Dan Connors, the co-founder of Telltale Games, believes that episodic games are the future. But he doesn't think gamers want to pay for episodes one chunk at a time.
"Most people have migrated to our subscription model in our PC business," the veteran game designer told Wired.com in a phone interview Thursday, the day that The Devil's Playhouse, the new season of episodic title Sam & Max, debuted for the PlayStation 3, PC and Mac. "After our first season, maybe 10 percent of people bought individual episodes."
Sam & Max is the longest-running episodic series owned by Telltale, the company founded in 2004 by LucasArts refugees that has pioneered the notions of downloadable content and episodic gaming. Telltale has also, thanks to Sam & Max and Monkey Island, spearheaded an adventure-game revival.
Keeping a tight schedule and delivering episodes on a monthly basis is key to keeping subscribers who've paid upfront happy, Connor said. Besides, getting customers to fork over all the dough from the start "feels better than having to resell people every time you have a new product come out," he said.
Just because customers are willing to pay a higher price at the outset doesn't mean that Telltale plans to revert to the old, big-game model.
"The customer expectation and the player experience in the digital world is a lot different than that full-blown retail experience," Connors said. "We're still focused on tailoring our product into the way the world seems to be going."
Image courtesy Telltale Games
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