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We’re proud to announce that the third part of the Choice of Romance: Affairs of the Court trilogy, our popular series of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for iOS, Android and, via the Chrome Web Store, Windows, OS X, and Linux.

The third part, titled “‘Til Death Do Us Part,” is the climactic conclusion to the trilogy, a fantasy story of clandestine love affairs, revolution, and betrayal, which started with “Choice of Romance” and continued in “Choice of Intrigues.”

Plunge into court politics and change the course of history, or pursue a love affair that rocks the kingdom to its foundations! It’s the game of romance, deception and court intrigue, where your choices determine how the story proceeds. The game is entirely text-based–without graphics or sound effects–but driven by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Will you play as male or female? Gay or straight? Match wits with the schemers of the court, or play your suitors off each other? Will you find true love? Gain a crown? Lose your head?

We hope you enjoy playing Choice of Romance: Affairs of the Court. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

We’re proud to announce that Choice of the Vampire: The Fall of Memphis, the sequel to 2010’s hit Choice of the Vampire, is now available for iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, and, via the Chrome Web Store, Windows, OS X, and Linux.

Feast on the blood of a dying city: Memphis, 1873! Make your national debut in the Society, a conspiracy of vampires who convene in Memphis to elect a new “senator.” The city burns with yellow fever, as the nascent Ku Klux Klan rises.

“Choice of the Vampire” is the epic interactive novel by Jason Stevan Hill where your choices determine how the story proceeds. The game is entirely text-based–without graphics or sound effects–but driven by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

What will you take from Memphis before the city collapses? Will you battle the Klan, or control them from within? Will you rekindle a romance that transcends death? The choice is yours.

We hope you enjoy playing Choice of the Vampire: The Fall of Memphis. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

At long last, after a ton of hard work, we’re about to release ‘Til Death Do Us Part, the third part of the Choice of Romance and Choice of Intrigues trilogy.

Intrigues is currently available on the web at no charge. On iOS and Android, Romance is available for free (with a $1.99 in-app purchase to turn off advertisements), but Intrigues costs $0.99.

In order to be able to afford to keep working on games like ‘Til Death Do Us Part, we have to sell our games, not give them away for free. We’ve tried giving away our games and monetizing them through advertisements and in-app purchases, but we simply can’t make enough money that way to keep on making new games.

The impending release of ‘Til Death Do Us Part (we call it Death, for short) forced us to make some hard decisions about how to price the existing parts of the Affairs of the Court trilogy, which is how we now refer to Choice of Romance and its sequels.

Here’s what we plan to do when we release Death.

• On iOS and Android (including Kindle Fire), we’ll make Death available as an in-app purchase for $0.99; Intrigues will still cost $0.99. You’ll be able to buy Death without buying Intrigues, and vice versa. (You also still be able to pay $2.99 to play the game without advertisements.)
• On E-Ink Kindle devices, in-app purchasing is not possible. We currently charge $2.99 for the Affairs of the Court app, which includes Romance plus Intrigues and no ads; when we release Death, we’ll increase the price of Affairs of the Court to $3.99. Everyone who’s already purchased Affairs of the Court will receive Death at no additional charge, in an upgrade to the original app. (Note that this could take a while, while we wait for the upgrade to be approved.)
• We’ll make the entire Affairs of the Court trilogy available for $3.99 on the Chrome Web Store, Mac App Store, and Windows Store (for Windows 8 PCs), without any advertisements or in-app purchases.
• We’ll remove the free version of Intrigues from our web site. When you reach the end of Romance on the web, you’ll be invited to purchase the rest of the game on one of our other platforms.

By removing Intrigues from our web site, we’re effectively raising the price of Intrigues to match the price on iOS/Android, to avoid chiseling our mobile customers. When we release Death for $0.99, it will be possible for mobile players to purchase Death but not Intrigues; if Intrigues is free on the web, we’ll be effectively asking our mobile customers to play Intrigues on the web, switching to mobile only when playing Death. We want our paying customers to be confident that they’re getting the best deal possible, and not force them to jump through annoying hoops to save money.

