I would say most IF already feels pretty episodic and has multi-year development times. I would not personally be interested in even shorter content, considering it already takes me like, 2 hours to get through a playthrough that ends on a cliffhanger where the next 2 hours will come 3+ years later.
Well here is the fun part, when the episodic content is deliberately 2 hours, it means there is no cliffhanger and it’s a fully polished release with a propper act structure and conclusion. At least that’s the theory.
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That’s not the case when the content is deliberately an entire self-contained game rather than one episode in a series, so I won’t hold my breath.
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You read fast! 
I thought I was a fast reader (granted, slower in English since my brain needs to run a translation subprocess on the side) and I’m closer to a day for a longer game (if I read fully and not just skim).
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It does vary by wordcount and how much I enjoy the prose enough to slow down and savor it, but not in a 1:1 ratio way due to the way wordcount isn’t necessarily measured on a per-playthrough basis.
Siege of Treboulain is like 260,000 words and I have 2.6 hours steam playtime having beaten it twice, the second go-round being much faster than the first. Meanwhile A Squire’s Tale has 150,000 words and has 2 hours playtime, a study in steampunk is 277,000 words and I have 110 minutes in it, Waywalkers 2 is 198,000 words and I have 2.3 hours in it, etc.
On the other hand, Sabres of Infinity is 200,000 words and I have 6 hours in it, with 400,000 words and 9 hours in Guns of Infinity and 1.6 million words and 19 hours for Lords of Infinity. I don’t know how many playthroughs each, but there were several.
As I said, wordcount per playthrough, hours per playthrough, hour/wordcount ratio etc. is tough to measure on my end.
Anyway, I think games here are already in the sweet spot of taking their time and delivering a solid package quickly enough for my tastes. Delivering 1/10th of the game so I can play it for 10 minutes every 2 months or whatever isn’t that appealing to me as I like to get engrossed in it and that’s tough when you’re talking such bite-sized content, hypothetically.
It might be popular with others, just comparing how much more popular tiktok is than long-form youtube content and so on.
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Episodic is fine.
I would like a save system already implemented at release of first if planned to do episodes. If plan fails then, well, it fails.
Idk about infinity series except its men only read that i didnt, and wont get into. I cant talk on it.
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Maybe. I could see it working in some ways. We played with an episode format in starship adventures, as did lost in the pages to an extent. They were all released at once though. Few difficulties spring to mind.
Release: this is probably going to be a difficult one to release through HG if you want it in a single game. (Solo games also have to be 30k min even if part of a series). Even if you could convince COG to continually update the existing game, the amount of exposure you’ll likely get after the base game is released probably won’t be high without a lot of leg work on your part. You also could get significant delays in releases depending on what sort of release backlog is there which would affect your audience retention.
Also bare in mind possible complications if you plan to publish through HG and have multiple authors. All have to sign a contract with COG regardless of whether they are being paid anything for it. If one person decides that don’t want their part of the content available any more on HG what then? You’re have to speak to COG about the viability of being able to separate out the purchases of different episodes to calculate how much to pay each author. I know for our group project we just agreed on a constant split at publishing because it was finished, but that may not suit as your kind of project as it grows.
You’re talking very short episodes (20k). Historically games under 100k do very very poorly on HG these days in general. In terms of very short games (sub 30k words), I don’t always bother posting release threads here for the short games I make over at itch as they get little to no interest when I have. You might get away with it to a point as the overall word count will get higher when combined, but the short game length individually and short size on release (as it’s episodic) will probably hurt this game a lot.
On that writing different characters in the same universe that are all playable within different stories will probably get you into preset protag territory which is also set to make your game under perform. You can still write it, just bare in mind why you want to write it. (Popularity, money or just for yourself primarily.)
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This was really insightful! 
I’ve come to agree with much of what you mentioned, I don’t know of the logistical complications related to publishing and this has introduced some difficult hurdles indeed.
So my conclusion from this thread so far is that while there is a market for episodic content, it lacks the publishing infrastructure and the viability to be worth the massive time investment, and dedication needed. (For now?)
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On the plus side, you totally could (should!) publish your WIP episodically. (It just would mean that your actual-actual release would be the DVD box instead of the TV airing.)
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This is an excellent callout. I didn’t think about it because I don’t play WIP’s, but this kind of release schedule sounds good for that kind of environment and will allow you to work with your followers to polish the series as you go and then release a bundle that’ll be more palatable to players like me later when it’s complete.