Nowa­days, I’m a casual gamer. I’m way too busy to spend lots of hours on gam­ing as I did just some years before. No more spend­ing a whole week­end play­ing games on my PS2 or my PC. I don’t even feel this burn­ing need for enter­tain­ment just like I did when I was younger. Back then I used to play for about 18 hours every day. Ah, those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end …

Well, I have to admit that I’m not com­pletely with­out hope. Some games still have to be played, even if it means ignor­ing my imme­di­ate envi­ron­ment. Games like the Sands of Time tril­ogy, the lat­est install­ments of the Prince of Per­sia fran­chise. Games like Heroes of Might and Magic V, Deus Ex, and the upcom­ing BioShock. Being as it is, I’m still inter­ested in these vir­tual worlds who offer enjoy­ment and relaxation.

There has been talk about some­thing called episodic gam­ing for some time now. If you often watch TV series you should be famil­iar with the con­cept. There are n episodes fol­low­ing one giant story arc. Of course, you can’t sim­ply leave one episode out. They’re all heav­ily inter­con­nected, push­ing the big story on and on. This con­cept isn’t exactly new in the gam­ing sec­tor but I didn’t want to talk about its his­tory anyway.

Instead, I’d like to focus on pos­si­ble ben­e­fits result­ing from this type of games as opposed to tra­di­tional full-length games. So, what’s to expect from episodic games? There are already some titles out there which fol­low this approach – just think of Half-Life or SiN. First of all, the story can be told in a new way. A seri­al­ized nar­ra­tive does have some great ben­e­fits like major cliffhang­ers, char­ac­ter devel­op­ment through­out many dif­fer­ent scenes, and lots of twists and turns. Per­son­ally, I like sub­plots very much. They make things more real and give more depth to sto­ries if not exaggerated.

Apart from new sto­ry­telling tech­niques, there’s a tech­no­log­i­cal advan­tage too – devel­op­ers can tweak graph­ics and game­play. This approach seems way bet­ter than wait­ing for years to present the new inno­va­tions after hav­ing changed the graph­ics engine two times just to stay state-of-the-art. Episodic games can deliver a bet­ter over­all impres­sion with every new episode released. More­over, devel­op­ers can react to cus­tomer feed­back much faster and bet­ter and you can actu­ally see improve­ments. That level of flex­i­bil­ity isn’t pos­si­ble when devel­op­ing a full-length game.

Then, there’s a finan­cial aspect we’ve got to take into con­sid­er­a­tion. This kinda games aren’t only faster to develop, they cost much less too and they’re quicker on the mar­ket. Pub­lish­ing costs are cut down because the pub­lish­ers can save on man­u­fac­tur­ing, pack­ag­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing. Every­body with broad­band access can down­load the episodes when­ever they choose to. Con­se­quently, a cheaper price leads to a lower risk for con­sumers and increased uptake. (A whole series would be more expen­sive than a sin­gle game for about 60 bucks, though.)

Now, let’s get to my favorite point: Such a model will lead to oppor­tu­ni­ties for smaller enter­prises and, thus, strengthen com­pe­ti­tion. Big name titles take years to make and they often have bud­gets of sev­eral mil­lion dol­lars. So we usu­ally get long delays and more often than not these block­buster titles lack the amount of meaty gam­ing we would expect.

The way it looks now, episodic con­tent is the future. Dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion meth­ods are becom­ing increas­ingly mature which will allow us to down­load most of our games. New tech­niques allow game devel­oper to cre­ate smaller titles. This is only the dawn of episodic gam­ing and things are evolv­ing fast. Yeah, it’s a fast-paced world we live in …