The Axis of Evil

This is the best game that has ever existed, or will ever exist.

Hyperbole aside, damn did this thing hit me when I needed it, well done poncle. I've got SO MUCH going on right now my brain is fried by nightfall and I needed a pick-up-and-go game that I could vibe with that still had some strat meat and this thing fits the bill.

Vampire Crawlers is a roguelike deckbuilder from the team behind the much beloved Vampire Survivors bullet heaven, or horde survivor, or OG Survivors-like, or whatever you wanna call it.

Deckbuilding is my favorite card game mechanic and I've played quite a few of these. Crawlers takes the iconography, hyperkinetic bling, combo-based strategy, and achievement storm that is VS and slams it into a deckbuilder fighting mechanic with dungeon crawler map navigation. The game is fun and fast-paced, and if you're familiar with VS, the icons and combos will click early-on. Evolutions create powerful new cards, and chaining combos for damage boosts is ridiculously satisfying. Hitting treasure chests is rewarding, bashing candlesticks and pillars for coins is fun, and the ability to apply gems to cards to upgrade them in a variety of ways is frankly brilliant.

Normally in these types of games, you upgrade a card to a better card. Here the player is given an option of gems that can be "hammered" into gem slots available on each card, meaning you could have a handful of holy bible starter cards with no two being quite the same. I have not seen this in a deckbuilder before, and letting players build their own cards as well as their own decks is A+. Once you start getting the hang of different strategies, every card has the potential to be a good card, and every gem has potential relative to your current run. "All power ups are good power ups" was one of the big boons of VS, and it's lovely to see the sentiment carried over here.

Deckbuilder is a saturated genre and I gotta give the devs credit for making this game feel like a unique play experience. I have never played a game quite like this. I love VS, and I appreciate those sweet vibes are getting overlaid, but lads there's genuinely a lot to love here. From the old-school dungeon crawler graphics and retro dialogue sfx to the unlockable QOL enhancements and the knowledge this here is a poncle game so you're gonna have like 30 characters to play, it's a banger all around.

x-posted from .club ( Read more... )

Some big anti-slop initiatives have come down the pipeline in recent days, though but some of these changes may be related to other things... ($)

Barnes & Noble Press

• No longer allows public domain content, and all such content must be removed immediately. This is great BTW. I never understood why retailers permitted 132543 self-published copies of Edgar Allen Poe stories to be uploaded.
• B&N has also applied a 100 book limit to accounts, saying that if you have over 100 books you need to get in touch with them. This, to me, is less about controlling slop and more about controlling unprofitable slop. But I don't think it's unreasonable to ask someone who has published 100 books on your platform to touch base.

A career author touched base with B&N and they confirmed they value career authors and this restriction is not for people who publish multiple pens over the course of years

Draft 2 Digital

• New accounts now have a $20 USD activation fee
• Accounts that earn less than $100 annually in royalty income (after D2D's cut) must pay a $12 USD maintenance fee. This fee isn't applied to accounts that don't have actively published books, so authors can delist titles to avoid the fee, but if the account goes into the negative and it isn't paid, the account is closed. So delist BEFORE the due date, not after.

Earnings-wise, you'd need to sell around $170 in books generally (you'd have to sell a lot more if you price at 0.99c, hopefully no one is still doing that). These rates are USD across the board, and are therefore more expensive in certain countries than others.

Kevin McLaughlin did a zoom call with D2D and got some interesting insights as to why this was done. D2D says there is a growing retailer, library, and reader backlash to indie books due to the sheer volume of slop, and they consider this an existential threat. So they are framing this as a way to protect indie authors.

Kris told me that some months they decline as much as 70% of the titles uploaded to D2D, which is...a lot! The fallout from this on the retailer and library end has been a steady increase in hostility toward indie authors. Because Apple, Overdrive, B&N, and other D2D partners can't easily tell a indie author from a bookspammer, they have a tendency to tar and feather us all with the same brush. Kris mentioned that libraries have been pushing back hard against indie titles because of the raw quantity of spam content flooding the marketplace.

...Bookspammers have figured out a workaround. If they want to upload fifty books a month, they can open fifty D2D accounts and upload one book per account per month. This keeps the numbers low, so they look like a regular indie, and don't get as much attention paid to them. This has apparently been happening enough that it's reached a crisis point. D2D is adding the $20 fee for new accounts because, coupled with the $12 annual fee, that's enough revenue lost that they believe it will force the bookspammers to leave D2D and try going direct to retailers instead. This protects D2D's reputation, and the reps of authors using their platform for distribution.

Kevin notes retailers may start considering a per title setup fee. Book Vault already does this ($20 per title), evidently to stop this very problem. There's been some talk of asking D2D to work with ALLi to waive fees for members, as they already provide discounts for BookVault and Ingram Spark per-title fees. If you do paper and hardbacks through BV or IS the ALLi membership might already pay for itself.

Personally, I feel like the anti-slop argument is at least partly a smoke screen. Both companies want to get rid of books that don't sell or provide a "bad customer experience" (as the Zon is fond of saying) and make them look bad, and it happens the vast majority of those ARE slop books. Some slop must sell enough to warrant the trouble, or content farms wouldn't be so damned persistent about publishing it.

That being said... a 70% rejection rate is very high, and obviously incredibly time-consuming. Response rates over at D2D Support have been at a crawl for some time now, and I usually wait days if not a full week to get a reply to an email, so I get it. There's some speculation all of these recent changes are because D2D isn't profitable enough. Reducing spam volume helps them regardless, but if they are having money issues and that's a major driver, I would not be surprised if per-title fees become a thing.

What I hope people appreciate is once fees like this are introduced, there's really nowhere to go but up. The problem with fees isn't necessarily the fees themselves, especially in the beginning when they're comparatively low, it's the normalization of the added expenses when the entire point of their distribution model is their cut comes from sales, and they profit if you profit. There are distributors that do charge up-front like PublishDrive but they've got so much bullshit and add-ons IDK what the fuck it actually costs.

Aside, I was checking the D2D royalty rates and I just realized the Kobo+ rate is 51% which explains why I thought I wasn't making any money on my D2D-distributed books there, lmao. If you go direct on Kobo you get 10% more on standard royalties, reimbursement for 49%!!! more of your Kobo+ minutes, and you get access to all the promo stuff. Where's my shrug emoji..... ¯_(ツ)_/¯ There it is.