[penguin16ej]

Reposting this from reddit as it has now been taken down. If you have been wondering about the downfall of choices here’s some info for you!

Hi all! I’m sure y’all have been confused by the direction Choices has taken lately. run.tv slop products, such as Hero: Homecoming and It Lives Within (no, not the fan project – side note, don’t forget there’s an Obsidian Cut in the work), or the Queen B merge game that still feels like a fever dream. Well, we have Choices insider info! Not the monthly newsletters. Actual tea. Buckle up, it’s crazy! or at least was at the helm of, which is run.tv’s predecessor.

1. Layoffs, run.tv slop, reduced daily ads, no more rewards from replaying books, the shift in focus from “original” stories to romance/booktok popular genres, shortened books with only like 4-8 chapters – we can all thank the evil villain who will not be named here, as it might be considered doxing. But, cough, they are listed on the choices fandom staff page. And unfortunately, many of the things you guys blame Series for… is actually the work of a PB staff. (Other hints: not a writer, not an artist).

2. Allegedly, evil Villain is the one responsible for the mass layoffs in March. Allegedly, it’s for power-tripping reasons. Allegedly (I will use this word a lot). Evil Villain worked at Pixelberry for a while, felt like an outsider while the other PB staff got along very closely, and left years ago to create the predecessor of the shitty slop app we all know as run.tv. Not sure when they were brought back to Choices, but they allegedly wouldn’t stop name-dropping Choices while trying to shill their AI slop apps. Anyway, the current parent company acquired Choices, and Evil Villain impressed the company with their shitty AI slop and how you can create a lot of video assets in a short period of time (for more info, since they did a blog post lowkey bragging about this tool: https://blog.comfy.org/p/cause-study-how-series-entertainment). Since the AI parent company is impressed by Evil Villain’s data/proof on generating soooooo much output (because quantity over quality, am I right?), they put them in charge, and Evil Villain becomes a #Soap Opera Villain by pulling a #power move and firing 99% of the Choices staff (yes, that’s right) in March.. In March, only [insert a prime number you can count on one hand] staff members remained. Allegedly. Evil Villain fired many of those people because they were bitter that they felt like an outsider when they worked for Choices in the past. The remaining writers (up until at least one got fired right before July 4th and wrote a farewell comment on the official server this Monday, July 6th) were moved to run.tv, because run.tv was the Evil Villain’s brain child and they convinced the parent company that run.tv would be the future.

3. On, yeah, Hero: Homecoming episodes 1-10 or whatever that got released right when it dropped were “written”/produced by the Evil Villain. They got butthurt by all the negative comments (on Reddit, I’m presuming, since Evil Villain was also butthurt by the run.tv slop flair lmao), so they allegedly forced one of the remaining writers to write the rest of it.

4. It Lives Within plagiarism rumors are… Well, let’s just say… a certain Evil Villain thought the fan project folks should be flattered. 5. Anyway… yeah, Evil Villain did not plan for more books to be written. Since, you know, 99% of the staff was fired. (It’s likely the reason why Scream for Me was cut short). They really wanted to funnel Choices fans to run.tv lmao

6. Evil Villain didn’t care about the backlash (prior to Hero: Homecoming coming out). Bestie was living in delulu land and believed that “there’s always gonna be a hater,” so it was just white noise to them. Evil Villain was convinced there was gonna be an audience/silent fans who’ll embrace run.tv and AI. They didn’t give a shit about Choices fans and what the fandom wanted (yet they kept using Choices books to try and funnel the readers??? Make it make sense). Also, Evil Villain didn’t want to mention AI usage for Hero: Homecoming and the It Lives Within knockoff because “fans might not give it a chance”. Bestie, please. The parent company is an AI company. As long as money was coming in from somewhere, that was the most important thing. And surely they could somehow profit from all those AI videos on run.tv because there are a lot of them. 7. Anyway, it looks like run.tv is not doing so hot. It’s likely dying, lol (was it ever doing well to begin with?), hence the Scream for Me part 2 drop and the sudden “we’re actually going to produce more books” angle when they stayed silent for months while fans were wondering what was going to happen after the March layoffs. (No, the app isn’t going to shut down. It’s the only thing making the current parent company money. But they originally (at least around April) didn’t plan on new books past August, which they likely didn’t want to reveal and piss off the already pissed-off fans).

