, but that could be changed either by building checkpoint saving into CS (as we’re almost all asking) or save-at-will (as we’re arguing about).