Last week, Pocket Gems' storytelling app Episode registered its 500,000th writer—not bad for a product that launched less than six months ago. While many of those half-million would-be creators are obviously amateurs, veterans of Marvel Comics and the CW’s Supernatural have signed up to created interactive animated serials, what Pocket Gems CEO Daniel Terry describes as "something between a TV show, a comic book and a novel."
"What Episode really is," Terry says, "is a way of re-envisioning storytelling for a modern mobile audience."
Episode's genesis came about when Pocket Gems noticed a distinct trend in their previous free-to-play experiences, from exploration titles like Paradise Cove to "isometric campus simulation game" Campus Life. "Whenever we’ve released an app or a game that has some kind of story-based element to it, we just saw an amazing reaction from our audience," Terry sys. "People engage with their mobile devices in unique ways, with your behavior pattern on your phone being different from your behavior pattern on your laptop, so we designed this to be consumed in short, bite-size sessions; we imagine people using it while waiting in line for coffee in Starbucks before going on with the rest of your day."
How Episode works is simple; readers download the app (via Apple's App Store, Google Play or the Amazon App Store), select one of the available stories—choosing from "Hollywood Crush," "Campus Crush," "Rich Witches," "In A Perfect World," or "Stranded at Sea"—and follow along, safe in the knowledge that, at certain points in the story, you’ll get to make choices that decide what happens next.
For writers, the process is somewhat different; they sign up and have to learn a proprietary script/coding process that translates their ideas into finished episodes. It's not particularly complicated, according to Terry. "After about a half-hour, you certainly can gather the basics and as you go on, it becomes more like a second language," he sys. "We wanted to enable writers who didn’t have any visual abilities to create these visual, interactive stories. If you can write a screenplay, you can write one of these. But it is a new medium, so in addition to the technical aspects, you’re also thinking about, how can I use this to tell my story, where can I let the reader interact with it, how can I make it unfold."
Dealing with the new platform isn’t the only thing writers will have to get used to with Episode; they’ll also become intimately familiar with what the audience does (and doesn’t) appreciate about their work. "We can tell them, ‘X% of the people that started your story made it to the end, and Y% made it to the end of the second chapter, so they can see where the strongest parts of their story are and where they might want to beef up their story," Terry sys. "In addition to that, we’ll share how many readers made this choice versus that choice, giving them the chance to double down on a particular topic because that’s where their audience is really interested in. Writers have been raving to us about that."
While Pocket Gems never expected so many writers to sign up to create on the platform, that 500,000 is still only a small percentage of the overall user base. "We have far more than that reading stories," Terry says. "We get a lot of people write in to tell us that they made this choice, and their friend made [the other] choice. It becomes a point of discussion for them, within their social groups."
And the company remains bullish about Episode's potential, even outside mobile. "We’re also starting to work with studios and publishers about bringing third-party IP onto the platform," Terry says. "We want to work on bringing IP onto the platform, but also taking our IP elsewhere."
For now, however, the focus is on continuing to grow Episode as it is—not just in terms of reach, but also technical capabilities. "The visuals are great for a first-generation product, but our next generation aims to blow people away," Terry says. "We’re also investing heavily in the capability around storytelling. Our audience loves the stories that are in there now, but we really want to continue to invest in that and put out the highest quality stories that exist whether on mobile or off-mobile. There’s a lot of learning for us to do there." The ending may not be in sight, but with this many people creating content for it, there are nearly infinite ways to get there.
