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Games, Abridged .hectate 08/09/2006 - 19:55 EST Saturday I briefly mentioned the fad (not a particularly new one) of using very short names for games. Today I'm going to talk about "abridged" games. To be exact, I mean episodic games. Now, games released as a series of episodes is nothing new. Anyone who has been around longer than Quake II should remember that Doom and Duke Nukem 3D both came with shareware episodes. Obviously we can go much further back and look at the entire set of Commander Keen games or nearly anything else published by Apogee Software (aka 3D Realms). Unfortunately, while we all have fond memories of flying around on pogo sticks or chasing carrots, the era of mass shareware has passed. So for a while, publishers and developers alike focused instead on bigger and longer games. Small demos were the norm, and ever-growing hype fueled the market machine. Then the industry discovered that bigger and longer games meant bigger costs and longer development times. Daikatana is one of the most noteable failures of this development style. As a result of the huge losses incurred through poor sales after heavy development investment, publishers and developers both began to fall prey to the almighty dollar. Household names like Acclaim, Origin, and Sierra went bankrupt or were absorbed and eliminated into larger and more stable companies like EA and Vivendi. Things were looking grim. The world of video games seemed like it was going to consist of the big boys rehashing the same old stuff time after time. Except for the efforts of a few flash-in-the-pan, independent developers, innovation was disappearing. Then something changed. Valve Software recently and successfully moved the entire (and very large) Half-Life community into the realm of "Digital Content Distribution" with the advent of Steam. This is a bit of an aside, but I really didn't like Steam when it first came out. I had an older computer (purchased in Y2k) that was more than sufficient for Half-Life and the mods that I enjoyed. But running Steam in the background was just too much and it got sluggish. Now fast forward to the release of Half-Life 2 in late 2004. If I wanted HL2, Steam was required. Happily, a much newer computer and a matured Steam resulted in a pleasing experience and no regrets. Now back to the subject at hand. As I was saying, Valve released Steam (in it's earliest form) in 2002. When HL2 came out in 2004 and basically connected the entire FPS market to Steam (such as myself), they essentially had the first successful online content delivery system. The reason I've taken so much time just to get to this point is that Steam is what allows developers to make content in episode form. It is not feasible to release many small episodes individually for sale in a retail environment. They would take up valuable shelf space while distribution and packaging costs would increase expotentially. Not to say that a series of episodes wouldn't be a good idea. After all, what is the value of a single episode of MXC versus the entire set? |