"I think there's a different way of tackling this problem: something similar to a TV series, where you can use pilot episodes to test the waters before you jump completely into the project..."
Kojima Productions studio head (and Metal Gear series creator) Hideo Kojima responds to an interview question from Edge about whether this next generation of dedicated consoles could see triple-A development becoming prohibitively expensive. Yes, he says, team sizes are likely to increase for traditional big-box games, but there are other ways to distribute games now.
"It can be distributed via download channels, so the player can try it out before production continues. Something like that wouldnt take that long to create, maybe a year, and if its successful, you can continue."
Over these last couple disruptful years, we've seen the dramatic rise of the concept of "games as services" - that is, titles that live beyond a traditional retail shelf life by offering continuous content to the player, often with additional revenue streams attached.
Combined with the consumer tastes for free-to-play games -- not to mention the first real episodic game success story with Telltale's The Walking Dead -- it's entirely possible that we're now in an era where it makes sense to put small chunks of triple-A games through a pilot program.
Yes, the upfront cost of a failed pilot that doesn't reach a second episode would likely be a lot more expensive than designing a small game meant to live on its own, but for studios that are still built to produce big budget games, wouldn't it be worth the risk to find out your game is a flop before finishing it up? And in a situation where a pilot does manage to find an audience, wouldn't the immediacy of feedback on its opening chapter ultimately result in a better game?
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.
Honestly we have been doing this for a while... just in a different form, namely sequels.
the problem with making a small pilot is that the invenstment is frontheavy, developing all the tech costs the most money, thus delivering a game "pilot" with say the first 3 levels, is still very expensive... with the added risk that people might not buy the rest of the series, wheras if the game is purchased now the full price has been paid.
if the game does well our "pilot game/ new IP" can now be expanded upon and part 2/3 will most likely sell better, create more revenue and can be developed at lower risk and less costs.
also there is DLC, which has gotten closer to episodic content as well, (Halo 4 for example)
so in my opinion this is not new, but an even more granular presentation will probably just hurt incomes imho, (then again I might be spectacularly wrong so please try it!)
It has been thought of by EVERYBODY. It's obvious. As is the small detail, to anyone who knows game development, that it DOES NOT WORK.
The first 10% of your game costs 90% of your budget. Think about it. You've done all the programming, the gameplay, the network code, the backend, the sound, voices and recording, music, animation, front end, tuning and polish, you've had to to ALL the hard, complex, and expensive stuff.
Which is not to say that knocking out more content is cheap either. But it's the easier and comparatively less expensive part.
It's actually quite embarrassing to see an experienced industry developer trot out this old and failed idea.
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.
So then I guess the idea would be you have to make episode 1 free either for the purpose of finding a publisher or otherwise getting people to subscribe to the rest of the season. It sounds sort of like a demo, no?
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.
Maybe in AAA scale it's a bit more difficult but Telltale's TWD seems to be a good example of a success. Curious to see how Kentucky Route 0 is managing.
It works well for Telltale because they've been investing in their tools through all the other series they've done. Frankly, Telltale seems like the developer in the best position in the world to try a pilot program because of it...though I think it's possible that its Puzzle Agent series was done this way?
Yeah, frank - I'm just saying this is not a new idea - it works for companies using the same tools, but for most it's not really gonna be feasible. You need to be working within themes and genres that support it well. We are still waiting for Half Life Episode 3, no?
Oh, of course it's not a new idea! But I do wonder if it might be finally feasible now due to an episodic success story/consumer acceptance of games as services/the rise of microtransactions, etc.
It's not clear to me though, at least from the bit of the interview quoted, that he's talking about fully episodic games. I instead imagined something more like story DLC in reverse - instead of buying a $60 game and then hey, here's a $10 download that adds four hours, you start with the download and if that proves popular you go ahead and make a full $60 game. It seems to me that this approach could really make sense for new IPs.
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
The good part is that new and interesting stuff can manage risks with those kinds of budgets. And basic mechanics can be polished and rehashed into new pilots. At least we can get a lot of potentially nice first couple chapters. More than we get today.
I doubt publishers will learn that each next chapter sells on the merits of the previous one, not the changes in vision added in the new ones, and the most interesting ones won't last very long.
But as development times get smaller with episodes, there won't be so much an effect of consumer mentality of the kind: "heard good things about that game, but it's old and the new one is coming... gonna wait for it then and skip the old one..." as it happens now, with the way graphics and stuff get outdated quickly...
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.
yeah, as soon as I saw this I thought of SiN Episodes. Then I thought of Half Life 2: Episodes, and how PA Adventures' final chapter ended up being an XBL indie game.
These examples do not convince me that episodic games are a good idea.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
the problem with making a small pilot is that the invenstment is frontheavy, developing all the tech costs the most money, thus delivering a game "pilot" with say the first 3 levels, is still very expensive... with the added risk that people might not buy the rest of the series, wheras if the game is purchased now the full price has been paid.
if the game does well our "pilot game/ new IP" can now be expanded upon and part 2/3 will most likely sell better, create more revenue and can be developed at lower risk and less costs.
also there is DLC, which has gotten closer to episodic content as well, (Halo 4 for example)
so in my opinion this is not new, but an even more granular presentation will probably just hurt incomes imho, (then again I might be spectacularly wrong so please try it!)
The first 10% of your game costs 90% of your budget. Think about it. You've done all the programming, the gameplay, the network code, the backend, the sound, voices and recording, music, animation, front end, tuning and polish, you've had to to ALL the hard, complex, and expensive stuff.
Which is not to say that knocking out more content is cheap either. But it's the easier and comparatively less expensive part.
It's actually quite embarrassing to see an experienced industry developer trot out this old and failed idea.
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.
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
I doubt publishers will learn that each next chapter sells on the merits of the previous one, not the changes in vision added in the new ones, and the most interesting ones won't last very long.
But as development times get smaller with episodes, there won't be so much an effect of consumer mentality of the kind: "heard good things about that game, but it's old and the new one is coming... gonna wait for it then and skip the old one..." as it happens now, with the way graphics and stuff get outdated quickly...
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.
These examples do not convince me that episodic games are a good idea.
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.
Simply because a system is established or a tradition doesn't equate to the system's inherent success or appropriateness in solving a problem.
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.
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.
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.
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'm not sure this is actually what he was going for, but it's a good idea.
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.
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.