The key to good episodic delivery is to give the player the feeling that they have a complete game at the same time that it is part of a greater whole. To simply take a twenty hour game and split it up into four five-hour episodes is not going to work because there will no closure and the player will be left a little unsatisfied until the final episode comes out. The key is to introduce a sub-plot or secondary story for each episode that is brought to a conclusion at the end of that episode. You would then have additional gameplay to go along with this story, which means that each episode may well be eight hours or more. Over the whole series you could be getting twelve hours or so of additional gameplay that you wouldn't have got if the game had been produced as a single entity.
It could be argued that the Broken Sword games are episodic, it's just that each of the episodes are single games in their own right. The same could be said for Gabriel Knight, Monkey Island, etc.
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