Game Studios, More Story Expansions Please!
28 Sep 2024Big budget, “eye candy” singleplayer games have hit a point in improved fidelity and quality of gameplay where, for many of them, it may be time to double down on expansions over sequels.
Video games have come a long way in the 60-70 years that they’ve been around. They’ve come especially far in the last few decades with rapidly increasing and evolving commercialization of the medium.
Not long ago, licensed movie tie-ins were extremely common. So many tentpole films had them, from 2000s superhero flicks to many Pixar releases. Of course, money follows eyeballs, and the industry pivoted more towards original stories in their singleplayer titles. The occasional tie-in game that still comes out is no longer limited by the film’s production schedule or is likely to be on mobile platforms.
With studios constantly one-upping each other in graphics and gameplay mechanics, attractive and highly marketable singleplayer games just became longer and harder to make. And they still are. God of War: Ragnarok continued the story of the 2018 game 4 years later, in 2022. The sequel to Control (2019) is still in development with no release year (although, they did develop Alan Wake II in the meantime). The forever-wished-for and long-awaited next entry in the Grand Theft Auto series still isn’t out, 11 years after GTA V (although, it likely won’t be a direct sequel).
Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man series is made up of faithful sequels. They have a truly continuous storyline involving the two Spider-Men and their respective supporting casts. The stories are so tight knit that, for new players, jumping into a later game is like skipping seasons of a TV show. No matter how many years pass since release, no one would start watching The Mandalorian at season 3, would they? Each new installment in the Spider-Man series takes Insomniac 2 or 3 years to develop. In each game, they go all out, adding new gameplay features, menu designs, and major adjustments to skill progression. I appreciate all that, and consider the series to be some of the best games I’ve ever played. However, what fascinated me was the City That Never Sleeps expansion that they created for the original 2018 game.
CTNS must have been developed alongside the original game, since the chapters were released episodically in the same year as the original. It consists of three chapters. Each chapter was released a few months apart, and they play out using the same map, gameplay mechanics, recurring characters, and other assets that were developed to tell the main story. Each chapter ends with a “to be continued” and the latter two start with recaps.
My question is, why not do more of this?
Episodic games are far from new. Life is Strange is one well known series to employ this model. Several titles in the series have released episodically over several months, either charging by chapter or upfront as a “season pass”. Life is Strange 2 had the longest release schedule so far - from September 2018 to December 2019. After all the episodes are done releasing, the games are available as a one time purchase. In some cases, after full release, the first episode is free to new players.
Games have also had expansion packs for a long time. The ones Rockstar North developed for Grand Theft Auto IV are great examples of anthological stories told by reusing the same map and many assets developed for a base game, in the form of standalone DLCs.
With games telling stories as compelling as high budget TV shows these days, I strongly believe that many franchises would benefit from a faster development cycle and more bite-sized stories. Why design a whole new gadget menu and progression system for Spider-Man: Miles Morales? Why not simply focus on the storytelling and build the snowy weather effects, venom powers, stealth abilities and all the new assets into the 2018 base game? Okay, Miles Morales may not be the strongest argument, since it was intended to be a PlayStation 5 technology showcase in some ways (while still releasing cross-platform). Were all the gameplay changes really worth the five year gap between the Horizon games, compared to another expansion or two of the same scale as The Frozen Wilds?
In fact, it could be argued that the Spider-Man series is a good example of reusing most of the previous games’ assets to tell new stories. Many reviewers considered Miles Morales as almost standalone DLC. I don’t, because there are significant upgrades and changes from the previous game, but I see where they come from. Spider-Man 2 doesn’t have the most groundbreaking graphical upgrades from Miles Morales, just enough gameplay changes to tell a solid symbiote story. CTNS just has some of the strongest development-time-to-storytelling-value ratios I’ve ever seen.
Another stellar example of a game reusing assets effectively is Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. Technically, it barely builds anything on the previous title, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, while being a solid addition to the franchise. Spin-off story and character appeal aside, I doubt most players cared about the lack of technical advancement between these two titles. In fact, The Lost Legacy began development as DLC before growing enough to warrant a standalone release.
The open question is what the pricing model should be. US$10-30 for each expansion after the base game, depending on scale? It’s hard to say definitively. If expansions are properly factored into the development cycle, I could see a world where some studios shorten their base game length and charge less than the standard US$60-70 for main titles. After all, charging too much increases the chance of losing players after each episode. Some will drop, no matter what; reducing the percentage must be a key metric.
Game studios will probably want to rely on playthrough statistics. Many singleplayer games already have an issue of players not finishing games. Game designer Josef Fares (notable for Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and A Way Out) discussed this in this interview with Inverse. Remember, they still make full revenue from upfront sales, a detail that must be considered when splitting a game across episodes or expansions. There is a serious possibility of losing your audience’s attention before they have finished spending the same amount of money as for a full-length game. Some of the variables in play would be the pricing of and the amount of content in each chapter, required budget (ideally mostly in storytelling and performances for truly story-driven games), and the studio’s confidence in their product.
How does TV do it?
Well, for a long time, there was enough recurring revenue from cable subscriptions that TV series released on a predictable season schedule. Now, we have much cheaper streaming subscriptions. While there is significant revenue in the business, and production budget allocations always follow eyeballs, things have been shaky in recent years. It’s too early to tell, but the heydays of TV may be over. Younger generations in the US are less interested in movies and TV than older ones. Regardless of all that, at least for the time being, we still get somewhat predictable releases of high budget streaming series funded by streaming revenue.
A similar model in gaming may be viable, but with so many variables that differ between the two mediums, it’s hard for me to say for sure, especially as an industry outsider to both. A greater proportion of audiences are into interactive media overall. As the younger audiences who are growing up with high effort storytelling in video games, we could see a major shift in the entertainment industry as they turn into adults. Maybe a future world with episodic gaming, with high quality annual story drops, is possible if subscription services like Game Pass or Apple Arcade, or game streaming services become the norm. Or, gen-z will prefer different kinds of games - maybe less story-driven and more social - and most of the industry will follow those eyeballs. I really hope I don’t find myself in that timeline.
