Shaping Choices With You, Our Players

Hello! My name is Brian and I’m the Head of Studios at Series Entertainment.

I’ve been following your feedback for Choices on Reddit, Instagram, Meta, and more. And I felt it was time for us to break our silence since our acquisition of Pixelberry last year. An acquisition that was just as groundbreaking for the Choices team as it was for Series Entertainment.

The Choices team is still, by and large, here, and wonderful to work with — we’ve added writers, artists, engineers and producers to the mix, and we’ve also surged the team to help bolster the tools the team has to make stories with — there’s a lot of work that goes into making great stories, and we’ve taken what’s worked with XO Games to help lighten the load for story producers at Pixelberry.

There are a few reasons for this: 1) We believe that Choices has an audience that wants more Choices content and we want to deliver more of it and 2) The Choices team was overly lean (due to a prior layoff) when we acquired Pixelberry; many Choices team members were very extremely fatigued after a year of trying to keep the machine going without sufficient support.

Something that probably hasn’t been discussed much, is that the original Choices was built on a tech stack that was very hard to build on top of.

This was known for years but never satisfactorily addressed (partly because it’s really hard to address).

That means for years, Choices could never build the types of features or experiences that allow the players to more deeply enjoy the universes the Choices team has brought to life.

The community has been pained by this for years, and the team has had little ability to address this community want.

We are working hard to address these pain points to provide a Choices experience that the community deserves. There is good news on this front, which we can reveal in the coming months.

This brings me to the Thoren Bradley story, which continues to be a heated topic for many. Thoren has been a wonderful partner, and we truly enjoyed bringing Into the Woods to life.

If you don’t like that we brought Thoren to the app, blame me. Even if you don’t love the story or the IP, we wanted to push ourselves to experiment with content (Endless Summer, after all, was an experiment, too). We also hope there is room for those who do enjoy the Thoren storyline to continue enjoying it.

It is hard to be perfect. We are writing, building, and growing together.

Thanks for playing, and thanks for reading, too.

We’ll be in touch.

—Brian