The Steam Review

For those that don’t yet know, Ritual are developing SiN 2 (or SiN Episodes as some are calling them) in a publisher-less, episodic format, each unit to be distributed over Steam once every three to four months. This is pretty big. Quite aside from breaking one of the conceptions I mentioned in my last post, regardless of how long you think it will last it marks the beginning of the episodic AAA game era.

Why did they go episodic? It certainly wasn’t to make money: episodic development is very hard and pressurising work. Is it to get the game into our hands ASAP, as the Steam slogan goes? Maybe – but the tradeoff is waiting several months between each bout. Perhaps it is because they know that the episodic era is going to need someone to start it off...but surely Valve is doing that with Aftermath? It could also be that they simply didn’t have the funds to sink into a lump development cycle (it’s hard to come up with names for these things in this new context).
Personally I feel it is a mixture of all three, plus Ritual’s existing relationship with Valve from CZ: Deleted Scenes that made it happen so early. This move is still a huge risk though, and I can only assume Ritual want to make the game very badly.

Steam is perfect for this sort of thing so we’ll skip over its capabilities and get right on to the biggest point of friction for the gaming public right now. The price. Each SiN 2 episode will last around 6 hours and cost $20. This at first seems like a lot, but look at this:

Game	Length	Price
Half-Life 2	15 hours	$50
Three SiN 2 episodes	18 hours	$60

That works out at exactly the same, 0.3 hours per dollar, and it sure as hell can’t be a coincidence. Were you a cynic you would point out that Half-Life 2 is not a particularly long title, but bear in mind that a level-grinding or base-building game is a recipe for disaster with singleplayer episodes. It’s got to be as memorable as possible for the player’s interest to keep up between each release and highly-choreographed gameplay is the best way of doing that. Think of an episodic game as a guarantee of constant quality.
Were you a cynic you might also point out that unlike Half-Life 2 SiN 2 is not tied down to publisher deals that take a piece of all the profits (VU still got a cut of Steam sales, albeit reduced). Presumably the lack of decrease is to cushion the risk and stress both of being first and going episodic in the first place, but nobody outside Relic and perhaps Valve knows right now.

One thing I’ve touched on before, and that any staticians will have spotted a few paragraphs ago, is the extreme workload. Ritual are going to have to produce the same amount of quality playtime Valve made in two years in just ten months. They’ve got the advantage of Source being finalised and documented, and probably better organisational skills to boot, but that is still a serious shortage. Some time-consuming processes such as the weapon balancing, voice casting and the design docs must already be finalised and perhaps Ritual have been buffering, so to speak, episodes so they can spend the inter-release period finalising rather than building – again, nobody outside Relic or Valve knows. All I can say is don’t expect a great deal of content variety.

Audience is another issue. How much advertising will we see, now it’s all being funded by developers? There’s the free publicity in magazines, on the net and through Steam’s captive audience which adds up to not a small total, but publicity’s reach (both in terms of numbers and social strata) is nothing compared to paid-for advertising. My guess is a publicity-only approach until all the episodes are out, whereupon they will, assuming they are good of course, be bundled together on a CD at a mid-range price point in a traditional publisher deal with advertising and other such trappings. As ever though, there’s only two groups of people that know.

I’m already waiting with baited breath for the first episode this Winter, and that’s without knowing anything about the game itself!