So I’ve been reading the new featured story, Love Life. I’m not going to dwell on that fact that it’s another badly paced farce packed with first-world problems and bad characters who don’t deserve to be romance options. That’s something we can debate about another time.
The problem I have is the sheer VOLUME and PRICE of gem choices in this story. I decided to choose a gem choice on all of the choices as a little experiment. I started with over 150 and ended up not being able to use a gem choice at the end. That means the story is costing me over £5 for 3 chapters!
I have nothing wrong with a good, well-placed gem choice in each episode. I’d never add them I to my story, as I think they’re exploitative, but I understand why Episode would want to use them on FEATURED stories. What I have a problem with is the idea of 4+ choices in one chapter! You can’t do anything interesting in this story without paying for it and it’s absolutely disgusting. Where is Episode’s integrity?!
It cost me as much to use gem choices in this story as it would to buy a book… or two ebooks on Amazon! I could have bought a whole meal at McDonald’s. Two coffees. For 3 chapters. If this doesn’t change soon, I think a boycott might be in order. And I know many people who feel the same way.
So this is me saying, Episode: change the price of gem choices, change the number of gem choices needed in your featured story, or risk losing a lot of your dedicated readers, writers and reputation.
Please tell me how much 150 gems costs in your country and what you could buy with that! I’d be very interested to hear!
I’m a fairly popular writer in this app. I haven’t qualified for writers payments, but I could have if I had implemented gem choices. Do you know why I decided not to? I’m on here to create ART. If I make money out of popularity and not exploitation, I’m happy. But I will continue writing whether I’m broke or not. I will continue giving FREE tips and tricks because I care about the ART.
I agree! EPISODE is exploiting readers by making them pay SO much money to just get the cute outfit or the steamy kiss. I just don’t like that they’re making us pay so much! I’m okay with 1 gem choice 2 at most but 4+!? I have spent money on gems before but if the price and frequency of gem choices are at this rate I doubt I will ever invest in them again.
I agree with you.
I haven’t read the new featured story and I don’t intend to - simply because I’ve already seen so many people complain about the way too expensive gem choices.
I’m just checking out the gem prizes here in my country right now and it is so expensive, oh my god. Now, there’s no package with 150 to buy as far as I can see but 125 gems cost £10/5€/14$ AND I AM SHOCKED.
With this amount of money, I could actually buy a piece of clothing or I could buy two bus tickets (which are actually pretty expensive) and still have money left. With the right thinking, I could have bought groceries enough to make a two-day meal to my family of four. I could have bought TWO drinks at a bar past midnight (it’s always twice the price after midnight here, I don’t know of that’s the case elsewhere).
I just checked and it costs me $12.86(AUD) for 125 gems but I currently live in Mexico. That’s… a LOT of tacos lol. It’s nearly 200 pesos which could buy two full meals somewhere including drinks and soups and we’d still have change left over.
I agree with you about the new story. There were three gem choices in the first episode and each one was 20 gems. Episodes two and three possibly had more choices. I don’t mind gem choices in general but this was overkill. Normally I ignore gem choices but this really put me off reading the story. You’re almost made to feel like you can’t enjoy the story if you don’t have gems.
I don’t have an issue with featured stories having gem choices (or user stories either actually) but usually there’ll be two per story- one outfit and one decision- that don’t seem to make any major impact on the story (I rarely spend gems and I usually just ignore the gem choices). This story had more than that and it was worded in such a way that you felt like you were missing out and couldn’t enjoy the story properly if you didn’t spend gems.
I stopped reading some of the Choices stories for the same reason- I felt like I there were some stories that I couldn’t get into and enjoy properly if I didn’t spend money.
They could have used the point system in this story. Build up your relationship with the LI’s/roommates through free choices which can allow you to choose special options OR buy those options if you don’t have enough points.
Almost makes you feel that you need to pay for friendship/love
