Here is a quick thought I had recently. Fable II was just released in episodes on XBLA. Also, Episodic Gaming has been discussed in one of the recent Brainy Gamer podcasts. The idea is: instead of releasing one big, long, expensive game, you chop it up into small pieces and release it cheaper and individually. And you always produce the next episode while the previous one is being distributed. If a series turns not to be popular you cancel the development of further episodes, limiting the financial risk. Basically, you adopt the model of TV series.

Here are some problems with that I haven’t really heard being discussed anywhere else:

• Unlike TV production, game production doesn’t scale down so well. There is a tremendous amount of work to do in order to establish the base technology for a game to work at all. Compared to that, sheer content production is cheaper. Because of that, the game model works THE OTHER way around: the up-front costs are so high that you NEED to produce a huge full-size game and even a bigger sequel before the initial investment starts to pay off. If you release the game in smaller episodes, the pilot episode would end up costing almost as much as the entire season.

• The consumer behavior actually doesn’t work so well for an episodic model. Right now, most gamers have huge backlogs. Gamers tend to buy games and don’t even open them. Finishing a game just takes a lot of time and rarely anybody has that time. If games were released episodically, gamers would probably just buy the pilots and the first few episodes. The latter episodes would sell much worse. In all, each gamer would end up spending less on each game on average. There is no reason to believe that games would sell more in total to offset that loss. For adult players, money is not the limiting factor – time is.

• One last thing I noticed while working on my current game. Releasing games in episodes heavily limits the kind of cohesiveness of the world you create. So for example, it would be very difficult to release something like Metroid episodically. You could package one part of the huge world into an episode. But one great feature of Metroid is re-visiting older parts of the world with new skills to open previously closed passages. In order to release Metroid episodically you would need to design and anticipate every ability the player would have at the end of the game already in the pilot episode. Again, this comes back to the first argument: you would need to design and develop the entire season already before the pilot episode, making the pilot almost as expensive as a full-size game.

Am I missing something? What do you think? Have you tried the episodic Fable II? What did you think?

I have been mean to Daniel Cook in the past (oh yeah, it goes way back doesn’t it). It was probably mostly undeserved, seeing how how he was one of the inspirations for this blog in the first place. It feels especially awkward when he releases something as cool as “Fishing Girl” (together with Eric Woroshow).

If you follow his Blog it might remember you of one of his challenges. “Fishing Girl” is just that. Polished to the max. It’s 10 Minutes of very carefully designed, very well-crafted game design with very simple goals. It has almost one-button controls. It has some mechanics that allow for surprising depth. It has a cute surprise ending (which they give away in the Trailer! Thank god I haven’t seen it before I played it! Don’t look!) and it costs only 1$ (80 MS Points) on XBLA Indie Games. If you have an Xbox, what are you waiting for?!

I really love the idea of having a very short, simple experience and just putting all the effort into making sure it works perfectly. It’s a very refreshing approach in a world where “20h+ of Gameplay” is considered a good thing. In the end if I had to come up with a critique I would maybe ask for more meaning, more thematic depth. Right now it’s a little superficial cuteness. But I won’t. Ask me again after they released their 5th game. Because it would make me very happy if they would.

Thank you Daniel! Thank you Eric!

A post a day keeps the… something away. I don’t care, ok? It’s just a good idea in general.

We were recently at GameCom where I had the opportunity to check out Scribblenauts. And check out I did. I played it basically at least once every day I was there. It was an awesome booth and it is an awesome game. Will pick it up on release.

I made a post on the GameSpot forums and on Twitter to collect ideas of things to try out in this game. People sent in some cool suggestions. I made photos and videos. In case you missed those, here they are:

Also, check out my Flickr album with a ton of GamesCom and Scribblenauts photos!