Why Hasn't Episodic Gaming Taken Off?

Thanks to GameSpot for its 'GameSpotting' editorial discussing the potential lure of the episodic videogame. The writer ruminates: "Imagine your favorite first-person shooter, role-playing game, or action adventure game. Now imagine that game broken up into one- to two-hour sequences. Now imagine that the first part was free and subsequent parts were delivered to you automatically for five bucks a pop, each month. Would you take the bait?" He suggests this approach could work particularly well for "...a lot of people out there who want to be gamers but don't want to make the commitment of living the 'gamer lifestyle' of having their entire existence revolve around their hobby." Could you see yourself buying into episodic gaming?

Comments

Star chamber and Uru, for example

[Murphy's Paradox]

The online collectible cardgame + space civilization sim Star Chamber is a good similar idea. Free download, free trial play with sample decks. You pay money for booster packs at a low cost of $20 for 16 (240 cards total, more than enough for a good deck). It plays better and is more fun than games twice as costly. You go into a chatroom and play against other people and trade. There is an entire section of the system that even allows phantom sealed deck tournamnets.

Episodic gaming is hard to get off the ground, I my opinion, because the first episode has to deliever a lot of promise, and the next part(s) have to maintain that promise without disrupting the cost vs. content and length balance. Myst: Uru will hopefully open the way for more installment type games, with free downloadable extra content.

Re:I can

[PainKilleR-CE]

I don't want to spend eight weeks with a game. I would probably play more different games for a shorter time, while coming back to favourites when new episodes are released.

Why do you need games to be episodic to do this? I usually have 3 or 4 games next to each of my systems and cycle through them, putting one back on the shelf every time I get a new game for that system (the new game going next to the system), or get sick of or finish that particular game. If I think I might have a problem coming back to a particular game, I write myself a note. If I have a guide for that particular game, I'll stick the note in the page that's roughly where I'm at in the game. If I don't have a guide, I'll just put the note in the game's case. I have a hand-drawn map of Metroid on my coffee table at the moment because I've been playing through the emulated version of the NES Metroid on my GameCube, and it helps me remember where I've been and where I'm going. What I'm trying to do is something I can usually figure out from there. The first "episode" of .hack has a note sitting in it that probably tells me something like "level up before going to area (whatever the name of it is) to finish this game", because I got sick of spending so much time on the last boss only to die. There's a similar note in my FF Origins case, except that I'm nowhere near the end of FF2 afaik.

What it comes down to is simple, games need better facilities for tracking your progress so that you can fire a game up after not playing it for a month or so, load your save game, maybe read a little info from the map or an in-game journal (ala Baldur's Gate and derivatives), and you have a pretty good idea of what's going on. The games are getting more complex, your goals get more complex, so the games need to help us handle that complexity. After all, any of us can pick up almost any Super Mario Bros. game today, no matter how long ago we last played it, and have it all figured out in a couple minutes.