« The Tragic Hero | Main | Administrivia »
October 31, 2005
Homicide and Thoughts about Episodic Content
More than any other show, the Barry Levinson police procedural Homicide: Life on the Street made me wish I was a homicide detective, which is saying something. I've been watching cop shows nearly my whole life; the first one I can remember really getting into was Hill Street Blues, but that even postdates a fascination with earlier shows with a detective element, like Quincy, M.D. and The Rockford Files.
Now, the crazy thing is that I've no actual interest in most of the actual work having to do with being a Homicide detective, chasing down leads, investigating gory death scenes, seeing names in red and black on "the board". About the only thing I'd really like to know if I was any good at is putting suspects in "the box".
No, what really interested me about Homicide was the amount of time the detectives spent talking about what you could call "life issues": birth, death, love, hate, marriage, divorce, children, parents, justice, compassion, humility. Oh, and lots of murder, and the reasons why people murder, and the kinds of people who murder. It didn't treat crime romantically, it treated it frankly.
Ah, and the characters, paired off beautifully: the morally black-and-white Pembleton with the relativist Bayliss, conspiracy nut Munch with ordinary joe Bolander, soulful Lewis with "meatball" Crosetti, romantic Felton with pragmatist Howard.
Homicide, sweet Homicide. Over the last couple of years I've watched all seven seasons and the conclusive television movie that tied off the remaining loose ends. And when I finished it, I wanted to turn right around and start over.
I keep hearing about episodic content in games coming along the pike one of these days. In fact, putting "episodic content" and video games together into Google nets you around 13,000 hits, which isn't Halo numbers, but it's a start.
I used to think it was a little bit crazy, I admit; after all, a reasonable segment of our market largely won't bother with a game if they can rent it. On the other hand, every sale of a used game and every GameFly or Blockbuster rental is a lost bit of revenue to the industry; I hear that even Best Buy is getting into the act. With development costs for AAA titles skyrocketing, I think prices will rise a bit (as I've started to notice for next-gen), and these alternative channels will swell, leaving fewer consumers actually buying that first copy of the product that we actually make money on.
So it seems like a great way to go is episodic content through Steam-like services, where downloads and an active network connection work both ends of this problem. Download permits the developer to sell for less and make the same revenue (since the cost of goods is lower), and the active network connection limits the license to one user (or more accurately, one computer). There will be backlash, sure, but there were plenty of people signed up for Steam getting their Counterstrike: Source on before Half-Life 2 was available -- I think the right carrots will make it a viable approach.
There's a lot more involved in this issue, though. You can't really liken it to television, though that's the comparison I see every single time it's mentioned. It's not like television. Television is free; or at least, it was when episodic content arose on it. Even paying for it, you are paying for a staggering array of choices, something for everyone. Spend ten bucks a month on HBO and you're getting more than four episodes of The Sopranos, you're also getting Six Feet Under, Deadwood, and a bunch of movies, and probably some shows I'm not hip enough to know about but which are doubtless pretty decent. And it's pretty staggering to think about how many hours of content your fifty bucks for basic cable gets you -- granted, it has additional subsidies in the form of advertising, but if you use TiVo, you're basically getting far more than you could ever watch without commercial interruption.
MMOs are more like episodic content in this regard; at the very least, they are simply enormous amounts of content, which justifies to a degree their monthly fees. I think I could reasonably argue that my $15/month for WoW could go for at least four different characters who would rarely encounter the same content, at least up until a certain level.
Thus, MMOs are already very close to episodic content, though it's driven by my time alone. This is appealing, much as DVD collections of my favorite shows are appealing: I don't really see much point in watching television "live" anymore -- I'll just wait until the boxed set comes out. If the shows are good enough, they'll get put on DVD eventually, and I can watch them at my own pace, much like I'd play an MMO. These days, it seems like the last season gets put out a week or two before the next one starts. I imagine I could fill my Netflix queue just with those -- in fact, about 15% of my queue is shows right now, and that's before Deadwood Season Two or Six Feet Under Season Five is out.
