This article was originally published on November 28, 2025 - read the full issue

By Marie Dealessandri

AdHoc Studio steadily released the eight episodes of its debut title, Dispatch, throughout October and November, to huge critical and commercial success.

The superhero workplace comedy was made by former Telltale Games, Ubisoft and Night School Studio devs. And they didn't choose the easy option for their first game.

"We've been a company for seven years," says CEO and executive producer Michael Choung. "We've been working on this game, in full production, for about three. Seven years, one game. But what's inside that game is basically three feature-length premium animated films and a videogame, all meshing and rubbing up against each other.

"We also [decided] to do it [narrative-driven], episodic, completely original… We were not [making it easy], at every turn. And part of it was because we weren't really thinking about feasibility. We were just thinking in terms of creative and player experience."

Choung and lead producer Natalie Herman tell Knowledge about how the episodic model worked for Dispatch and why it's otherwise a terrible idea that you probably shouldn't entertain.

High risk, high reward

The storytelling-focused episodic model was popular in the 2010s, driven largely by Telltale, but that popularity dwindled after the studio's initial shutdown in 2018, with other developers exploring the concept only sporadically (most famously Toby Fox with Deltarune).

Publishing Dispatch as a one-and-done release would certainly have been "the conventional wisdom," Choung says. The decision came from what made sense for the story – and its roots as a live-action show – more so than from a desire to reinvigorate the business model as a whole.

"Everyone was telling us not to do it," Choung says. "We had internal debates about it but the story was always structured that way."

The debate revolved around how the team should deliver these episodes, and AdHoc explored every possibility: one-shot release, two halves, one episode per week, or two per week. It eventually landed on the latter option.

"A lot of the reasons for it we're now seeing the results of," Choung continues. "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."

Supported by its star-studded cast, Dispatch sold one million copies in ten days (two million in a month), and is on track to beat its three-year sales target in three months. That's not to say Choung recommends the episodic business model blindly – the team struggled to secure investment time and time again, until Critical Role came on board in July 2025 to fund the final stages of development.

"It's insane to do," he laughs. "From every metric, from a production perspective, no one should do this. 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."

"From a production perspective, we released four times," Herman says. "We were basically a live-service game for a month."

Choung continues: "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]."

Everything starts with the story

In addition to the episodic nature of the story, AdHoc had to settle on the right level of interaction, which isn't an exact science. Choung recalls mandates at Telltate, along the lines of "there needs to be a choice every minute." For Dispatch, though, it's more "vibey," he says, and narrative is paramount.

"Everything starts with the story," Herman adds. "We developed our tools for interactivity from the perspective of: how does this serve and live within the overall narrative that we're telling?

"The first tool we have is branching choices, and choice dialogue. We knew that we wanted to do more. We knew that we weren't going to do a point-and-click or have the character walk around a space. Those things weren't interesting to us – they can be pace killers. We wanted to explore: what does fulfilling the fantasy of a dispatcher look like? Well, you'd be sitting at the desk and you would be doing the job. That was an idea that came to us pretty quickly.

"We went down avenues where it was much more focused on 3D interactive environments, and then we found that it wasn't as fun as this dispatch mechanic that we were developing. So we followed the fun, put more time into making that really sticky, but also finding avenues to make sure that it wasn't living on its own island, so that this piece and the choice-branching cinematics could seamlessly blend into each other and inform each other."

The thrill of waiting for the next choice gave the game an unexpected boost in certain areas, Choung notes.

"It gave streamers natural places to pause the game and talk to chat, for instance. Similarly our games are really great for couch co-op; [people] pause and talk about it. That's part of the experience. Episodic also leaves a huge amount of space for conversation and we're leaving room for our players to be co-authors of the story, leaving room for them to have a conversation – not just with each other, but with us as well."

This article was originally published on November 28, 2025 - read the full issue