These quotes of doom and gloom about episodic games are stolen from this article:
It's a broken business model," he warned the audience, claiming that games already operated on a successful episodic formula thanks to regular franchise releases and sequels. He also said that the choice to release games piecemeal at lower prices over the web just will not work, and will turn consumers off: "It's not feasible to bring out a level every week – you'll see a lot of recycled content. Fatigue will set in, and franchise fatigue means dimishing returns."
Despite accusations from the attending audience of developers in a Q&A that his assertions were "wrong" or "dinosaur-like", he added: "I would love to see games sell for $20 on a DVD-like model – but that won't happen in our lifetime. What scares me is people betting their business on making money out of this [episodic gaming]."
He later went on to add, I'm so very jealous we have no way of doing that and have to wait years and years in between are games and we're not making as much money as Valve is.
Ok, he didn't really say that last part, but he might of. What's the problem here? That Valve created Steam and dealt with all the backlash and bugs and so on and now they have a delivery system for episodic gaming that Epic doesn't? Is it that Valve made oodles and oodles of money by creating a game that was only 4-5 hours long and then selling it on their own system so as to get around publisher cuts? Because the idea that episodic gaming is the end of the PC gaming industry makes about as much sense as blaming computer/chip manufactures for the failure of it. Oh wait:
Rein also repeated his assertions made in MCV 385 (5/5/2006) that the PC games market is being killed off thanks to low-priced low-spec machines that are incapable of playing the latest cutting edge games, and laid the blame squarely at the feat of chip producer Intel. "There is a potential for catastrophic failure in the PC gaming market," he said. "If Intel left the PC graphics market we'd all be better off."
Ok, nevermind, Mark is just a crazy man. Yeah, damn Intel! Damn Dell! Damn them all for making Epic create engines that require the Touch of God™ to run them. It's just not fair!
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