Why can't way pay for individual episodes anymore?
 

I know this is something that must have been asked a million times but I had other things on my mind when the time came.

I was expecting it to be still possible to buy episodes individually when ToMI came out. In retrospect I don't know why I thought it was a better was to go about things, unless I was looking at it as 'try before you buy' which made little sense as each game has a demo (though sometimes that might not be enough of a taste).

The only thing I can think of was the marketing strategy they had for a while of giving people codes to get 1 chapter of any game for free. I got 3 episodes of Wallace & Gromit this way. But they could have simply altered the policy and ran similar offers as "1 free episode of any game you haven't tried" or "1 of the game you've purchased the fewest episodes of (if you've had at least one of each title)".

That's the only way I can think of in which it might have been unprofitable.

If you install the game episodically but have to pay for it as 1 lump of a game then what's the point of being episodic anymore?

feedback during the developement of later episodes. But then again they never listened to the forum when they complained about the easy puzzles and the horrible hint system that just will not STFU no matter what you do.

To be fair, you can still buy individual episodes of Tales of Monkey Island. They're just on the Wii.

Honestly, I think they don't do individual episodes any more because of the way the plots have advanced. They're less stand-alone stories and more parts of one long adventure split into smaller chunks.

For example: would you really only want to play one episode of Back to the Future: The Game? Or would you want to play them all so you get the entire story? I'm pretty sure most people would want to play the whole thing (or not, if you're one of those people who constantly goes on about how bad BTTF:TG is, which is not the point ).

While it might be more profitable to release episodes individually, I think Telltale have taken on board the idea that people would pay more upfront for an entire 'season' of games than they would otherwise. It's more user-friendly as well, so it's good PR. Which Telltale could do with right now :p

...that's my 2% of a dollar, anyway.

Actually, they did. The puzzles in Episodes 4 and 5 of BttF were a lot better than the ones in the first three, though they were still pretty easy.

That is the thing that bugs me the most about the episodic format, though. In one of the developer commentaries (I think it was The Devil's Playhouse?) I remember someone explained the benefits of episodic gaming as "If there's a problem in Episode 1, we can have it fixed by Episode 3." Which is nice, but the series is half-over by that point. And if there's still any problems near the end, there's nothing they can do.