Dispatch maker AdHoc says the episodic business model is “an insane thing to do”

The developer of Dispatch, AdHoc Studios, has said that developers need to think carefully before opting for an episodic business model.

Speaking to Knowledge, executive producer and CEO Michael Choung said that launching the game as a single big release would have been “the conventional wisdom”. He added that opting for an episodic release schedule is an “insane thing to do” and that “everyone was telling us not to do it”.

“From every metric, from a production perspective, no one should do this,” he said.

“If you think episodic alone is going to be the thing that dictates success for you, then good luck.

“The spine of this whole thing is the creative. If the creative is strong, you can cut it up however you like, and it probably is going to make it through, even if it’s a poor decision. If we’d said, ‘We’re just going to release the whole thing’, it probably would have done OK. But it probably wouldn’t have been as big as this.”

Choung continued: “If you go episodic with a not-so-great story, you’re flirting with people that aren’t attracted to you whatsoever. You might say it’s like a multiplier: if it’s good, then it’s going to do better. And if it’s not, honestly, it’s not going to save you. It might even be worse. But if folks pick this and try it themselves, we’d be thrilled if it worked out for other [studios].”

Before landing on the final release schedule for Dispatch, the developers at AdHoc spent a lot of time debating the best course of action, which turned out to be two episodes per week.

“A lot of the reasons for it we’re now seeing the results of,” Choung explained.

“There would just be a longer time period for it to be covered. TV has been doing it for 70 years. We knew that it gives a ‘the train is leaving the station, but not just yet – I can still make it’ kind of feeling across weeks, and people catch on. When we look at concurrent user numbers across the drops, it’s exactly that – it just kept doubling every week. Again, conventional wisdom says: whatever you guys do in the first week, the second week is going to be half that number. It was literally the opposite. Those things, we anticipated. I don’t think we anticipated the scale of it.”

Dispatch launched on October 22 and within ten days of release had shifted over one million copies before surpassing two million units within a month. The studio recently told GI.biz that the project is “on track” to hit the sales target it had pencilled in for three years within three months.