8. Also, the Evil Villain hate-stalks Spellfyre because they have beef (or history) with one of the founders. Lol. Allegedly. So check out Spellfyre <3 (Also check out Rogue Wombat, since it’s founded by a writer who got laid off during Evil Villain’s allegedly vindictive firing spree). 9. Allegedly, Evil Villain convinced the parent company that they have to “kill” Choices in order for run.tv to succeed. Fans would otherwise cling to the app

1. Side note: the parent company did consider making a “Choices 2.0” app because they codebase they use is indeed outdated. The vague blog statement they released isn’t wrong (https://www.pixelberrystudios.com/blog/2026/4/15/ef5sny7sjvbe68wd46qr3iowc0xf2z). The Reddit mod team is aware that Choices uses Cocos, which hasn’t been updated since November 2019. Cocos was heavily used in the 2010s, as it’s open-source and provides a cross-platform 2D engine for any individual or indie companies (or even big companies) to take a stab at making mobile apps, 2d games, etc. But again, it hasn’t been updated since 2019. And the current parent company considered migrating stories to a new app, but it’d cost too much $$$$$ and time, and they realized fans would not give up on their beloved series/books/characters, so they axed Choices 2.0. (Yeah, they’re seeking alternative apps/ventures/ideas because this app is truly using a hella outdated platform, and as the years go on, it’s gonna be harder and harder to find a person who has background knowledge in an app that hasn’t been updated in ~7 years to maintain it lol)

10. Anyway, run.tv was supposed to be the future. Choices fans should have gone there. The numerous mpreg videos (and boy, are there a lot of them) on there (at least during Hero: Homecoming’s initial release. I haven’t looked at the slop app since the day they desecrated the series) were because Evil Villain is a fan (citations needed) or they’re convinced mpreg is a very, very, very, very popular genre. Allegedly. 11. Also, Evil Villain considered deceiving fans at one point and telling them that the original writers of Hero worked on Hero: Homecoming. Allegedly.

12. Also, allegedly they’ve been watching Reddit (again, happy to hear that the run.tv slop flair pisses you off, Evil Villain lmao) because of how strong the backlash has been against Hero: Homecoming, etc, which is why the mod team has been subtly or unsubtly encouraging people to be vocal about their opinions since April lol. This is the only platform they have zero control over. It’s also the biggest fan group (63.9k members!!!). So the backlash here is the most visible (and widespread) lol. This isn’t Discord where they can threaten people with bans for expressing their dislike of AI or run.tv. The rampage made them realize they need to do whatever they can to retain Choices fans (because y’all were canceling your Vip subscriptions and deleting the app, and encouraging everyone else to do so lol)! 13. Evil Villain’s goal in May was to have the official Discord stop being so negative about AI btw, and tasked a person with like a few weeks to make it embrace run.tv. Anyway, there seems to be a new person in that position I will not name (but if you’re a member of the server, you’ll know), so god speed to them because the server has been open to the public since November and they’re now the third person to be handed that role.

