GC 08: Telltale's Dan Connors Discusses Episodic Games

Before the public comes storming into the 2008 Games Convention in Leipzig, there's three days worth of developer-focused panels called the Games Convention Developers Conference. Like the Games Developer Conference in San Francisco, the focus here is on the business, technical, and creative side of games--not the actually playing of them (much to our frequent dismay). But nevertheless, for every panel dryly labeled "The Current State of Game Development Contracts," there's an interesting one like the discussion of episodic games I just attended.

The episodic gaming panel was led by Telltale's Dan Connors. And by "was led" we mean "featured from start to finish." Since he was the only one there, the discussion consisted entirely of Telltale's episodic business model. He began by talking about the reasons for why they use the business models they do. He listed several points, but the main theme driving all of it is that episodic releases help the company stay nimble. For one, the smaller sizes and frequent release dates are well suited for the emerging distribution channels like PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Marketplace and WiiWare.

In addition, the cycle allows them to both continue to develop their existing stories and characters, and keep the audience's attention over a longer period of time. And when they fail to do their job, the rhythmic nature of Telltale's releases allows them to quickly correct the faults and address them for subsequent releases. This is something a development studio with a two or three year retail release cycle can't do. He gave the example of the Soda Poppers from Sam and Max, characters developed to be bizarre and strange, but it turns out the audience found them to be really obnoxious. So what did Telltale do? Turned them into bad guys, naturally.

Once a series is complete, Connors drew a comparison to television shows as far as what sort of path they like to take. Telltale starts out by releasing the games on their site (network television), then brings the episodes to third-party distribution channels (Steam, Yahoo! Games) and finally, they release the entire series as a retail box set (collector's edition DVD).

But Telltale can't always rely on their existing series. Like with the new Strong Bad games, they need to introduce new series in order to grow. Choosing Strong Bad was no coincidence; they're focused on licensing existing franchises when it comes to new source material. Why? Less of a risk. Connors likes the idea of taking the characters and settings from existing works and focus the developer effort on making an entertaining game, rather than attempt the monumental task of creating a brand new world that audiences will want to be a part of.

You can listen to the panel right here.