another thing: microsales and episodic content seems to work perfect for the asian rpg-alike games. but i do beliebe this is simply because there are enough (teen?) players that have all three necessary factors time and stubborn interesst into only one game _and_ money (prepaid cards everywhere).

TO tom h.

i’m well aware of the 3:1 (and up for todays blockbusters) ratio of content to programming/development people. and you are pretty close to call that number as an example why cutting down cost (by less content for the first episode(s)) should be possible. but i say it isn’t.

it isn’t because exactly as krystian pointed out in his initial post, if you develop the game with 1/3 of the cost (going down from 5:1 teams to 1:1 teams) and sell it with 1/3 of the price, there will be a huge amount of people that TRULY like the game but still will not be able (time!) to buy the rest. for example final fantasy: there is a huge adult “fanbase” where my guts are telling me that about 50% of the people are not playing through the “80h+” games square enix is developing for the teens that are very hatefull against every console rpg that delivers LESS than 30+ hours and still very sad for the games with less than 60+ hours.

of couse many people are buying every gta add-on, but still there is a huge drop in the add-on sales numbers, wich i do not expact to be only based on customers that bought but did not like the game.

time for adults is a mayor problem. for example: every indie trying to go half-day work for money and half-day work for his “art” knows what i’m talking about. and indie developers aren’t the only people interested into games AND doing the things that they dream about for a living while in the need to do things they don’t totaly like until their goals are reached!

I must agree with you on the first part. I presented a skewed picture here. Content is actually got far more cost-intense, especially in the current gen. But it’s not that easy to split development/content by counting heads. Keep in mind that there is a grey area of up-front development where also artists are involved. Take a game like Fallout 3 for example. The levels/dungeons in that game a made of pre-fabricated elements. In oder to design a level an artist need to invest a lot of time creating all those elements. Once they are done, a level designer can build a lot of levels using those elements. From this point, creating even more levels using that same elements becomes easier and cheaper. And in fact, this is how Bethesda managed to create such a huge world. But if you created them for just one level, it would be terribly inefficient. The same is true for other re-usable assets like enemies for example. I found that in game development, the biggest challenge is to establish a working content-pipeline in the first place. And that’s a challenge you don’t have in TV shows.

As for your second argument – that’s true that customer behavior varies but keep in mind that Wii/DS games are relatively cheap to produce anyway so there is no need for risk control there. The idea seems to be to use episodic gaming to manage the bloated, expensive AAA next gen core gamer titles.

The second seems very much to be a core gamer habit. When I look at a large group of my neighbors who buy Wii/DS games for their kids, or non-gaming professionals who dabble in games, or relatively poor people, the buying pattern tends to be one at a time, play until saturation, buy a new one at the next major holiday / next time you’re bored / next time you have the available cash.