14. Evil Villain is delulu. They cannot accept the blame that all of the backlash (run.tv, hero: homecoming, it lives within) is all their doing. Why is the parent company trusting them? No idea. Seniority. I guess. The idea that 10,000 sixty-second videos can easily be generated with Ai, which somehow means profit? 15. Oh! And Evil Villain the folks at the parent company truly didn’t think the anti-AI sentiment within the Choices fandom would be that strong. They really miscalculated, and you guys are really throwing a wrench in their “funnel all Choices fans to run.tv so we can kill this app and profit off of them somehow paying for their run.tv content” plan. The faster run.tv dies, the faster they’re going to scramble to find ways to keep y’all from fleeing because Choices is their only moneymaker lol. (And when the parent company acquired Choices, they actually didn’t plan to turn it into an AI slop format or push AI slop videos on the fans.. It’s really just the Cocos platform not being updated and them unable to find resources/folks who are familiar with it to keep the app running that they started looking for alternative ways to make money.) 16. Anyway, the return to the interactive fiction format is definitely them scrambling to retain Choices fans (Scream for Me getting rightfully continued, Loki getting more chapters than originally announced on an Insiders newsletter) but who knows how long that’ll go on for since, again, they fired most (all?) of their remaining Choices staff right before the 4th of July. 17. Oh, and run.tv is pretty much Evil Villain’s baby. Allegedly, LoreSpark was one of the apps they created, or at east was at the helm of, which is run.tv’s predecessor.

Yeah, I’m sure this was a lot. And very vague at times. Or maybe it wasn’t. It’s basically three months’ worth of insider tea condensed into one post. I will not name names as it’s against Reddit’s TOS.

TLDR: there’s one person to blame for the downfall of Choices, lol. The 100 ads rewards being taken from the fans? Their idea. The rewards from replays being removed? Their idea. The shift to very short books? Their idea. run.tv AI slop? Their idea. (Their baby, actually). Layoffs? Them (for petty, vindictive reasons). The current parent company pretty much is backing them up and their ideas because they once upon a time demonstrated an AI tool that shows how you can mass-produce 10,000 60-sec videos, and lol they’re scrambling to retain Choices fans now because they were truly delulu and believed readers would embrace AI videos with open arms so they could kill this app.

RUN.tv — The TikTok Alternative for AI Video Creators

Create AI videos and earn more per view than TikTok or YouTube Shorts. Built-in AI tools for scenes, characters, voice, and music. The video

— Pixelberry Studios

You've had questions this week about the future of Choices and it's time to tell you a little more about where things stand. The team change

[itlivesproject]

Hello everyone, mod win here.

A couple days ago, I made a post addressing Pixelberry/Series Entertainment's "It Lives Within." At the time, I wasn't aware of the story, I only knew that the name was the same. Since then, I saw many people accusing it of plagiarizing our game. I decided to look into it more, and after having watched all the episodes on YouTube, the claims of plagiarism unfortunately seem to be valid. As such, I'd like to further address this situation, and provide a list of stolen ideas and art with screenshot proofs and explanations.

A few years ago, I had a video call with one of the original writers for the It Lives Series. He no longer works for Pixelberry, and did not work with them at the time of the video call. Though I knew nothing about their original plans for the game before starting this project (including that they also intended to name the game "It Lives Within"), he told me their plans on that call. It was going to be a survivor-type cave crawl story with giant bug-inspired and creepy crawler monster enemies, where you play as a new character who is attacked by these creatures while camping and separated from their friends. From my understanding, Connor and his crew would be sort of like Sam and Dean from SPN, acting as these experienced "hunters" who help protect them.

That is not what the story of what Choices "It Lives Within" was. At all.

This means that the AI """writers""" at Series Entertainment/PB were not creating this story based on the original writers’ plans. They made their story idea later - after ILW was completed in its entirety. Therefore, it's reasonable to follow that unlike the title, these similarities are not coincidence. Though even then, the title It Lives Within had to do with the cave setting and going literally into the earth, while the AI version has nothing to do with caves. So the reasoning for the title is not the same as the reasoning for their original title.

With all this in mind, let’s go over the similarities between our game and the Choices It Lives Within AI show. I am going to be putting it beneath a read more, in case there are people who are interested in playing ILW and don’t want to get it spoiled.

Major things they stole:

Their villain, Silas, is Matthias. Literally, that's it. He's Matthias.

