Pre-order our next game: "A Midsummer Night's Choice" by Kreg Segall

Announcements
1

For the first time, we’re offering our fans a chance to pre-order our next game, A Midsummer Night’s Choice by Kreg Segall.

We’ll release the game to the public on Thursday, August 25th; you can buy it today at a discounted price. If you buy it here on our website, you’ll be able to play it on your preferred device (iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, or Linux) when the game comes out.

Fairy outlaws invade a Shakespearean comedy!

In this Shakespearean comedy adventure, can forbidden love conquer adorable fairy outlaws?

A Midsummer Night’s Choice is a 190,000-word interactive fantasy novel by Kreg Segall, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based–without graphics or sound effects–and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind”

When your father, the Duke, tries to force you to marry, you’ll leave civilization behind as you flee in disguise, cross-dressed, into the enchanted forest. Mistaken identities, inexplicable bears, and tiny but fearsome fairies await! (Seriously, they wear little walnut shells for helmets, and ride armored baby bunnies into battle.)

Will you fall into the mysterious Faerie Queene’s clutches? Will you (or your identical doppelganger) find true love? Or will your father’s spies find you first?

Hold on to your heart! The course of true love never did run smooth.

  • Play as male or female, gay, straight, or bi.
  • Inspire the world with your noble deeds, or play everything for laughs.
  • Star in a play within a play. (Er, within a game…that you are playing.)
  • Become a jester, a diplomat, a knight, a poet, a shepherd–or leave the world behind and join the fairy court.
  • Why is there a bear?!

How the pre-order works

Today: Anyone can go to our A Midsummer Night’s Choice page, play the first part of the game for free on our website, and purchase the game at a discounted price.

But the rest of the game is not available to play today, even if you pay now. Everyone who pre-orders the game will get to play it when it becomes available to the public on August 25th.

iOS/Android: On August 25th, we’ll make A Midsummer Night’s Choice available as a free app. Anyone can play the first part of the game for free on iOS and Android (or on our website). Once you reach the end of the free trial, the app will ask you to either purchase the game or “restore” your purchase.

If you’ve pre-ordered the game on our website, you’ll be able to restore your purchase on iOS/Android at no additional charge, unlocking the rest of the game.

Windows/Mac/Linux: On August 25th, players who have purchased the game on our website will be able to download the game directly from us. We’ll make downloads available on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

On launch day, (but not before then) the game will also be available to purchase on Steam. We’re not allowed to make our games available for pre-order on Steam yet — that option is available only to larger publishers — but if our pre-order experiment is a hit, we hope to be able to use our data to justify offering pre-orders on Steam as well.

We’ve never done this before

This is the first time Choice of Games has offered a game to the public for pre-order. We think of it as an experiment; we hope to learn a lot about what you’d like to see in the course of the next few weeks. If the experiment is a hit, we’ll try to make more of our games available for pre-order. If our players aren’t interested in pre-ordering, we might modify the experiment next time, or give up on pre-order sales and try something else.

21 Likes
2

Pre-ordering doesn’t interest me. With most of the games I’ve pre-ordered in the past I’ve lost interest in the game by the time I actually get my hands on a release. Admittedly this is usually months and not weeks in advance.

I see you listed Windows. Will the game be playable on windows phones? While not connected to online? (We’d another user asking about that earlier).

2 Likes
3

Like our other games, Windows Phones can play the full game on our website, but not offline.

1 Like
4

For me, part of the benefit of pre-order is that I don’t need to remember game’s release date - I know I will have it as soon as it’s available. CoG’s official newsletter is usually a few days behind release, making it hard for a casual customer to keep track of releases… I’d suggest some sort of automatic email reminder sent upon release, especially if you aim to reach potential customers who don’t religiously check these forums and the app stores for new games. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
5

Part of the problem is that each store (iOS, Google Play, Steam, Amazon Appstore) has a button we click to release the game; some of them release instantly, and some of them do it over the course of hours or even an entire day.

We try to hold off on the mailer until we’re reasonably confident that everyone who gets the mailer can actually download the game immediately. There’s nothing more annoying than getting the mailer, clicking buy, and getting an error message from the App Store saying, “Sorry, not available yet!” Plus people are extra likely to forget to try again later, so we’d lose sales.

(Sometimes a store lags so far behind that we decide to send the mailer early, but that’s usually an anomaly.)

