The Impact of Episodic Gaming

GameDailyBiz has a piece up looking at what episodic content is, and what it means to the future of the games industry. From the article: "Our age is one of aging. Mainstream gamers are now older on average than they have ever been. When you are single and unemployed, it is easy to play The Godfather for nine straight hours the day the game hits the shelf. When you are married, it becomes tougher. When you have kids, it might be impossible. It is difficult to slice some time for yourself. And in that slice, you have to carve a portion for gaming. It is no wonder casual games that require no more than 10 minutes to play continue to grow in popularity. This is why we are more likely to login to Call of Duty 2 on Xbox Live to play a quick five-minute Team Deathmatch and leave the Lobby."

Not a joke

[MBraynard]

I am still single but I have gotten involves in amateur athletics and started my own company. Before all this started, I could come home from work and play an MMORPG, an Xbox game, or a PC shooter with a mate until I fell asleep. Weekends were pure game time. I ran a guild in one with over 1000 people at one point. Serious time comitment.

Now, it has all changed. I got a 360 at the beginning of the month. I think I have played it a total of 3 hours. I have not played any PC games that I use to. I barely am able to log into Eve just to make sure I am still training something.

It's called growing up. I really do wish I could blow a few days in Battlefield2, and maybe in the future I will try to work that in. But right now, I just do a little Geometry Wars before bed (the demo version) or Blazing Angels demo (a lot of fun, that one).

Why is it about older gamers?

[Fool_Errant]

Honestly, episodic content's great across all demographics. Because there's not this drive to complete a game instantly, it makes it far more replayable. If you get tired of a game for a while, it's easy to put down, but when that urge comes back, it's right there again. That's not just an "older gamer" thing, that's across all age categories. Little kids do it, teenagers do that, college students go through it, and older gamers do it. I suspect it's one of the great successes of the early eras: those games, when they did have story, were easy to pick up and play and put back down. Sure, you could marathon finish the game, but you don't feel the driving NEED to finish it in a marathon. So, of course, you play it for longer.

Re:Compatibility Check

[Anonymous Coward]

Well let's take the number of (heterosexual) guys interested in gaming, and then subtract from that the number of (heterosexual) girls interested in gaming. We now have group A, guys who get a gaming girl, and B, guys who are out of luck.

Group B has three options:
1) Spend the rest of their lives alone
2) Settle for someone who isn't nearly as interested in gaming as they are (and possibly hope to encourage an interest in games, with no guarantee of success)
3) Hunt down the people like you who made it into group A and kill them, thus freeing up some of the gaming women.

Re:Ugh

[AuMatar]

On the other hand, there's things like gamefly- rent N games at a time. For less than the cost of a game a month, you can get and beat 3 or 4 easily. That may well be worth it, if the price is the cost of a game or less.