Silas is an immortal man who's been alive for almost 200 years and was a member of the Westchester cult, where he knew Cora. Matthias is an immortal man who's been alive 200+ years and was a member of the Westchester cult, where he knew Cora. Silas wants to sacrifice redfield Noah due to his connection to the Power as part of a complicated ritual he's put together in order to... I'm not quite sure what, exactly, as the story was a bit hard to follow. Matthias wants to sacrifice Rowan, due to their connection to the Power, as part of a complicated ritual he's put together in order to gain more power and freedom and heal the corrupted Power. Silas thinks he’s all manipulative and the main crew states that "He’s getting us to do his work for him!” Matthias thinks he's all manipulative, and gloats about being a "puppet master" and getting people to do his work for him.

And then there's his appearance. That's literally the same hairstyle - even has the part on the same side and the same curly swoops. He's the same age. Same race. Literally, just like Connor in their story is a recognizable AI-version of his in-game sprite, that's what Silas looks like to Matthias. All he's missing is the beard.

The gang's base of operations is Cora’s cabin

This one is interesting. It's such a tiny detail, and I'd grown so used to the cabin being their safe place that when Connor was like "We need to get back to the cabin" it literally took me a moment to realize - wait. They had nothing to do with that cabin in the original series. Using that as a home base was literally our idea, an It Lives Within original.

The main enemies are mind controlled townspeople working for Silas

Instead of following the precedent of the previous games and having the enemies be Power-twisted animal monsters, they decided to make their enemies humans that are mind-controlled into zombie-like beings with that attack the gang in hordes. This is a rip-off of It Lives Within's horrors, which are power-corrupted townsfolk that Matthias takes advantage of to oppose the main crew. And on top of that, they copied the carnival scene where Harper drives through a horde of horrors, including a scene where Devon drives through a horde of mind-controlled/zombified townsfolk.

Noah and Devon's relationship

Their relationship in this '"TV show" has suspicious similarities to their friendship/romance routes in ILW. They made Devon be redfield Noah's anchor to reality, and even had Devon use memories to help ground Noah, which we showed in the cabin scene where Devon and Noah play baseball together. And I know there were Noah x Devon shippers outside of me before ILW released, but it was never PB's plan to canonize them. So the fact that they are seemingly changing course to canonize them after they grew so popular in the fan version feels a bit too coincidental.

Scraping fan art for their AI animation frames

But what's even more egregious is that they have even stooped to scraping from fan artists, who have nowhere near the same following or exposure as our project does. Seriously, what are the odds that the MC they choose to use matches this artist's MC's race, gender, hair, and outfit exactly, that they used Noah's old outfit, that they are literally positioned on the same sides of the image? It's blatant plagiarism, and it's despicable. @errajay I'm so sorry they did this.

These are the biggest similarities, but considering that it was only like 15 minutes of content, that means that a high percentage of the story was stolen. Sure, the exact details of "Silas's" plan are different (he's like a horcrux for the "entity" aka power and he was split into 43 parts and Noah's one of his parts and he needs to kill him to get it back and be free or something) it's the same concept: immortal man who's trapped making a complicated ritual requiring sacrifice while manipulating people to get everything into place.

If you want to see for yourselves, please find it on YouTube. Do not support them with clicks or traffic on their app. Thank you! Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering, no AI was used in the drafting of this post 💖

[lostworldss]

he is so endearing to me <3

[lostworldss]

hero homecoming is genuinely an evil product. like wdym you’re going to make a sequel to an customizable interactive fiction story but it’s only with the MC as a white straight female with the default name and the romance is forced to be locked to only one of the characters (probably the white male option), if it’s even there at all. there’s absolutely no care or consideration for any player who played any different than that.

don’t even get me started on how the original canon MC on the cover of book 1 is NOT white and now she suddenly is for book 2 and they’re promoting it with “she’s back better than before” type messaging.

and of course, the giant ugly elephant in the room of being the soulless AI slop. taking a perfectly fine script that was created by the original writers years ago with deliberate care and thought, and churning it through ChatGPT so that it can become watered down one minute episodes of brainrot. every aspect of it looks horrible: the art, the voices, the dialogue, no consistency in the plot, faces, or art style to be found anywhere.

the QA team approving this (also AI):

i would say i’m surprised this was even released, with how godawful it is. but i’m going to be honest, i don’t think they even care. this literally took zero effort or money to make, nostalgia bait seems to be the new meta, the script has been sitting in a dusty closet for years, why not make a quick cash grab at practically no cost.

