Analysis of wait times between eps for episodic games

[Montresor]

Release dates were pulled from Wikipedia, and where available, I chose the Steam/PC release date.

My stats are very rough calculations.

In my opinion, there should never be ANY wait whatsoever for episodic games. If you're going to make it episodic, then make it like Alan Wake where all the episodes are released at once. Or make it like Netflix where an entire season is released at the same time.

If there is going to be a wait for episodes, the most it should be is a 1-month wait per episode. And the analysis below shows that often, the wait is more than 1 month per episode, which is not cool with me.



Telltale's Walking Dead Season 1 (avg. 1.758 months wait per ep):
*Episode 1: April 24th, 2012
*Episode 2: June 29th, 2012
*Episode 3: August 29th, 2012
*Episode 4: October 10th, 2012
*Episode 5: November 21st, 2012


Telltale's Walking Dead Season 2 (avg. 2.100 months wait per ep):
*Episode 1: December 17th, 2013
*Episode 2: March 4th, 2014
*Episode 3: May 13th, 2014
*Episode 4: July 22nd, 2014
*Episode 5: August 26th, 2014


Telltale's Walking Dead Michonne (avg. 1.050 months wait per ep):
*Episode 1: February 23rd, 2016
*Episode 2: March 29th, 2016
*Episode 3: April 26th, 2016


Telltale's Walking Season A New Frontier (avg. 1.342 months per ep):
*Episode 1: December 20th, 2016
*Episode 2: December 20th, 2016
*Episode 3: March 28th, 2017
*Episode 4: April 25th, 2017
*Episode 5: May 30th, 2017


Telltale's Batman Season 1 (avg. 1.108 months wait per ep):
*Episode 1: August 2nd, 2016
*Episode 2: September 20th, 2016
*Episode 3: October 25th, 2016
*Episode 4: November 22nd, 2016
*Episode 5: December 13th, 2016


Telltale's Batman Season 2 (avg. 1.925 months wait per ep):
*Episode 1: August 8th, 2017
*Episode 2: October 3rd, 2017
*Episode 3: November 21st, 2017
*Episode 4: January 23rd, 2018
*Episode 5: March 27th, 2018


Telltale's Game of Thrones (avg. 2.333 months wait per ep):
*Episode 1: December 2nd, 2014
*Episode 2: February 3rd, 2015
*Episode 3: March 24th, 2015
*Episode 4: May 26th, 2015
*Episode 5: July 21st, 2015
*Episode 6: November 17th, 2015


Tales from the Borderlands (avg 2.742 months wait per ep):
*Episode 1: November 25th, 2014
*Episode 2: March 17th, 2015
*Episode 3: June 23rd, 2015
*Episode 4: August 18th, 2015
*Episode 5: October 20th, 2015


The Wolf Among Us (avg 2.250 months wait per ep):
*Episode 1: October 11th, 2013
*Episode 2: February 4th, 2014
*Episode 3: April 8th, 2014
*Episode 4: May 27th, 2014
*Episode 5: July 8th, 2014


Resident Evil Revelations 2 (avg. 0.233 months wait per ep):
*Episode 1: February 24th, 2015
*Episode 2: March 3rd, 2015
*Episode 3: March 10th, 2015
*Episode 4: March 17th, 2015


King's Quest 2015 (avg. 3.792 months wait per ep)
*Episode 1: July 28th, 2015
*Episode 2: December 15th, 2015
*Episode 3: April 26th, 2016
*Episode 4: September 27th, 2016
*Episode 5: October 25th, 2016


Life Is Strange (avg. 2.192 months wait per ep)
*Episode 1: January 30th, 2015
*Episode 2: March 24th, 2015
*Episode 3: May 19th, 2015
*Episode 4: July 28th, 2015
*Episode 5: October 20th, 2015


Life Is Strange Before The Storm (avg. 1.85 months wait per ep):
*Episode 1: August 31st, 2017
*Episode 2: October 19th, 2017
*Episode 3: December 20th, 2017


Telltale's Walking Dead Final Season (projected avg. will be 2.489 months wait per ep):
*Episode 1: August 14th, 2018
*Episode 2: September 25th, 2018
*Episode 3: January 15th, 2019
*Episode 4: March 26th, 2019 (projected release date)


Life Is Strange 2 (so far, avg 3.967 months wait per ep):
*Episode 1: September 27th, 2018
*Episode 2: January 24th, 2019
*Episode 3: TBA release date
*Episode 4: TBA release date
*Episode 5: TBA release date

 

[Dreamboum]

Tell that to the D4 folks out there still crying

 

[Deleted member 26156]

I don't get why Resident Evil Revelations 2 was even episodic when they released all the episodes in under a month.

 

[IIFloodyII]

Why I have zero interest in buying/playing these as they release. Tales From The Borderlands was the final straw. They are much better played when all Eps are out too imo, though I hate cliff-hangers.

 

[ThereAreFourNaan]

Half Life 2: (6 year avg so far)
Episode One - June 2006
Episode Two - October 2007
Episode Three - No release date yet

 

[FluxWaveZ]

I'm fine with 2 months. Preferably, I'd prefer everything released at once. I imagine an Ace Attorney game where each case was an episode released at the average rate and it'd be a damn nightmare.

