Chris Morris from CNN/Money examines the rise of episodic content through games like Half-Life, Halo, and the upcoming GTA 4 chapters for Xbox 360. While episodic gaming is nothing new, its application in $20 titles that serve up bite-size gaming sessions is still being perfected as a business model. From the article:"Cliffhangers, which have been somewhat rare in games of yore, have come into vogue in the last few years - and the rise of episodic gaming hints we may be seeing a lot more of them ... There are notable downsides to going episodic with video games. Players, who have been trained to expect 20 to 60 hours of gameplay per title, might reject the model, even though it's lower priced. Critics tend to penalize episodic games because of their length. And retailers don't quite know how to handle the games."
Half-Life developer Valve is still unsure if gamers will embrace their episodic content in the long-term, despite the distribution's ability to update a story more quickly and incorporate player feedback into future games. As a side note, I almost broke this post up into two staggered parts. But alas, I'm trained in the "give it all to me now" vein. Plus, that just would have been half-witted (pun intended).
