1/9/2005
Episodic Gaming
Well, after a rough start I finally finished Metal Arms: Glitch in the system. I have to say I really enjoyed the game to despite my rantings at the begining. While I was slogging my way towards the end I kept having a thought occur to me over and over:
"This game is too long"
When the game came out it was priced at $49 at most places. The game has 42 levels, so that works out to about a dollar a level. Which sounds like a good deal until you realize that people might get distracted half way through the game and put it down for a while (or forever). As a busy grown up, I find this happens to me more often than I like to admit. I simply don't have the time I did when I was a teenager (or in college) to sit and play games all day.
My feeling is that if this game was broken up into at least 2 or 3 parts it would have been a better experince. By making the games smaller, they could have sold them for a cheaper price (like $19 for example). Then more people would have tried the game out. Sure, not every person who buys episode 1 will buy 2 and 3, but I think it is better to have more sales at a lower price than few sales at a high price. (I was going to talk for a minute about the crazy pricing of games, and how they drop like rocks after a few weeks of release, but that is a topic for another time.)
Plus I think the idea of short gaming and story cycles is an idea whose time has come. Now that everybody and their uncle can connect their game to the internet, it would seem putting the hooks into an engine that will allow it to download (for a nominal fee of course) new content (mostly I'm thinking of new stories and maps utilizing existing graphics and sounds) to allow the end user to "continue the experince".
But that's just my opinion. Personally I'm going to try and work episodes into the games I'm working on, I think it would be a neat way to build a community with the players. Plus it gives the opportunity to reuse the core engine which would be nice.
"This game is too long"
When the game came out it was priced at $49 at most places. The game has 42 levels, so that works out to about a dollar a level. Which sounds like a good deal until you realize that people might get distracted half way through the game and put it down for a while (or forever). As a busy grown up, I find this happens to me more often than I like to admit. I simply don't have the time I did when I was a teenager (or in college) to sit and play games all day.
My feeling is that if this game was broken up into at least 2 or 3 parts it would have been a better experince. By making the games smaller, they could have sold them for a cheaper price (like $19 for example). Then more people would have tried the game out. Sure, not every person who buys episode 1 will buy 2 and 3, but I think it is better to have more sales at a lower price than few sales at a high price. (I was going to talk for a minute about the crazy pricing of games, and how they drop like rocks after a few weeks of release, but that is a topic for another time.)
Plus I think the idea of short gaming and story cycles is an idea whose time has come. Now that everybody and their uncle can connect their game to the internet, it would seem putting the hooks into an engine that will allow it to download (for a nominal fee of course) new content (mostly I'm thinking of new stories and maps utilizing existing graphics and sounds) to allow the end user to "continue the experince".
But that's just my opinion. Personally I'm going to try and work episodes into the games I'm working on, I think it would be a neat way to build a community with the players. Plus it gives the opportunity to reuse the core engine which would be nice.
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