Slashdot Mirror
Epic's Mark Rein Not an Episodic Fan
Next Generation reports on comments by Epic Games VP Mark Rein, a man who doesn't like the phenomenon of episodic content. At the Develop Conference in Brighton, England he railed against the trend in game design during a keynote speech. He also covered topics such as the costs of next-gen game design, and the ways in which Intel has done disservice to the game development community. From the article: "He said that episodic games could never compete will full-priced products. 'They're competing against massive marketing budgets. Distribution without marketing is worthless. You can't buy retail marketing with a wholesale price of $15.' He added, 'Full-price games have a cohesive start, middle and end.' Rein acknowledged that the game industry already has an episodic model through game sequels, such as Madden, Zelda and Final Fantasy. He said these work because they are full-price and backed by marketing."
The BBC version of this story was entitled, "Game Industry faces Serial Killer." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5168320.stm ) For the life of me, I thought Jack Thompson had gone on a killing spree. They also had a story, "Brain Sensor allows mind-control," which was referring to controlling things with your mind, not controlling someone else's mind.
What sound do people on rollercoasters make? Hint: it's not Xbox 360.
I believe that there is room for the little episodic developer, though it is shrinking daily. Sports games (like TFA's Madden) will continue, as there is a distinct point after which the data from the old game becomes invalid (after the season). Even without massive amounts of marketing, there are still people (like me) who go out of our way to look for any promising title, not just the one's I've already heard about. I appreciate the effort that goes into these games, and I do not have time to justify paying recurring subscriptions to an MMORPG.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
I like the option of episodic games on the market though not for a reason that game companies would appreciate. Half the games I buy only hold my attention for a few levels and episodic content gives me enough of a feel for the game that it doesnt take as much for me to feel as I have gotten my moneys worth. OTOH, the few that I have played were good enough to make me want to get the next chapter.
I think what this really comes down to is that without hype only good games will survive, perhaps that is more what Mark fears. I did find this quote funny "Episodic games that offer faster turnaround will inevitably be using a lot of recycled content, walking through the same environments and shooting the same enemies with the same weapons." especially since Epic has been rereleaseing the same crap in its unreal franchise for the past 8 years.
Episodes are just a buzzword and we need to stop listening to it. For years PCs have had expansion packs, these usually continued the story or did a side story. How is this any different than episodic content?
And before anyone says "but this is continueing the same story, so it's new!!", Diablo 2's expansion pack did just that.
Stop buying into this crappy hype and open your eyes. It's the same thing we've had since the 80s (at least) with a new name to make the headlines.
I like muppets.
Episodic games can't compete against the mega bucks marketeers like EA can bring to the table? I had a hearty laugh! In a market as closly tied to technologies like the internet, word of mouth will always be king. It doesn't hurt that internet distribution of episodic content makes advertising cheaper too.
When I put down a game, I pick up a new one too. But with years of development between the one I put down and it's sequel, the chances are a lot less that the game I pick up is going to be one of yours. I happen to think that recycled content is a symptom of uncreative developers, something that happens is games already anyways. Maybe buyers will wise up faster in episodic and not tolerate that crap so much and then the real creative developers can increase their market share.
Demented But Determined.
"You can't buy retail marketing with a wholesale price of $15.' He added, 'Full-price games have a cohesive start, middle and end."
I usually wait about 8 months for that $49 game I want to go down to $9.99 at Gamestop. Best Buy, Software Etc, etc... And these are the (formerly) full-price games that have a cohesive start, middle, and end. Even if the end is just like John Dvorak described: when it all comes down to the end of the game, you have to fight a giant bug.
Where were you when the voynix came?
1. Make incomplete game
2. Release first pasrt of incomplete game as full version
3. Profit!
4. Release final portion of game later as an 'episode'.
5. Profit!
What sets my cynicism meters a-twitchin' is that episodic content seems ultimately to derive from the game companies desires to turn periodic purchases into purchase streams. I've yet to see a case where a company turns something that is naturally a periodic purchase into a stream and actually benefit the consumer more than leaving it alone. You can't create revenue streams by corporate fiat. If you want streams, you're going to need to offer products that are naturally streams, live "server access" (MMORPGS) or other such things.
Against the little problem of "I don't think they have a customer-benefitting reason to exist", all the other problems pale into insignificance.
