The Episode Game

47
3D Action Planet's newest feature is an article about Episodes in Games, Where Did They Go? asking several developers why games are no longer shareware and episode based like they used to be. Developers who are asked this are TRI's Joe Wampole, Chris Rhinehart of Human Head Studios, Raven's Kenn Hoekstra, Ritual's Robert Atkins, Tom Hall of ION Storm, Scott Dalton of Legend Entertainment and of course Scott Miller of 3D Realms who was very successful with the shareware model with Apogee. Part of Scott's reply

Most commercial games have no need to have episodic divisions. Our coming games, Duke Nukem Forever, and Max Payne, will still have episodes, but in reality they're more like acts in a play, good for breaking the game into sub-story segments. We'll still release a shareware version of these games, but it might be a smaller demo than a full episode.

From The Chatty
Hello, Meet Lola