The final episode of swish and salacious Telltale-style caped tellydrama Dispatch released yesterday. It’s been a surprise hit – according to the gabbling labcoats at GameDiscoverCo, AdHoc’s superhero workplace comedy is approaching two million sales. Reasons given for this range from the appealing but uninvestigated – there’s a Galactus-sized untapped audience for narrative single player games, and all the publishers are absolute spanners for doubling down on live service projects instead – to the boring – people are still keen on superheroes, especially sociopathic and disgusting superheroes that cut against archetypes from the more pompous Marvel films, and Dispatch is simply a very well-made game.
Good games sell? What a gauche, back-of-napkin excuse for industry analysis. There must be a more arcane and clever-sounding explanation for Dispatch’s meteoric fortunes. Ah yes, here we go: speaking to GameDiscoverCo, AdHoc’s CEO and exec producer Michael Choung has suggested that it’s partly down to the weekly episodic release schedule.
