I'm honestly surprised this wasn't thought of sooner... Or perhaps it was, it's just that it needed to be thought of by someone like him first for it to actually draw any attention.

Year 1 MGS -Next!!! - Part 1 tutorial £9.99
Year 2 MGS- Next (renamed next next) Part 2 Level 2 & 3 £9.99
Year 3 MGS -Next Next - now MGS revenge strikes - Level 3 1/2 £9.99
Year 4 MGS - Revenge strikes stricken= delayed
Year 5 MGS- scrapped and restarted

Year 8 MGS- The new Next! Full game £69.99 all previous parts have no purpose.

Interesting comparison. Part of the reason that "pilots" work for TV is that consumers rarely purchase them - they spend time watching them, but the disappointment of a failed pilot that doesn't get picked up for a full season is nothing compared to the disappointment of a consumer who pays $10 for part one of a five-part series, and then never gets parts 2-5. It doesn't seem like the launches of most online F2P games are really all that different from a "pilot program" already - they usually are light on content, launch in beta, etc.

If you make one episode and then wait to see if it succeeds, if it does you've wasted time not working on the next episode, and if it doesn't, you've spent a lot of time and assets on something you won't be using again. I think that is, in a nutshell, why this hasn't worked thus far.

Of course , this is what Shenmue tried, which ended up leading to a decade+ of grief for its fan base. Not sure how eager I would be to invest in a new series like that. I mean...I am still waiting for Stephen King to finish publishing The Plant...

It makes sense no matter what scale you're working at. An indie outfit can throw out a pilot / episode one then use that to drive traffic to kickstarter or get donations for future episodes (or just plain sell it and use the funds to create future episodes).

I think the problem is if you're creating a mechanics-focused game, you have to upfront all the costs of creating that. If you're just making a cookie cutter FPS, but for the intriguing story, then it works

Having now played the Walking Dead I can say that the best spot to use this sort of model is with interactive TV. I don't really like to watch TV much, I prefer games, but when I get in that mode that I want to interact with the game, but not worry much about the mechanics I tend to lean back to TV. This is why I think the walking dead worked so well. Interactive TV!

I know there is a market here. I bet with the right story line and such this whole genre could take off. I would have probably enjoyed a game like Mass Effect without the action sequences. Let me make the decisions and watch the rest of the 'game' unfold. I think this was one of the stronger aspects of Metroid Other M - too bad everyone complained about the way Samus was portrayed more than the game - Theater mode got my wife to watch Metroid with me. Seriously.

There are a lot more games that I think people would watch if it got the interactive story treatment - Uncharted, Tomb Raider, Thief - hell, I replay Thief because I love the story so much, about half-way through I just watch the cutscene videos to get my fix.

Huge market here - totally untapped. Seeming most of the people that would like stuff like this have a tablet, that is probably the best place to put it too.

Welcome to 10 years ago, Hideo.

So he's basically outlining a self-contained demo? Or maybe a beta? Or any number of player feedback mechanisms development companies use to know whether their game needs to be re-worked or they are on the right track. Maybe I'm not reading enough into it, but this doesn't really sound like anything that hasn't already been done, just on a smaller scale.

Trend setters are always superior to copy cats. Just remember that.

Noooooooooooooooooooo.

So, it's like shareware, except you need to pay for the first episode, and you may not get the rest if the publisher thinks it wasn't worth ? Not interested, Mr. Kojima, thank you.

The thing about Telltales episodic game was that you paid once, I think the idea for paying per episode might make me throw up a little in my mouth, unless we're talking something akin to $1.99 per release.

It's also worth noting I didn't buy Telltales Walking Dead game until the whole of series one was available. Juries still out on how quickly I will purchase series two, but i will purchase it. There is a level of mistrust with episodic content that sooner or later you'll stop getting episodes of a show you enjoyed, much like your favorite tv series that get's canceled.

My primary concern would be weak sales of a previous episode impacting the quality of the series, leading to a downward spiral of development budget & sales. When you think about most single player games, there are usually levels here or there that are not as good. In a per level/episode type game, you could get significant dips in sales for those levels, if players can cherry pick which is best. Overall that may mean less income than simply selling all the episodes as a single product.

Pilots don't work for television, why would it work for gaming?

Simply because a system is established or a tradition doesn't equate to the system's inherent success or appropriateness in solving a problem.

I think independent games are the "tv pilots."

TV pilots aren't made with the full resources of a successful franchise. Take any tv show and you'll notice the production values in later years are much better than in earlier years.

I think if you are a big publisher you should foster/fund a farm system of independent game development. I am not sure the big guys do that.

STarting funding games like Kickstarter does. Or fund independent game pitches from your current employees.

You could even keep it in-house. TV pilots are kept in-house until greenlit for further development. And its a process. Tv pilots are shown to audiences. Reactions are gauged. The production companies tell you to do this or that.