People Who Can’t Buy the Game

Unfortunately, charging money for Intrigues will mean that some people who can currently enjoy the game will no longer be able to play it at all, especially players who are too young to have a bank account.

We’ve heard your complaints about Chrome Web Store’s Google Wallet, which doesn’t accept payments in all countries. Our hope is that by also making the game available on the Windows Store and the Mac App Store, we’ll be able to reach as many paying customers as possible.

If you have access to a PayPal account but do not have any way to purchase the Affairs of the Court trilogy, please email support-affairs-paypal@choiceofgames.com and we’ll try to help you out by hand. (One day, we’ll build our own online store to accept PayPal payments, but designing a secure online store is a lot of work; since we already support seven different online storefronts, our hope is that we can handle the rest of you via email.)

The Good Old Days When Everything Was Free

Overall, this is yet another step in our evolution from a company that gives games away for free to a company that charges money for games. We began this process immediately after Google banned us from Google AdSense, cutting our advertising revenue substantially. As we’d hoped at the time, being forced to charge money for our games has been good for our profits.

We have to admit that there was another way to unify our prices: we could have made Intrigues available for free on all platforms. As a team, we agreed not to do that. We’ve worked really hard on Death. (Really really hard. This might be the most complex game we’ve ever written.) If we made Intrigues free on iOS and Android, we’d lose the substantial revenue that we continue to get from Intrigues, effectively reducing the revenue we made from Death. We feel that if we made Intrigues available for free, we’d be getting paid less for Death than we deserve.

We know that a lot of you still yearn for the good old days when our games were available online for free. We’ll continue to experiment with techniques that could help our free games earn as much money as our paid games, without using exploitative tricks for which free-to-play games are so notorious.

We want as many people as possible to enjoy our games. If we can find an ethical way to make our games available for free without losing money, we’ll do it.

In the meantime, you’ve still got a week or so to enjoy Intrigues on the web at no charge. (We’ll submit the new version to Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon this week; we’ll release Death once they approve us.)

We’re proud to announce that Choice of the Ninja, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for iOS, Android and, via the Chrome Web Store, Windows, OS X, and Linux.

In the high-stakes game of politics between two feudal lords, you are a ninja village’s chosen warrior. Earn glory for your clan as you battle your enemies, becoming a master of magic, combat, and stealth.

Choice of the Ninja is an epic interactive fantasy novel by Katherine Buffington, where your choices determine how the story proceeds. The game is entirely text-based–without graphics or sound effects–but driven by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Will you bring peace to your village, or return home in shame? Will you serve your daimyo obediently, or defy his orders for the greater good? Or will you use your powers of invisibility for personal gain? The choice is yours.

We hope you enjoy playing Choice of the Ninja. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

You can now get SLAMMED! on the Microsoft Windows Store or on the Mac App Store, for $2.99 until July 17th.

The Windows Store is available only for Windows 8 PCs and Windows RT tablets like the MS Surface. If you’re using Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, or Linux, you can still purchase SLAMMED! for your PC on the Chrome Web Store.

Our goal is to make our games available on as many stores as we can. That’s partly because we’ve heard from our users that Google won’t accept payments from countries where you live, but also because stores can help users discover our games.

We hope you enjoy playing SLAMMED! We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the Windows Store (just like the App Store). Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

We’re proud to announce that SLAMMED!, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, and, via the Chrome Web Store, Windows, OS X, and Linux.

Turn a scripted steel-cage wrestling match into a real fight in this 250,000-word interactive novel!

You’ve always dreamed of becoming pro wrestling’s biggest star…but a wrestler’s world is fraught with hardship and betrayal, in and out of the ring. Become a powerhouse, a technician, a high-flier, or focus on your promo skills. There’s more than one road to success.

But none of those roads will be easy. This is a world where your biggest fans are your harshest critics; where the front office is more dangerous than the squared circle; where friends can become enemies with a single heel turn; where, sometimes, the only way to win is to lose, spectacularly.

This is professional wrestling. And you’re about to change it, forever.