(Note: I speak of generalities. It's great that you love episodic content, but you are not the totality of the game market. Are gamers as a whole really clamoring to be nickle-and-dimed to death, especially when that saying translates to $5-$10?)
A John Dvorak quote gets insightful on /.
Final Fantasy is not episodic persay (with the exception of a few recent titles) - each game is "unique" and vary greatly on graphics and gameplay. The only thing they share in common is the title and certain key staff from the Square(Enix) team.
Of course, upon detailed inspection it can be said that there are certain "features" that every FF game has, such as a theme revolving around life, a world with magic, an airship, characters with names like "cid", an epic storyline (character is the only one blah blah). The FF title also garuntees a certain level of quality (as FF is Squre's flagship product), so that may effect the marketing thing. Other than that I really dont see how FF is episodic.
Seeing that... is he really sure what he's talking about?
Taking this a step further, I remember back when the original wolfenstein 3d came out, you could play the shareware (remember shareware?) version, then choose to buy the next bit of it, and after finishing that, then buy the final portion of the game. They were literally called episodes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein_3D
I remember this being done for several computer games of that time.
The only difference is you couldn't download the episodes, and if you were from a small town you had to order them and have them sent to you.
I like the idea of shorter, cheaper games. most games have about 3-4 hours of interesting, challenging gameplay, the rest of the crap is just 'package stuffing' to make it last 12 hours. that's why we have jumping puzzles in FPS games!
There is room for blockbusters, and Episodic content. I think Rein is wrong, there. But, the episodic content will be built on engines like the Doom, Source, or Unreal engine. The blockbusters or bigger games, that come from Epic or iD or Valve, will have the time and money invested in an engine AND a game. While, a small publisher, like Ritual will take the engine, and develop an episode on it. I DO kind of find Valve jumping into Episodic content, odd. I think it is a good fit for Ritual.
Where Episodic content reigns surpreme, is to create a more constant revenue stream for smaller developers. Spending 3 or 4 years building a game can REALLY tax resources. If you can divide that by 2, or even 4, all of the sudden you have a shorter development time, and can start making money. The other advantage I think that episodic content gives you, is the ability to have a nimble storyline. Developers can add cool new "features" to test the water. If it goes well, future episodes can get that feature. If it falls flat on its face, well, they don't have to include it in the next release. Ultimately, as consumers, we ALL win, with multiple styles of game creations. Think of episodic content as those short summer run TV shows on the cable channels. They are entertaining, and short. That is a good thing.
I DO think that Mark hit the nail on the head, when it comes to marketting though. Valve can get away with producing an episode, and realsing it retail. I don't think a lot of that type of content will be distributed on physical medium. There are a LOT of people that do not like "virtual" assets. It also makes it more difficult to sell a "used" game, if you just downloaded it. Episodic contnet is in its infancy. I think it is an exciting concept, and I expect more innovation to come from that type of content, than I will from EA/Vivendi/Activision, and their much more costly (in terms of time AND money) blockbuster hits.
The difference is that with episodic content there is no base game to expand, it's like you're only buying expansions. It is new, because if Diablo 2 had been episodic, they would have sold every act separately.
He also accused Intel of killing the PC games market ...
with its integrated graphics laptops and desktops.
"Intel is evil, we need to kick its ass.
The difference in price in offering better graphics
chips is negligible. You couldn't buy a meal for
that price [difference]. We're talking five bucks."
Episodic gaming is BAAAD as I have previously discussed in detail in my previous posts here, here and here.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Publishers will look at the numbers and say "100,000 people bought episode one, but only 40,000 bought episode two, three and four - if we had packaged all of those together and charged four times as much we would have twice the revenue!"
They're (probably) wrong, but you know they'll think that way.
I quit!
I see nothing wrong with episodic content as long as its applicable to the game. I don't think that most games would do well in an episodic format, but for some games it might work, depending on the genre, cost, and time between releases. Graphic adventures are probably the best suited to this.
Small developers certainly can use episodic releases to their advantage. For example, if a small developer waited to release the whole thing and the game was releases with a ton of bugs or other issues that gamers don't like, the company is dead, and the customer is pissed that he spent $50 on a bug-ridden piece of shit, e.g. Ultima: Ascension. (I'm not saying that U:A would have worked in an episodic format, mind you. NOTHING could have saved it from the completely irresponsible ways that EA managed that project.)
