Dispatch's episodic format - alongside sharp storytelling - is key to its success

AdHoc Studio reflects on Dispatch's episodic format as the last episodes debut

Nicole Carpenter , Columnist, Game Developer

November 13, 2025

7 Min Read

Dispatch characters in discussion

Via AdHoc Studio

On Nov. 12, AdHoc Studio released the seventh and eighth episodes of its superhero workplace comedy Dispatch. It's the first Wednesday in a month in which the team isn't simultaneously releasing two episodes and locking in the build for the next week's entries—not drastic fixes, but tweaking and polishing at the last minute.

"We haven't been able to fully enjoy a launch day until today," AdHoc Studio co-founder and Dispatch creator director Nick Herman told Game Developer.

When Dispatch's first two episodes were released on Oct. 22, a peak of nearly 13,000 played the game concurrently on Valve's Steam platform. That number more than quintupled to 66,000 concurrent players the next week, on Oct. 29, when the next two episodes were released. By episodes five and six, the past week's numbers doubled to 131,000. Dispatch's final two episodes were released on Nov. 12 and continued the increase, reaching a new peak of 220,060 concurrent players. Each week, Dispatch is finding more of an audience.

The weekly episodic release schedule, typically the realm of TV, works—at least for Dispatch, which has been lauded for its storytelling, animation, and voice acting.

Built by former Telltale Games, Ubisoft, and Night School Studio developers, AdHoc Studio is familiar with the episodic cadence. The team is behind games like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, often cited as the gold standard of this sort of storytelling. But Telltale Games' episodes released its episodes months apart; The Wolf Among Us' first episode was released in October 2013, followed by its next episode in February 2014, and its third in April 2014. That schedule meant Telltale Games could make bigger changes to its stories between episodes.

"You'd crunch to make an episode at Telltale, it would come out, and there would be another team who had been thinking about and started on the next one," Herman said. "But every couple months, you're just making a new game from scratch. Here, we had to do most of it upfront."

A long lead-up to a successful Dispatch

AdHoc Studio had been working on the current version of Dispatch—there were previous iterations, including a live-action one—for roughly three years. The studio had to have ninety percent of the game done by the time the first episode was released, and the other ten percent was spread across the month of episodic launches. Dennis Lenart, also AdHoc Studio co-founder and Dispatch creative director, said the format forced the studio to front load playtesting everything up front so it could reach its desired quality bar it set for cinematics.

"You have to playtest as much as you possibly can upfront—interactive storyboards, and we built a whole pipeline where you could do playable scripts, playable storyboards," Lenart told Game Developer. "We tested this as much as possible, because one of the key ingredients to making a good game is playtesting. There's a lot of stuff that had to be locked a long time ago. There's a lot of stuff we haven't looked at for a year and a half because it was just early in the process. We had to iterate way more than we ever did in our previous projects at Telltale."

The little stuff behind-the-scenes—that ten percent—is fixing bugs, polishing audio, or tweaking on-screen text, not reanimating or rewriting scenes. Something unique to the episodic format, though, is how AdHoc Studio is able to do some internal balancing to the game's "invisible relationship meters" and other storytelling calculations necessary in a choice-based game like Dispatch.

Much of the gameplay in Dispatch, aside from the actual computer work of managing and dispatching a team of villains-turned-heroes, consists of quick-time events and dialogue choices. The decisions you make in Dispatch have both immediate impacts and, perhaps, later consequences. Early on, for instance, the player must decide to kick someone off the team; there are two choices, and the game changes depending on who you pick. Later, that teammate must be replaced, which, again, turns the tide of Dispatch's story. There are smaller decisions, and it's not always obvious what the impact may be, which heightens the stakes of the game.

AdHoc Studio has been watching player choice as each pair of episodes rolls out.

"As we've been watching week-to-week, we've learned a lot of things from players—things we weren't expecting," Herman said. "Parts of the game we thought were hard have been really easy for people. Choices that we thought were going to be more split have been maybe one more-sided. We've done a little bit of balancing on the backend as far as what the math is, tweaking to make sure people don't end the game and 99 percent of players experience this one thing, and then there's this whole other piece that no one's seen because it's not quite tuned right."

"That's the benefit of live development, that we're able to do stuff like that," he said.

The approach is working. The episodic nature of Dispatch means Adhoc Studio is doing something with its playerbase that doesn't normally happen: Usually, there's a surge of players right when a game is released. Naturally, as people play through the game and complete it or lose interest, the playerbase decreases. The episodic format is an incentive for players to keep coming back, but Dispatch has not only stayed consistent, but dramatically increased its playerbase.

Players aren't coming back because it's an episodic release, though; they're coming back because the characters are compelling and the storytelling is successful. But the episodic nature does help with the "staying power" of the game, Herman said. "[It] creates that hype in the fandom that can discuss [the episodes] and it also allows people to hear about it late and feel like they can catch up and they're not behind," he said.

Or, if players want, they can simply wait a month or so for all the episodes to be released and play them all at once. "One of the things that influenced our decision with the weekly releases is the idea that if someone came and saw the trailer and thought it looked cool but wasn't in the zone for something episodic at the time, there's a short enough time window between when the first episode releases and the finale airs that you can decide to wait and play it when it all comes out," Lenart said.

That's likely what we're seeing right now with the Dispatch concurrent player numbers on Steam, but the increase can also be attributed to the growing "snowball" interest in the game.

Dispatch's success means people are already asking—and were even before the finale—if it'll get a second season. AdHoc Studio hasn't announced anything yet, but Herman said that the extended cast and robust world means "there's potentially more content in the future, if we want there to be." But for now, it's enjoying the release that's been a long way in the making; Herman said Dispatch is a project that could have died "five separate times along the path to get here."

"It was really hard to get this game made," Herman said. "We basically made a television show and a video game at the same time, in parallel, and had to blend them together, which we hadn't seen anyone do before. There were not a lot of people who believed in this project. We tried to get this going for a long time. We got funding, we lost funding. Ninety percent of people told us this is never going to sell. We had to basically keep believing in ourselves and our team that we had something special here, that people were going to resonate with."

Lenart added: "We put everything on the line. We believed in this type of experience. I don't think we look at this as some random, lucky success to never happen again. We see this type of experience, and the reception it's getting is more validating that there is interest in this type of game."