Slammed! is an epic interactive professional-wrestling novel by Paolo Chikiamco, where your choices determine how the story proceeds. The game is entirely text-based–without graphics or sound effects–but driven by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

There’s never been a professional wrestling game like this, a game where the outcome of your final match, your choice of opponent, and your relationships affect the ending. When’s the last time you played a pro-wrestling RPG with a “kayfabe” stat?–or where your trash-talking “promo” ability is as important as your core strength and wrestling technique?

• Enjoy a 250,000-word personal tale of friendship, competition, and revenge.
• Develop not only your physical abilities, but a favored wrestling style.
• Become a heroic face, or a villainous heel–or even turn heel.
• Turn a scripted match into a real fight–and vice versa.
• Decide when to keep kayfabe, and when to break it.
• Play as male or female, gay or straight.

We hope you enjoy playing SLAMMED!. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

You can now download Choice of Kung Fu on the Nook App Store!

It’s compatible with the Nook Color, Nook Tablet, and Nook HD/HD+ Tablet, but not the E Ink Nook Simple Touch.

(Everybody else may continue to enjoy Choice of Kung Fu on iOS, Android, Kindle, and, via the Chrome Web Store, Windows, OS X, and Linux.)

This is our first trial with the Nook App Store; if it goes well, we’ll convert more of our games to be compatible with Nook.

We’re proud to announce that Sabres of Infinity, the latest in our Hosted Games label of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for iOS, Android, and, via the Chrome Web Store, Windows, OS X, and Linux.

Fight for glory as an officer of the Royal Tierran Army in a rich, low-fantasy world where gunpowder and magic rule the battlefield. Choose a horse, pick a sergeant and lead a unit of Royal Dragoons through five years of brutal war.

“Sabres of Infinity” is an epic interactive novel by by Paul “Cataphrak” Wang where you control the main character. In each chapter, your choices determine how the story proceeds.

Battle your enemies with your mind, your wits or with pistol and sword. Earn the loyalty of your subordinates and the friendship of your fellow officers, or betray them for your own gain. As armies, heroes and philosophies clash in the forests of the north, your choices could mean the difference between everlasting glory and an ignominious death.

We hope you enjoy playing Sabres of Infinity. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better we’ll rank.

It’s once again time to register for IntroComp!

The requirements of IntroComp are deceptively simple: All entrants must submit the beginning of a new, never before seen work of IF that is not yet complete and for which the ending is somewhat uncertain. The introduction can be as short or as long as the author likes, so long as it is 1) a working, playable game and 2) interactive fiction.

Note that only introductions to games which are slated for non-commercial release may be entered in the competition. (In email, the organizer emphasized that IntroComp “is not a venue for people aspiring to make money.”) Even if you intend to distribute your game for free, if you intend to make money from the game via advertisements (e.g. via our Hosted Games program), IntroComp may not be the right competition for your game.

If you’re interested participating, you’ll need to submit your Intent to Enter by June 15th (just a few days away!) and submit your polished introduction on July 15th. The competition is open and welcoming to games written in ChoiceScript, including last year’s first-place winner, Resonance.

We’re proud to announce that Treasure Seekers of Lady Luck, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for iOS, Android, e-Ink Kindle, and, via the Chrome Web Store, Windows, OS X, and Linux.

Jump to hyperspace aboard the Lady Luck, the fastest starship in the galaxy! Join her ragtag crew of space pirates, or infiltrate their ranks, working undercover for the Galactic Police.

Treasure Seekers of Lady Luck is an interactive sci-fi novel by Christopher Brendel, where your choices determine how the story proceeds. The game is entirely text-based–without graphics or sound effects–but driven by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

In addition, Christopher is trying something new with Treasure Seekers: it includes puzzle elements in the style of traditional text adventures. You can explore the ship, collect inventory items, and use them to overcome obstacles, all in our trademark multiple-choice format.

The fate of the ship rests in your hands! Will you play as male or female? Gay or straight? Will you unlock the mystery hidden in the heart of the ship?

We hope you enjoy playing Treasure Seekers of Lady Luck. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.