[lostworldss]

learning more about the hero sequel through reddit and discord

[lostworldss]

huh, wonder what that logo is for…

and yeah…these posts are basically all AI video shorts. and would you look at that, this app is owned by Series Entertainment too

hero i’m so sorry for what they’re about to do to you…

i’m wondering if this is what they were talking about with the “new immersive” experience they were teasing in their latest ominious choices insiders post

[choices-binglebonkus]

If they keep giving me reasons to recycle this meme, of course I’m going to keep recycling it.

[lostworldss]

hero book 2 but it’s AI slop

[choices-binglebonkus]

If this is Hero vol 2, PUT IT BACK.

[lostworldss]

Did you try Spellfyre? The game by ex Choices employees?

I have not. I’ve been meaning to try it when I get some time. If I’m being honest, the LIs don’t really intrigue me too much from what I’ve seen, but i’ll give it a shot and see. I’m interested to see how it differs from the Elementalists and other Choices games.

[te3-project]

It's finally here! We're so glad to present to you our book cover ✨

More than 3 years (!) in the making with all the reworks it went through, but we're so happy to finally share it with you all! 🎨 Done with Clip Studio Paint, part drawing and part collage. To continue with the previous Choices official book covers, we chose to represent hispanic F!MC, hispanic F!Atlas and F!Saffron. We really hope you'll like it as much as we do 🩵 Feel free to share and comment ✨

[lostworldss]

missing hero again

[lostworldss]

One of Atlas’s biggest fears being MC dying and one of MC’s biggest fears being Atlas wishing she was dead

[lostworldss]

i’m missing blades of light and shadow so bad rn

[the-unconquered-queen]

Choices on why they do single-LI books even though they know (they outright acknowledge) that players want choices (even though they act like we demand “LOTS” of LIs as if we constantly expect them to give us 6+ LIs instead of, like, 2-4 sometimes):

I get what you’re saying, but,,, that’s the point. That an LIs’ romancers get scenes that non-romancers don’t and that non-romancers don’t get scenes for LIs they’re not that interested in is the point.

I’m not trying to diminish the work that the writers put in, but you can’t write for the choose-your-own-whatever genre and get frustrated that every player isn’t seeing every single line of dialogue or every last scene. The entire nature of the genre is that you only get the path you go down, and if you did such a good job that the writing is so compelling or appealing, the player might just be drawn to replay over and over again to get every last scene anyway. If you find that you’re forcing your readers down a certain path so none of your writing goes unappreciated, you just wanna write regular stories and should ditch the pretense of choice, and rename the app while you’re at it.

[te3-project]

The Elementalists 3 Project demo is online!

Click here to download it

You can play on any Android phones or tablets, and on any computer (PC, Linux, iMac). iOS users on iPhone or iPad : sorry we couldn't make it work 😔 Packaging for IOS implies some cost that we cant afford.

We would LOVE to read and see your reactions: feel free to post about your play and take as many screenshots as you want!

Use the tag #te3-project so we can find your posts easily.

We recommend playing the official Book 1, Book 2 and Winter's Past Book first as our book immediately follow and continue those story.

------------------------------

Disclaimer: This is a demo, which means there may be bugs, grammatical or spelling mistakes, and a few changes with the final and finished version.

If you have any suggestions, if you spot any bugs or mistake, please let us know through here on Tumblr or on Reddit!

How to play the demo?

Follow the link to itch.io. Download the version that fit your device.

You may get a security warning for virus or unsafe file: please ignore it and proceed with the downloading and installing.

Once installed, click on the app icon and enjoy your play!

[lostworldss]

alexeva being my only choices ship where i’ve lost will always haunt me

“all this money can’t buy me a time machine” FUCKKKKKKK