AdHoc Studios says that developers need to think carefully before applying the episodic business model to their games.

The Dispatch development team agrees, believing that developers should carefully consider the episodic business model. In an interview with Knowledge, executive producer and CEO Michael Choung said that the traditional solution would have been to release the game as one large release. He added that deciding on an episodic release schedule was crazy and that everyone told them not to do it. Before finalizing the release schedule for Dispatch, the AdHoc developers spent a lot of time discussing the best solution, which ultimately became two episodes per week.

“From every metric and from a production perspective, no one should do this. If you think that an episodic model alone will dictate your success, then good luck. The core of this whole thing is creativity. If the creative aspect is strong, you can cut it up however you like, and it will probably make it through, even if it’s a poor decision. If we had said, ‘We’re just going to release the whole thing,’ it probably would have done okay. But it probably wouldn’t have been as big as this. If you release an episodic series with a mediocre story, you’re appealing to people who aren’t attracted to you at all. You might say it’s like a multiplier; if the story is good, it will do better. But if it’s not good, it’s not going to save you, honestly. It might even be worse. We’d be thrilled if folks picked this and tried it themselves, and if it worked out for other studios.

We’re now seeing the results of many of the reasons for it. It would just take a longer time period to be covered. TV has been doing it for 70 years. We knew it would give people the feeling that the train is leaving the station, but not just yet – they can still make it – and that feeling would last for weeks. People would catch on. When we look at concurrent user numbers across the drops, it’s exactly that – it just kept doubling every week. Conventional wisdom says that whatever you do in the first week, the second week will be half that number. But it was literally the opposite. We anticipated those things. I don’t think we anticipated the scale of it,” said Choung.

Dispatch was released on October 22 and sold over a million copies within ten days, exceeding two million within a month. The studio recently told GamesIndustry that the project is on track to reach its three-year sales target in three months.

Source: Gamesindustry, Knowledge