I'm clearly in the minority here because I keep seeing different people mentioning this like it's a fact, but I just don't see why that needs to be the case.
If the content is really good.. why wouldn't people play it whenever they can? You'd think they would, but it's pretty much a given in the game industry that people simply move on. It's long been a problem for developers with expansion packs, because they want to put a lot of new stuff in the expansions, but they have to release it within a certain timespan of the original, or simply risk having a lot of people just move on to something new.
I think it was one of the bioware devs who once said "You want to release the expansion pack while the game is still on people's harddrives."
Which makes perfect sense.
Now, with Sin Episodes it'd probably be a bit more forgiving time period, since it's doubtful people would uninstall it (since they'd have to redownload it when they want to reinstall it), but even so, I just can't see many people go back to "old" Sin Episodes after a year or so, unless the devs continuously make the game contain completely fresh gameplay.
But ofcourse, by adding fresh gameplay every time, they add to their development time...
Now, your TV shows analogy is a pretty good one, but what happens when you have to wait two years before the next season? Would you still watch it? In certain cases you most likely would, but there are probably also TV shows whom you just wouldn't care about anymore.
And, with TV shows, I can point out another analogy. If it takes too long between new episodes. To give some example, 24 season 3 suffered horribly from just having weeks in between new episodes, and it caused quite a lot of viewers to stop watching that season, leading to Fox showing season 4 at the perfect rate of one new episode per week, something they are doing again for season 5.
However, another well watched show, Alias, lost a ton of viewers in season 3 because they took 3-4 weeks between episodes sometimes, then went with the 1 new episode per week for their fourth season, only to backtrack and go back to their idiot broadcast schedule for season 5. Needless to say, their number of viewers has fallen totally off the scale, and this is most likely its final season.
There are ofcourse other factors having to do with whether people will watch or not, but I think people enjoy a timely series of episodes much more than having to wait forever for it.
Whether or not you are the minority, I don't know. I just think that Ritual would not be very wise to gamble.
Creston
Once the initial game engine and assets are completed, doing episodes is a lot easier as they don't have to worry about remodeling the main characters or making a entirely brand new set of textures. Well, to be frank, I'd hope they would. Would you buy another episode if it's just a few extra levels with the same textures, same weapons, same characters, same enemies? It'd get boring pretty damn quick, right?
Oh, and I know I can wait for episode 2, or whatever. To be honest, while I have no problem with Ritual and wish them well, I do hope that this episodic content thing will whither and die in its infancy, because if all games go that way, I'm probably going to stop playing games. Just the thought of constantly having to wait 6-8 months just to get the rest of the game is seriously antagonizing to me.
As an example, when I played Guild Wars, I was very eager for the next chapter to come out.
Now that it's almost out (supposedly it'll be released in January), I have absolutely no more interest in the game, and won't be buying the expansion.
Had they released it in July or August or so, I'd have been all over it.
I REALLY don't want all my games to wind up like that...
To each his own, ofcourse
This comment was edited on Dec 17, 17:30.