I don’t like to compare video games to television and movies. It’s not that their aren’t any similarities: all of them are forms of entertainment and the video game consumer is almost certainly a consumer of both film and television. It’s when games are compared with television and movies on the terms of revenue that leaves me cold.
Recently the talk of episodic games has started to bubble to the surface again. The same ideas of episodic gameplay have been around since at least the mid-nineties. The difference now is that the digital streams to deliver the content are now widely available and a model for in-game advertising has begun to ferment.
It is not reasonable to compare episodic games with films, which are neither episodic not delivered, short of PPV and NetFlix, to the consumers home. Going to see a movie is still primarily a group experience. Looking at television may just provide us with some clues as to how to create and deliver episodic games.
First, highly-paid TV execs have already done the core research for us. Serial television, with the exception of reality shows, are almost exclusively broadcast in the fall and spring when the audience is planted firmly on their living room couches.
Second, episodes are delivered with a regular schedule: 22 episodes on the same night every week.
Third, television content is either delivered with commercials or by subscription to pay for the development costs and hopefully earn a profit. The subscription model only works for channels like HBO that deliver a steady stream of both original programming and movies–not the model that games can emulate. The advertising option allows the content to be delivered free to the audience–this is the only viable model for games. The audience-at-large won’t pay for episodic content. Not even a dollar an episode. It’s simply too difficult to get the consumer to overcome the inital cost of buying into a new concept.
Fourth, television episodes have a fixed cost per episode. It will vary for different series and is certainly subject to over-time costs and renegotiations with the series stars, but it is certainly predictable.
How do you deliver episodic game content in a reasonable time frame?
- Build a stable and reliable engine first. The investment in man-hours has to be committed up front. There is no time to develop the engine during development. You certainly wouldn’t rebuild the cameras or lights before shooting each TV episode.
- A very high-level scripting language. Anything that is significantly more complex than a shooting script is too cumbersome to develop content in a reasonable timeframe.
- People only. The time to rig a new skeleton is not a reasonable when developing episodic content. If the protagonist must have a dog, do that up front. And make sure that the rig can be shared with cats.
- Create content for what already exists. If you want to have a UFO appear, plan it out two or three episodes in advance. There is no time to build and test the UFO before “shooting.” You must have a library of animations, props, and sets created well before they are needed.
- Animations and other assets must be shared. It’s okay if most of your characters walk the same at the beginning. If the series catches on, you’ll have plenty of time to develop unique characteristics. Look at the first two seasons of Seinfeld. They are almost unbearable to watch. It wasn’t until the third season that the characters settled into their personalities.
- Hire quality, professional writers. Nothing makes a game worse than playing through porrly constructed plots with stilted dialogue.
- Hire quality, professional voice actors. If you are going to compete for eyeballs with television, you have to hit the same bar of quality. Text on screen simply won’t cut it.
A simple challenge? Absolutely not. But if you can make it stick, you’ll have the pipeline in place to develop multiple series simultaneouly.
Tags: episodic games