Superhero workplace comedy Dispatch is currently proving – fairly convincingly – that episodic gaming can really work. Two new episodes of the choice-based narrative series arrived yesterday and propelled the series to even greater popularity than when it launched.
Dispatch’s concurrent player-count yesterday peaked at 131,000 players on Steam which, even taken alone, can be viewed as a significant success for a single-player narrative game. But it’s when you consider that the numbers doubled from last week’s launch that the episodic format begins to flex. I expect the impressive 1m Dispatch sales tally will soon be improved upon.
The sustained approach of releasing two episodes a week for four weeks is allowing word to circulate and an audience to build, creating something of a virtuous cycle around the game as people anticipate what will come next – a bit like what happens with a TV series. There’s every chance, then, player-numbers could build as the Dispatch series continues through 12th November.
That’s not all that’s going on, of course. Dispatch has the clout of Critical Role behind it, the role-play mega-group made up of now-celebrity voice actors, which is nominally listed as a publisher for the game, but as I discovered when I spoke to Dispatch developer AdHoc recently, hasn’t really played a publisher’s role. The partnership is really in place for the next game AdHoc will make – a Critical Role game.
Critical Role’s influence is enormous and a few of the actors from the group are in the game – the award-winning Laura Bailey and husband Travis Willingham among them – and I’ve seen many of the group pushing Dispatch’s release on social media. It’s another example of the increasing presence and heft voice actors have in today’s game-playing space – the success of this year’s voice-actor-led dating game Date Everything! being another example. Date Everything! also has strong Critical Role ties.
However, none of this would have been possible if Dispatch were rubbish, which by all accounts it is not, nor if we had to wait a long time between episode drops, which we do not. This is episodic gaming done well and the results speak for themselves.