8 Likes
6

Um, well you could try the pre-register done by Appstore and Google Play. It will inform the person who initially register a game as to when the game will be available. Some games that I’ve registered had time limits where in the game was readily available, but discounted for the first 1,000 people, etc. and when that condition is done, the game is set on a normal price range. Maybe you guys can have a chat with them for it? It’s just a thought thou.

This is just a screen shot sample of a game that has a pre-register icon.

1208×525 177 KB

3 Likes
7

I beta test the game and love it so will order it when it comes out as it is now low on caps right now.

1 Like
8

I am paranoid to give my account data so i usually use Google le cards i bough in shops so Preorder for me only works if i could pay with my google wallet anyway i am not friend of preorders

2 Likes
9

I agree that it would be better to allow pre-orders in each store where we sell our games (iOS App Store, Google Play Store, Amazon Appstore for Android, and Steam).

If they all let us offer discounted pre-orders, we’d just do that rather than sell preorders through our website, but most of them only allow preorders for big publishers (not us, yet), and some don’t allow preorders at all.

6 Likes
10

I think pre-orders work better for an existing series, rather than a new game, especially one that has been going on for a while.

Pre-ordering everything you like for bonuses or cheap has kind of fallen in popularity as SuperBunnyhop mentions, games become more Christmas/Holidays Rushed (it’s usually summer or Christmas) so the quality shown at the start of a game may not match near the ending at best (most well-known example is probably Mass Effect 3), and absolutely riddled with bugs and issues at worst (see Aliens vs. Predator, or if you want the oldest example I can think of, the E.T game).

Not like I’m immune either: I was going to buy Pendragon Rising recently but almost everyone was complaining about how the ending felt rushed and how many plot threads were just… left. So I just… didn’t.

2 Likes
11

The only games I’ve ever seen up for pre-order are the beefier ones (in terms of size and required processing power), and since it takes between two to five years for me to switch to a computer that can actually handle such a game I never bothered.

The reason I won’t bother with pre-ordering this one (while it sounds pretty nice going by the description) is because I’ve still got three or four other CS games sitting in my dream library which I haven’t played yet. (Including ZE. Shame on me.)

12

Well so long as this trope doesn’t happen to the male player character I guess it seems like a pretty cool game and we could certainly do with some more lighthearted stuff around here.

As for pre-ordering, I think I’d only do that for sequel games of a series I really like. I mean if @Havenstone and @Cataphrak want to offer me discounts on their sequels I’d take it.
The other reason to pre-order in this digital age is, like some other posters have already said, if I really wanted to get a big game on launch day and pre-ordering also lets me pre-load it (usually everything but the .exe and some config files).
For Cog’s pre-loading hardly seems useful.

13

Oh, contraire! Think of the good if the option was given to closeted or unaware trans people! A gender identity experimental journey, where, after coming out of the magical woods, stuff may or may not have changed! Wowza!

2 Likes
14

Ugh, I really loathe that trope, particularly in how unequally fiction applies it, if a woman changes to a man it’s always temporary but for a poor guy changed into a girl it’s always a one way street.
I don’t begrudge people a gender change, but I rather think my mc is male, feels male and wants to stay that way.
Forcing gender changes on people without their consent is a form of torture that may well be worse than death.

At least in the previous WIP to touch upon this theme, Switch, the author assured me that any true gender change, beyond the crossdressing, would always be completely voluntary.
If it isn’t here I probably won’t buy it, no matter how much I like the writing and the premise.

2 Likes
15

Well i beta role playing the game and I felt that it have sense and it is not gender aggressive it is just a typical figure in fairy tale you hide in other gender disguise. The story is sweet and light so I really think is not issues about that.

4 Likes
16

So no forced gender changes that stick with you after the end, just crossdressing? Then it’s fine with me, thanks Mara.

1 Like
17

I’m not saying forced gender changes, I’m saying it could give you the option!

18

Oh, as long as the player character can refuse, which mine obviously will, I’m fine with it.

3 Likes
19

I don’t think CoG would approve a story that forced that on you … and knowing two of the testers @poison_mara and @Lordirish … they both would have raised high hell over that - and both have endorsed the story…

Imagine Mara … she’d have at least 10 posts and emails all in caps so the author would realize the mistake.

10 Likes
20

I will if this were a wip in a cog nobody listen or at least you never have a reply. I had some issues about being forced to marry a very ugly horrible old man in some endings but all is okay now and fixed . I think is perfect for everyone. And the humor and the Monty pitton drama is amazing. In fact there is a scene than deserve a ten out of ten. I t makes me laughing enough to drop my coke over the floor. So far this has been one of best light humor Cogs ever!

9 Likes