For publishers looking to diversify their ebook sales channels, here’s an idea: selling ebooks through in-game stores. Alpenwolf, a small, international game-development firm is going to test this idea with a game it releases in November this year, First Sword. The game is a “commentary-based management game,” according to one of its developers, Theo Beale, who is also an author, musician, former game reviewer and game journalist.

This seems as good a time as any to announce the forthcoming release of First Sword, the first combat management game. Digital Book World was particularly interested in one of the innovations the game is introducing:I find it rather amusing that despite all of the frequent efforts to "out" me, no one ever figured out one of my alternate pseudonyms despite my use of it in one of the game industry's leading publications for my monthly column there. I mean, surely you never imagined that Vox Day would be the only one I use.... Anyhow, for those who are interested, here is another screen shot of First Sword in action.This is a pre-Alpha screenshot of a combat between two equally matched fighters. There are about 5,000 messages in the commentary system, more than 10x more than the leading game of this type, which allows for a wide variety of complicated narratives in describing the various arena battles. In this particular screenshot, the stipex, Honorius, has just managed to score a reasonably damaging hit on Trebonius, the hoplomachus.First Sword is a free-to-play game available for Android, iOS, Blackberry, Facebook, and web-based browser in November, 2013. In directly related news, I will soon be posting a call for authors interested in selling ebooks of all lengths through the in-game retail medium described in the linked article.