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Originally Posted by Jackal
Not just in one sitting, but in a larger context. Play it for 15 minutes, and not again for a week, then play for 2 hours a day for the next 3 days, and drop for a month, etc. Because there's no narrative focus at all, there is no "commitment" to the game at all. Add ANY kind of story, and you've immediately crossed that barrier.
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Sorry, yes, both are factors. It's really hard to tell what is the biggest obstacle to success from the developer's point of view, because we've lumped together several different types of episodic games in this thread. But overall, what I think has emerged is that
1) quality is paramount for everyone;
2) narrative by nature introduces a desire to follow it;
3) there's a difference (though how great a one might be fuzzy at the margins) between a stand-alone story and a story that's ongoing . . . (And here I really mean it IS fuzzy at the margins. "Friends" or "Seinfeld" is something you can enjoy for just a single episode. There's also an overarching story. Brainfuzz . . .
);
4) AGs might also be hard to turn into a "lite" product because of the type of gameplay. (Yes, that's really secondary. It depends on the audience you're trying to reach. Lite AGs can easily appeal to hardened AGers . . . );
5) there are those of us who are cheap.
oh yeah and 6) if we
are going to pay for something, we want it available to us wherever, whenever.