Lately I've been playing Shadow of the Colossus, and playing it as if it were a series of episodes. Since I've been enjoying it tremendously (expect a blog post at some point), I've been attempting to stretch out the experience, slaying no more than a single Colossus per day.
I wonder if an episodic release for this game might have worked, if putting a couple of Colossi into each digital release might have generated more sales overall than whatever it's getting¹. While I certainly would have been interested in it, waiting impatiently for the next episode, it seems unlikely at this point that it would have been any more lucrative than the traditional channel. I can only hope that with more consoles connected to broadband in the next few years, there might be some channel to push this stuff through.
What's most appealing to me about episodic content, though, is the opportunity to find that new retail channel, which is where we differ so strongly from these other media. Television has syndication for its shows, and movies have DVD and video². Most games have a couple of weeks on the shelves and then their selling window is gone more or less forever. Episodic content, however, is a more persistent revenue stream that opens up the opportunity to deliver a premium package later on, with the first six or twelve episodes on a single CD or set of CDs. You can play it as it comes out now... or you can wait, pay a bit more for the nice collection, and play a whole bunch of them at once. There's a model which exactly parallels this and it's been kicked around the block for quite a while -- the serial novels such as Charles Dickens wrote³.
So, I guess it'll be pretty interesting to see what happens with the Steam channel, with the SiN episodes I've read a little bit about coming through there, and Aftermath and whatever other Half-Life 2 content they generate. It's not quite the same as HBO, since I'll be paying a fair penny for a relatively small amount of entertainment, but it's certainly a start.
¹Naturally, I hope it's getting quite a lot. Unfortunately, I suspect it's closer to Psychonauts numbers than, say, Halo numbers. Which is a shame, because I've experienced emotions playing this game that I've never experienced playing other games.(back)
²It's interesting to note, however, that television shows generally only hit syndication after they've passed something akin to a quality bar -- 150 or 200 shows -- whereas even Little Nicky got a DVD release. (back)
³And of course, Dickens wasn't the only one. But Dickens is a good place to take a look if you're interested in what sorts of tricks need to be employed to make episodic content work. One of them is, of course, the cliffhanger. Dickens didn't write the stories where someone was left literally hanging from a cliff, but he did have a good sense of where to end a chapter so that his audience would visit the newstand the following Saturday. (back)
Posted by Brett Douville at October 31, 2005 10:20 PM
Comments
I'd challenge the idea that 4 characters in WoW will encounter mostly different content. It's actually mostly the same content, with different costumes and names. This is the main reason I stopped playing -- too little content-to-playtime ratio.
You'd think that story would be the driving force from episode to episode, but games have a bad habit of diluting story to begin with over hours and hours of play -- asking the player to recall the story and care about it from month to month (or quarter to quarter) is a lot to ask.
I guess I'll find out while playing Telltale's Bone series. The comics themselves tended to challenge my interest with their quarterly schedule; I would save up a couple years worth of them in a row and enjoy reading 8 issues at a time.
I've wondered if the Law & Order and CSI games might succed with Episodic releases, since they're all episodic to begin with, but they don't require you to remember how the story was shaping up before.
If you think about it, mods and user-made levels are a form of episodic content, although they tell different "stories". So there seems to be a market for it, but I think it has to arrive on a consistent basis (i.e. not quite episodic) or provide a between-times element (multiplayer) to keep the flame alive.
Posted by: Reed at November 12, 2005 06:14 PM
The content I was referring to was mainly things like the cities and environments; with the quests, I can certainly see your point of view. (And don't you still owe me an article on your site about that? :) )
Yeah, episodes are a hard thing. There's no way I'd be able to be transfixed by Colossus if it were over the course of a year, though I could probably keep the thread alive with three colossi a month for four months.
I think there's value in episodes, if only to determine whether there's enough interest to then box up the "season" and sell it in stores just as popular TV shows do. It's a risky proposition, though, since then you've maybe already tapped out your market and just now you're going to do it. Maybe you could just drive it off of preorders.
It's a tough nut to crack, no doubt about it.
Posted by: Brett Douville at November 21, 2005 11:13 PM