Episodic content seems to be picking up steam (ha! ha!) in the industry lately, with the first episode of Telltale's Bone adventure series just released, Ritual's SiN Episodes on the way, and Valve getting ready to ship Aftermath. Gabe Newell was very firm about Valve's devotion to delivering more content to players by way of a tighter development cycle than Half-Life 2's epic five-year journey. He explained how demotivating it can be to ship an enormously ambitious project, only to start right up again on another. It was much easier to get team members excited about smaller projects such as Lost Coast, Day of Defeat: Source, and Aftermath that it would have been to say, "Well, let's get started on Half-Life 3." The teams are smaller, the development cycles are shorter, it's easier to implement feedback, there's lower risk to the developer--essentially, Valve thinks it's the way to go.