Episodic game releases - oh lord, here we go again + Dispatch is still genius

I’ve lost count of the number of times devs have come to me citing “episodic” game releases as the answer to all their problems. It isn’t. It still isn’t, despite the well-deserved success of Dispatch, and its clever use of episodic release as a means to build audience and anticipation.

When I was a magazine publisher in the Permian (OK, so late eighties to mid-nineties), Partworks were a popular (if highly risky) money spinner. You basically sold a series of magazines as a collection, the first one of which was often discounted heavily and promoted on TV - “The history of the Spitfire in 50 parts, part one just $1!” and which often built into an overall ‘piece’ by the end - a plastic model plus a series of magazines that became a reference book when put in a binder (an extra purchase).

It was a classic ‘whale’ scenario - by the end, the vast majority of purchasers had given up, but a few would persist to the end, often paying thousands of dollars for what ended up being a plastic model and a cheap-to-print book. For a fraction of the cost you could buy a better model and a proper book about the Spitfire, but that didn’t cross anyone’s mind when they bought the first instalment.

The business model built in the drop-off in interest, the initial marketing cost, the cheap issue 1, and if you were lucky, the first few diminishing issues plus the whales would give you a great profit. Get it wrong, and it was a costly error. Partworks are, to my amazement, still a thing! There are only a handful of specialist Partworks companies left, going after a high-end specialist fan audience.

You have to sit down with a calculator to work out what the model and magazines will cost you (and they make it almost impossible to do this… the 1/43 Skyline GTR collectible at this link worked out at over 1,300 GBP for the set, but that was worked after much head-scratching).

These business models are invidious, and deservedly not as popular as they once were.

The problem is this business model is mostly incompatible with the economics of making games. Getting an expert to write a Partwork is easy - any number of impecunious journalists or academics would line up for a decent cheque to brain dump on a subject they knew well. One human. And the plastic model - the Partworks company knew exactly the likely drop off from issue to issue, so only made enough to cover the predicted demand. The Spitfire’s wing in issue one may have needed a 60,000 unit run, but only (say) 1,000 were manufactured of the tail fin for the last issue.

The problem is - games are not magazines. Yes, you can argue it’s an engine + content, especially for a linear narrative title, but content for part 10 costs much the same as it does for part 2.

When you put out Episode 1 of a game, and you’re expecting consumers to buy Episode 2, it’s effectively saying “buy this unfinished game with only part of the content, then you’re going to have to pay for the next bit as well, assuming we finish it, in several weeks’ or months’ time”.

A better option for consumers is game + DLC - “Buy this game, and if you like it, buy a little bit of extra content in a while (but of course if we don’t make it, you still have the whole game you paid for)” - even then, you are doing super well if 10% of the people who bought the game get the DLC. How many people are going to buy an initial incomplete game, on the promise that it might be finished? Practically no one, especially in these days of game gluts. And of those who do - how many will buy the next episode… 10%? 5%? 1%?

Ah yes, but Dont Nod’s Life Is Strange! It is an outlier, for sure. The game was far from finished when episode 1 was released. Each of the 5 episodes was a new purchase. Episodes were originally planned with a 6-week periodicity, but it took from 30 Jan 2015 to 20 Oct 2015 to squeeze them out, an average of 9 weeks per episode. The schedule was brutal for the team, and 5 episodes means 5 release events with all the QA and production headache that entails.

But it was planned, carefully, and backed by Square Enix. There was an element of “will we make enough money from the early episodes” but the chances were always that the game would be completed, at least after a fashion. For you, dear reader, the chances are - you don’t have a plan, good reasons, and Square Enix. Don’t Nod did. And they knocked the game out of the park.

They released LIS2 as an episodic game as well. The market would be expecting it to be finished and successful, and it was. After handing the LIS strange franchise to another studio, who chose not to release episodically, Don’t Nod made one more episodic game, which was a commercial disaster. They have not done so since.

Well, by the time they hit their stride with The Walking Dead in 2012 (and other titles subsequently), the studio was undeniably doing well. It blazed a trail in many other ways alonside its episodic business model, with its digital distribution chops and attempt to create an industrial scale narrative engine-room, but the proposition grew as tired over time as its overworked, over-stretched staff - and ever-increasing technical debt and competition from the mountain of alternatives didn’t help.

People also forget that although Telltale released epsiodically, players could buy a reasonably priced Season Pass up front for each collection of stories. There was always the promise the entire season would ship, and no one seemed worried it wouldn’t happen.

Telltale eventually went bust (though the company has been controversially resurrected). People often point out it’s not necessarily the model that was broken, but the management / individual games. I think the truth is complicated. An awful lot needs to be aligned to find success with episodic games. Developers have enough to align with a single game, let alone one broken into sections…

Some quick research on Gamediscover.co showed 3x as many titles with episode 1 in the title, as epsiod episode 2; and half again with episode 3. Take games with sexual content out and the number of games that make it as far as episode 3 is less than 5%. Track individual games, and estimated sales, and they always drop sharply from episode 1 to 2, even when the first game scores well.

So - research this even trivially, and episodic doesn’t look like a good plan, especially for small indies.

Persuading a publisher - or if self-publishing, convincing a consumer - that your plan to release an episode, then use the proceeds to fund the next one, is not going to float. Just stop pitching this, please.

Even in TV, while pilot episodes may be used to test the market (and I still remember the X-Files one blowing ‘young me’ away), it’s not a case that individual episodes will be funded one by one - it’s series by series. Once a TV series is greenlit, and the pilot passes muster, then generally a whole season will be made.

Imagine if every TV show was pay-per-episode, and you couldn’t even guarantee the episodes would get finished for a single season. Would you buy that first episode? Nope, nope, treble nope. I know mid-season cancellations do happen to TV shows, but it’s not commonplace. And if it happens, the same channel you’ve already paid for has other content to consume without paying again.

Well, now that’s a different story. Make a game, chop it up into sections, sell people the whole thing in one payment up front, secure in the knowledge every episode is guaranteed to be released, but TEASE the audience by releasing it with the familiar, rapid cadence of streaming TV. That’s a wholly different ballgame.

The thing is, while the plot may be episodic, most narrative games released as whole games in their own right also follow episodes and / or act structures - it’s not the episodic storytelling that’s significant, it’s the use of episodic release as a marketing tool that is at the heart of Dispatch’s success. And, of course, the fact that it gets everything else right at the same time - relatable Superheroes, tick, great production values, tick, flawless narrative design, tick, secure budget and finished game, tick.

Leaving gamers wanting more, week by week, encouraging them to discuss and speculate, turning them into a little flock of unpaid social media marketers - that’s what episodes brought to Dispatch. Hats off to AdHoc Studio. It will be fascinating to see how future games pan out. Will they stay within their universe? Will they take on a different world entirely? Will they tweak the Episodes-As-Marketing formula? I can’t wait to see.

But please - don’t let this inspire a raft of pre-doomed, pay-per-episode, funded-from-last-epsiode pitches that paper over the cracks of half-baked narrative brick walls and fatally flawed go-to-market plans. Don’t waste you own - or anyone else’s - time. That ship never really sailed in the first place, but even if it did - it’s long gone now.