Suttree.com: Casual Games, Social Software by Duncan Gough

I’ve long been a big fan of episodic games. That is to say, I’ve *wanted* to be able to champion episodic games for a long time, but there are so few successful episodic games around that it’s hard to remain enthused.

Needless to say, the recent news that Half Life 2: Episode 2 has been delayed into the Autumn, bringing it’s total delay time to one year, seems to signal the end of the episodic gaming buzz. They’re just expansion packs, that’s all they are. (See that expansion pack, that’s you that is.) We’ve had expansion packs for plenty of time, they work just like sequels for the big movies, bringing in the punters, making more money from the same IP. We’d all much rather be doing something new and different but it’s a quick fix for gamers, audiences, actors and developers alike.

However, maybe episodic gaming isn’t really dead. Maybe it’s been kicking around in a thin disguise for some time now. This post on the consistently useful Casual Games mailing list points to plenty of release date figures for the big portals:

  * A few sites release 7 or more games per week (TryGames, Big Fish,Reflexive)
  * Some major sites only release 2 or 3 games per week (Real,Shockwave)
  * Most sites release closer to 5 games per week

Granted, the kind of games these portals are releasing on such a frequent basis aren’t closely thematically related, but then, one puzzle game is pretty analogous to another, right? I’m a fan of abstract puzzlers so if I play a coloured gem-swapper one day, and a coloured fruit crusher the next, that’s good enough for jazz, as my Dad used to say. So, isn’t it fair to say that episodic gaming exists and is doing some healthy things over on these portals? Can’t we turn the problem of casual game clones into a feature of episodic casual games instead? I think so.