Over the last day those who pre-ordered the latest Hitman title through PSN received a message stating that the order had been cancelled. Of course there was speculation as to what was going on, and now IO Interactive has announced why these orders were cancelled. The new Hitman title will now be a fully episodic game, instead of having a large start and building from there as was the original plan.
The first mission will launch on March 11th and will be set in Paris. Then in April Agent 47 will travel to Italy to take down his next target, while May sees a trip to Morroco. This season will last until late 2016 with Thailand, Japan and the USA rounding off the locations. The Prologue and Paris Intro pack is priced at $15, with each additional mission costing $10. There will be the option to buy a pass for $60 to get all the content at a reduced price. If you want a disc version of Hitman you’ll have to wait until late 2016.
Each week will see live events occurring and other updates too to keep the experience from getting too stale. If you want to try out the game before release you’ll have to pre-order either the full experience or the Intro Pack, with those on PS4 getting beta access from February 12th and PC players getting access on February 19th.
Source: Press Release
Forrest_01
I am actually not sure how they feel this would benefit them – From the looks of things, the general consensus is “I’ll wait for a full release”, so you would have thought they might have done some market research to establish whether this was actually going to be an effective business model or not.
Aside from the fact that this is a pretty strange game to release episodically, it’s looking like they won’t be seeing much money for this until late this year.
Weird.