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Feature: The episodic business model and video games

Over the past two months, I’ve been working my way through the seven full seasons of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That’s 145 episodes total. A little over 100 hours of time spent loving and hating the characters who’d entered my dreams (that dream part might just be because of the extreme amount of Buffy I took in in a very short period of time). My point here is that a person can’t help but become attached to characters after spending that much time with them. And when it was finally over, I felt sad. I was certainly happy to have seen the show in its entirety, but at the same time I felt like a part of my life had gone away. I imagine I’ll feel much the same way when Lost ends next year. But I’ve never felt like that after completing a video game.

Video games generally leave me with more of a movie feeling. They might tell a great story and feature characters that I care about, but there’s never really enough time and nuance for me to truly know the characters. And even in the big, 100-hour-plus games I’ve played, character development just seems like an after-thought to filler side-quests. I feel like there has to be something wrong with character development and story-telling in games when one of my most beloved NPCs is a slightly discriminating robot named HK-47.

So here’s where Buffy and games merge. Episodic content. On a theoretical level, episodic content and video games don’t mix well. The vast majority of people, core gamers included, still see interactive entertainment as objective based GAMES that they must conquer. Gamers like to know that victory is within their grasp and that they will be rewarded for their efforts. The episodic business model on the other hand, relies on new stories and character developments extending the life of a series for as long as possible. There are very few shows that start out knowing when the end will come. You can’t beat a show, you simply go along for the ride.

But if we stop to think about it, don’t MMO players already subscribe to a business model with no end in sight? There’s clearly an audience out there that view games as more than a challenge to defeat. In the case of MMO players, they might view games as a vehicle for social experiences, but there’s no reason why games can’t find an audience for character development and story-telling–the past 50 years of television have demonstrated that those people exist. And with the money subscription-based games make, you better believe that publishers want to tap into that crowd.

To get a better idea of just how appealing the episodic business model is to developers, check out what Telltale Games (Sam & Max, Tales of Monkey Island) CEO and co-founder Dan Connors had to say in an interview with GamesIndustry.Biz.

“The steady stream of content is constant lifeblood into the studio. You always have something out, you’re always monetising. You’re realising on your investments quicker, and you’re not investing as much before you start seeing the revenue, so in that sense it’s safer. You’re not putting as much at risk…For us it is about getting to this point where we’re doing an episode every month, or two episodes every month, and they’re generating that kind of launch cash flow for us, and that would be a very safe business model. You monetise before you’re finished with your investment, and you just continue.”

The biggest financial investment with episodic games comes up front when the game engine has to be built, but once that’s out of the way, the only thing that can get in the way of a reliable monthly income is the ability of the writers to craft characters and a world that the player cares about. At Telltale, where they typically have the next episode complete and the one after that in development at the time of any given episode’s release, there’s always money coming in. In traditional game development, publishers front a developer millions of dollars without seeing any returns for two to three years. It’s no wonder why Rockstar is content to pump out new episodes in the Grand Theft Auto IV engine instead of starting GTAV.

So this is clearly a good thing from the development side of things. But what about the consumer? Why would anybody in their right mind want to pay a monthly subscription fee for bite-sized portions of gameplay with no end in sight? Well, just ask yourself why you pay your cable bill. Good television tends to be highly serialized, character-driven drama that keeps the viewer anticipating every new week. It forces us to become invested in the characters and then it pulls our strings like helpless puppets. The fanatical audiences of shows like The X-Files, The Sopranos, and Heroes just prove that we like to spend as much time as we can with interesting characters.

So here’s my proposition for the future of episodic content in video games. Given that Telltale, currently the most veteran episodic developer in the industry, can churn out an episode a month over six months with each episode being approximately three hours long, and they’re already talking about amping up to two episodes a month, I don’t think it’s any stretch of the imagination to see four-hour episodes coming out on a monthly basis. Or if a developer wanted to cater to the casual market, who crave brief game experiences in their busy lives, they could put out hour-long episodes weekly. Either way, over a six month period, the amount of content would add up to that of a season of 24.

And if we look to Telltale’s model of finishing about 8 hours of content at the time of initial release, that would give the developer two intervals in the course of the season to take heed of player feedback and modify characters, story arcs, and missions. In that sense of dynamic story-telling based on viewer feedback, television is already interactive. It only seems like a logical progression for stories in interactive entertainment.

In the six off months of the year, the developer would have a chance to upgrade the game engine, outline the coming season, and design the levels. If Bungie can make Halo 3: ODST in a year, I have every confidence that a veteran episodic developer could keep an on-going series looking up-to-date and fresh for several years. And if the graphics were stylized like those in World of Warcraft, the game-series could run on for a generation without becoming terribly dated.

As for pricing models, the publisher and consumer are afforded a great number of opportunities. A flat $5 monthly subscription would come out to $60 a year, or individual episodes could be offered for sale through services like Steam and Xbox Live Marketplace for a proportional value. And for those without internet connections, seasons could be packaged and sold at retail upon completion. On the more radical front, a developer could adopt TV’s approach and try to finance a series through advertisements. The player doesn’t have to pay anything to play the game, but whenever they reach certain trigger points in an episode, the game goes to commercial. If they wanted the uninterrupted experience, they could pay a premium fee or buy the packaged season, much like the television model today.

Whatever the pricing model, the financial risks of development are greatly reduced and the longer the series goes on, the more profits it rakes in. A good series could make $300 off of a consumer over the course of five seasons. With traditional game development, no more than two separate games from a given developer could be put out over those five years (Madden is the exception of course), meaning a potential for only $120 off a single consumer. Episodic content minimizes risk and maximizes reward for developers, which in turn presents the opportunity for more unorthodox and daring games for the consumers. Also benefiting the consumer is the gradual improvement of a series or even a single season based on player feedback. And most of all, players are treated to characters they’ll come to know and love, which is more than can be said for most games today.

In my mind, the episodic business model makes perfect sense for all parties involved. I think we need look no further than the Fallout 3 DLC to realize the potential of reliable, monthly content. My only doubts lie in the ability of video game writers to script a series with characters I’d care enough about to continue playing. In the words of Dan Connors, “No matter what the gameplay mechanic (is), 32 times in you’re not going to want to do it again. I think in building an episodic television model for games, yes – storytelling becomes an important focus for us.”

So I believe it’s important that episodic games balance fun gameplay with intriguing story elements while maintaining the “game” part of video game. Perhaps an RPG developer such as Bethesda or a company who has experience with story-driven shooters, like Valve for instance, would be ideal to blaze this trail. Whoever it is, I’m just fascinated by the idea a of serialized, cliff-hanger endings, dynamically adapting seasons, make-me-feel-sad-when-it’s-over kind of story-telling in video games.

Author: Cody

Tags: buffy the vampire slayer, dlc, episodic content, fallout 3, feature, grand theft auto iv, half life 2: episode 3, halo 3: odst, sam & max, tales of monkey island, telltale games