VGU Talks – Hitman’s Episodic Release
Hitman’s brand new title is coming out this month, well kind of. Square Enix will be releasing the game as an episodic series with regular instalments leading up to a full retail release later on in the year. But is this practice the way forward for this franchise and ones like it?
I take some time out to talk about it and you know what, I can see it from two different angles. From a business stand point it works, simply because gamers will get a chance to acquire the game as soon as content is released. Even giving them the option to purchase specific parts of the game that they are most interested in. This means that they can make a profit on the individual releases whilst working towards their end goal of having all the content on disc, to purchase on store shelves. It also seems to work due to the basics of the Hitman game, being a series of assassination contracts and the player jumping from one to the next. The DLCs in turn can represent this mentality by being named after important cases but including additional content alongside the simple story missions.
But what is the bad side of all this? The bad is that now you have to garner the value of every individual piece of the game on launch and hope that it is worth that money. The first release will be priced at $15 and will include the prologue and the first area of the game being Paris, France. Every DLC from here onward will cost $10 leading up to the full release. This means that players will have to be guaranteed that this investment is worth every single penny and that there is enough gameplay within these instalments to keep players entertained as they await the next instalment. This acts very differently to something like Life is Strange, where the episodic gameplay is built to represent that of a TV show and the content that is in the individual episodes is enough to keep gamers holding on to what happens next.
Only time will tell to see whether this practice is a step forward or back for both Hitman and Square Enix. What are your thoughts on the matter? Let us know in the comments.
