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With the recent release of Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and the announcement of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 it is clear that Valve is seriously trying to push the episodic content for their games. Although this may seem like a new and fresh idea with unlimited profit potential this may also generate a backslash in the gaming community.

With the recent release of Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and the announcement of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 it is clear that Valve is seriously trying to push the episodic content for their games. Although this may seem like a new and fresh idea with unlimited profit potential this may also generate a backslash in the gaming community.

From Valve’s standpoint this makes sense because it gives each game a smaller development lifecycle and it also gives gamers something to constantly look forward without the long down periods in between games. This can lead to a constant excitement about where a story is going as well as numerous "fan-fic" sites popping up all over the Internet giving the game series free publicity. One of the largest advantages can be to "cut out" the published because with online distribution technologies, like Steam, companies can distribute the games themselves with can really cut down on costs in the end. This is a win-win situation for smaller and upstart developers who are trying to get their product distributed quickly mainly because it is generally cheaper to buy server space than to have box art created, manuals written, and DVDs pressed. This leads to an ideal situation in the market because the game developers have a near unlimited supply of their content without having to worry about keeping up with demand or producing too many products and flooding the market.

There are many down sides to this though. For example the consumer may become frustrated with constantly having to purchase the next chapter of their game and feeling ripped off for having to pay $20 - $50 for only a few hours of game play. A few years ago, 1998 to be exact, Origin released "Wing Commander: Secret Ops" as a free download with episodic content. Although the content was being released statically over traditional web servers without any notification other than e-mail or seeing a post on a message board somewhere. Also many gamers complained about slow downloads and lack of content mirrors upon the release of each new chapter.

At the time episodic content via online distribution seemed like a new and fresh idea but sadly Origin was closed by EA and the story was left unfinished. This can become a serious fear among the fan base of any game, because each new episode is dependant of the success of the previous episode. This can cause an overall unfinished or rushed story if the numbers aren’t quite what the developers want to see.

One popular idea for episodic content distribution is that when the consumer initially buys the product they are paying for that current episode but future episodes are included. For example; Half-Life 2: Episode 1 cost $50, but Valve also includes all future episodes that will be automatically downloaded over Steam upon release then that would give the consumers an assurance that their product would be finished in a reasonable time period and that the story itself would be complete.

Episodic content is quite a cutting edge idea that can lead to seriously low prices with better overall content, epically when paired with online distribution. If this idea catches on among game developers this may revolutionize the way we purchase and play video game epically since just about everything these days is online. In the end, what it come down to is how many game developers are willing to take a risk and get away form the "brick and mortar" method of content delivery.

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