But it becomes really bad when it exceeds 2 months. The excitement dissipates. You start to forget what even happened during the previous episode. It's difficult to get invested into the world and its characters as much as you could be if it weren't for the waiting time.

LiS2 is the current example of this, and it's a huge shame. When we have The Quiet Man and Left Alive by Square Enix, I feel like Life is Strange 2 shouldn't be in the state it's currently in.

 

[Keldroc]

Now do Kentucky Route Zero.

 

[Comrade Crunch]

Kentucky Route Zero
Ep1: January 7th 2013
Ep2: May 31st 2013
Ep3: May 6th 2014
Ep4: June 19th 2016
Ep5: TBA 2019
=
Roughly a 1.54 year average so far.

4 months to almost a year to more than 2 to possibly 3. Every episode has been worth the wait, but I never would have thought it would take over 6 years to get to the end.

 

[Odeko]

As a KRZ fan I came here to laugh at you

 

[t26]

One of the selling point for episodic game is that the developer could look at the decision players are making and make adjustment based on that.

 

[SirFritz]

You should do hitman season 1 too. Afaik it was one a month. Revelations 2 was probably only episodic for marketing, get people talking about the game 4 times instead of once at launch.

 

[Murfield]

Half Life 2: (6 year avg so far)
Episode One - June 2006
Episode Two - Octover 2007
Episode Three - No release date yet

Click to shrink...

Glad this joke was made.

 

[TheSyldat]

What's that ? Oh please don't mind me I'm just gonna be sitting there in a corner listening to you dissert on the waiting period while my linux gamer punk ass will be furiously reloading Feral Interactive's page of upcoming ports to know when will the entirety of Life Is Strange Season 2 be ported to Linux all in one go ...

 

[Siggy-P]

Tell that to the D4 folks out there still crying

Click to shrink...

Im sure all 12 of them will be fine.

 

[Deleted member 8861]

Higurashi's Steam (re)release is 3-4 years behind schedule at this point

 

[Valdega]

I feel like you're missing the point of episodic games. The idea is that development continues throughout the season and developers can react to feedback between episodes. That's how Hitman 2016 worked. They added a lot of improvements between the first and the final episodes.

Episodic also keeps the game in the news for a much longer time. If you release an episode every month, you make headlines every month.

If you're going to release all the episodes at the same time, there's zero reason to go episodic.

 

[Gradon]

Higurashi's Steam (re)release is 3-4 years behind schedule at this point

Click to shrink...

It's what makes me really sad they seemingly will never localise the full Switch version bc of this.

 

[ghoulie]

I just want to play a completed KRZ

 

[Deleted member 8861]

It's what makes me really sad they seemingly will never localise the full Switch version bc of this.

Click to shrink...

That version (Sui) has an obscene amount of episodes (I want to say it's close to 20 compared to the original's 8) and takes more than 150 hours to read according to a friend. So that's always gonna be a pipe dream

 

[Montresor]

Life Is Strange 2's remaining episodes have been dated: https://www.trueachievements.com/n36931/life-is-strange-2s-three-remaining-episodes-dated.

Life Is Strange 2 (projected avg will be 3.6 months wait per ep):
*Episode 1: September 27th, 2018
*Episode 2: January 24th, 2019
*Episode 3: May 9th, 2019
*Episode 4: August 22nd, 2019
*Episode 5: December 3rd, 2019


That's way too fucking long. The game should've just been released December 2019 at this point.

I feel like you're missing the point of episodic games. The idea is that development continues throughout the season and developers can react to feedback between episodes. That's how Hitman 2016 worked. They added a lot of improvements between the first and the final episodes.

Episodic also keeps the game in the news for a much longer time. If you release an episode every month, you make headlines every month.

If you're going to release all the episodes at the same time, there's zero reason to go episodic.

Click to shrink...

I completely disagree, and others in this thread feel the same way, at least in thinking that the wait time between episodes is WAY too long.

 

[justiceiro]

Life Is Strange 2's remaining episodes have been dated: https://www.trueachievements.com/n36931/life-is-strange-2s-three-remaining-episodes-dated.

Life Is Strange 2 (projected avg will be 3.6 months wait per ep):
*Episode 1: September 27th, 2018
*Episode 2: January 24th, 2019
*Episode 3: May 9th, 2019
*Episode 4: August 22nd, 2019
*Episode 5: December 3rd, 2019


That's way too fucking long. The game should've just been released December 2019 at this point.



I completely disagree, and others in this thread feel the same way, at least in thinking that the wait time between episodes is WAY too long.

Click to shrink...

If it all release in the same day, it's not episodic.

While I get the feeling, for the consumer it doesn't really matter. Want to play the full game? Wait all episodes release them. Why when the developer decide to not release part of the game early, we can wait just fine, but when it release on chunks we can't bear the wait?

To avoid that I always wait for all the episodes to release, worked like a charm. The problem is for the developer, that doesn't get all the sales necessary to keep funding the development of future episodes.

The biggest problem I believe is that most episodic games are story driven instead of scenario driven. That's why Hitman succeed where all the other failed.