At least with episodic content, the developers can get a bit of money up front to keep them going and the gamers get the opportunity to say, "Well, here's where you had problems" or "I didn't like..." and the developers can fix the issue or make changes based on user feedback into the next episode. Meanwhile, the customer only spent $15 or so. So the remaining episodes could be tweaked to implement the fixes/changes with less egg on the developers' faces than if they released the whole game with the same bugs and problems for 3x the price or more.
Personally, the anti-episodic attitudes that I read about seem to stem more from a selfish "I want it and I want it ALL NOW!!!" attitude that doesn't help anyone.
And need I remind you that PJ's Lord of the Rings trilogy was episodic with two books released in movie format every year. (LotR was actually six books, not three.) Yet no one seemed to bitch about how that was handled. I never heard anyone complain that PJ should have finished all three, then released them. But video games, which are no more or less of an entertainment medium, are held to a completely different standard. Interesting.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
You market the original title extremely well, then the rest is all gravy. If your game is good, gamers will flock to the next episodes until it gets bland. Regardless, he doesn't have a leg to stand on. He assumes by default that episodes won't be properly marketed. Whose to say a company can't market each episode well?
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
It's interesting how Rein mentions that Madden, Zelda and Final Fantasy are following the episodic model via sequels but fails to include Epics own Unreal Tournament series which has come out with a number of sequels already and is not showing signs of letting up. Stop being a hippocrate Mark.
I am amazed how a brilliant guy like Tim Sweeney puts up with this retard.
Episodic content seems, to me, to be yet another irritating attempt to milk me, the gamer, for more cash.
A lot of people are get their arguments mixed up in this thread. People are mixing up arguments about quality with arguments of cost.
My basic line on this is: I don't pay good money for long crap games. However, I'm not particuarly keen on paying good money for an extremely short game that is mediocre or, maybe, good...
HL2 Episode 1 may be good. However, by all accounts it's not good enough to warrant paying half the price of a full-length movie for a mere 1/10th of the content.
In other words, I'd rather pay twice as much for a generally good full length game than half as much for a generally good game that is only 10% of the previous games length.
What's next, leased episodic content? Don't joke...
Mark's a nice guy but I have to call him out on this:
"Rein acknowledged that the game industry already has an episodic model through game sequels, such as Madden, Zelda and Final Fantasy."
Odd to think he didn't mention the Unreal series, which if you count Unreal, the Unreal expansion pack, Unreal 2, Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004, and the up-coming Unreal Tournament 2006, has had more releases than Zelda or Final Fantasy in the past several years.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
So, he says episodic gaming is dead just because "when [he] put[s] a game down, [he] want[s] to try a new one"? Please! ... ad infinatum). Now, they're just calling the horse a horse, and bowing to the inevitable. Some gamers don't mind shorter games for less with a quicker turnaround. Some gamers hate episodes. But it certainly isn't dead.
I think if video game history has shown us anything, it's that franchise/series loyalty is huge. Not all gamers are ADHD. We won't just forget about a series because something else shiny and flashy arrives. When Rein finished watching an episode of TV, does he want to try a new series?
Episodic content has been around for a while, as others have pointed out. If not in name, at least in essence (game -> expansion pack -> sequel -> 2 more expansions ->
Yes, this is sarcastic but it is also to illustrate a point. If television production companies tried to film every episode the way movie companies make movies then it would be practically impossible to have TV series. We have TV series because people modified the process. Some of the change was more or less a no brainer. You didn't sign your star to a new contract before each episode or tear down your sets at the end of each one. Other parts of it required more significant changes. The process a movie goes through for the creation of a script (one or two people working on it at a time before handing it on to someone else) and the process a TV episode goes through for a script (teams of writers working together) are fairly different.
Of course if you assume that game companies have to produce episodic content the same way they've been producing stand along content then it will look like it can't work, but I suspect people will figure out how to modify the process to make it more manageable.
This is exactly the sort of blockbuster-obsessed thinking that is currently strangling the industry, making the barrier of entry too high for small companies, and ultimately stifling innovation. The "blockbuster" line of thinking gives us thrilling games like "NFL Roster Update 2006." Whee.
The cost of game production is increasing faster than the revenue being made from games. The reason so many companies are currently investigating episodic content is because they are desperate for alternative models -- anything to break out of this death spiral. A willingness to investigate alternatives is not "insane." It's necessary.