And still most of them fail. It isn't a hard science.

But at least they have a system to bring ideas to fruition. Maybe the big guys all do this a ton already. But it doesn't seem like it.

You wouldn't want to lower your marketing budget just because your product costs less to develop. That right there creates a disincentive to try publishing very many different products.

Also, as long as customers value longer games, then selling shorter games is bad. This is what plagues the AAA industry right now, and simply lowering its price and calling it episodic doesn't fix it.

This isn't new.

Apogee Software (et. al.) were doing this 20-25 years ago where the first game in the series was free, and the others costing money. Worked well then, I'm sure it could be adapated to work today as well.

The thing about episodes is that, well, where do we get the idea of episodes?

Episodes of stories used to be a common feature of magazines and journals. You'd pay a small amount for a week's worth of light reading material, including but not limited to the episode. The actual episode got a few pennies out of every magazine sold.

Episodes in TV series are similar. They come as part of a much bigger whole and you pay for the whole TV thing, not individual episodes.

When the episodes are later released as standalone stories or go into those DVD compilations, everyone knows how well the series went over time and if it's worth actually spending money on.

It seems incredible to me that people proceed with the "episodic game" folly without thinking it through.

These days it would only make sense to put episodic games on things like PS+, which is closer to a magazine or television in terms of what you pay and what you get.

That, or charge £2-5 for every episode.

I think they did something similar to this with Siren: Blood Curse on the PSN. Didn't necessarily work, but that had more to do with the game than the actual marketing idea itself.

I hate a show that will get cancelled after a few episodes (because the ratings arent doing good enough). This sounds like a terrible idea, unless we are paying a fraction of the $60 dollar price. So lets suppose we broke each "chapter" into a 40 minute chunk- the time of an average show, lets say there are 30 chunks so each chunk is $1.99. Lets make a new episode every other week.

With how much I disagree with Kojima on a series of other points, I have to agree with him on this one. It's effectively what Dead Rising 2 and it worked out very well for them. It's a very nice proof of concept kind of thing to be able to release the bare bones systems of your game to see if people like it and to be able to work out the kinks and dislikes of the common gamer. It's actually quite brilliant.

I'm not sure this is actually what he was going for, but it's a good idea.

Isn't this essentially what Valve is doing with HL2? Or am I wrong? I guess if you have a big enough budget, trotting something out to test the waters isn't that big of a gamble...i'm assuming you wouldn't stop production until you knew for sure it was a failure. The release rate for TWD was great....if games can fall into that category and not take multiple years per ep....i think it can be successful. At the end of the day I suppose the onus is on the developers to make high quality games from the start.

Ever heard of "SiN Episodes"?
It was supposed to be episodic content to reboot the SiN franchise. They launched their first episode, "Emergence" in 2006. While the game was okay, it wasn't the game of the year. Later, the company got sold, they made a last patch to the game and Voilą, SiN Episodes was over, leaving all players with a "less-than-half" finished product.

Thats the downside for community about episodic content. While Telltale has a great reputation, other studios might not get the same confidence vote from the public.

Either way, the formula does exist and the result are mitigated.

Possibly an excellent model for Kojima, given the super-cinematic lean of the studio and its desire to branch out and explore side stories and characters in the MGS universe.

I think it's something that can work, but only if there is initial investment in tools that allow future instalments to be made quickly and relatively cheaply. In TV, the technology side is a known, fixed cost, and can be reused many times by different productions. The primary costs for a pilot are writing/story development, cast and crew fees, sets/locations/costumes, and then editing/vfx/sound/music. Depending on the show, these costs will vary (Big Bang Theory would have been way cheaper than Lost, for example), but the point is, the costs are predictable, and focused on the specific story, not the tech that captures and distributes the episodes.

In games, a huge chunk of the time and cost goes into the engine, and sometimes the tools, which are often custom-built for the one game (and possibly sequels, if successful). This is akin to building a whole new camera every time you want to film a new TV show. TellTale has succeeded partly because they have developed tools they can reuse (and refine over time) rather than start from scratch every time. But it's still just one company reusing one tool. Everyone else has to go build their own. And the tools don't develop to the point where you are just thinking about content and presentation, rather than plumbing.

Games are different to TV. Every genre requires different technical abilities, different focus. No one engine will serve them all. But it would be interesting to see what would happen if companies like TellTale made their engine available fairly cheaply, and other companies could pilot stories in the same basic style, but mostly focusing on making a unique story, not so much the tech that presents it. It still wouldn't be cheap, and some projects will fail, as they do in TV, but at least they would fail cheaper and faster. But there would be more variety in stories that get tried.

Won't work for everything, in the same way that TV is not the only visual medium, but it's a style of development that doesn't really exist currently, beyond one or two companies.