From GameTap’s announcement teaser for the upcoming Myst Online: Uru Live episode:

Be sure to join in now as this episode serves as a lead-in to the Myst Online: Uru Live Season Finale.

Because this has led to plenty of discussion and confusion, it seems worth analyzing bit by bit. Normally, picking apart sentences is considered sort of a violation of etiquette, but we’re talking about official marketing speak here, not someone’s Usenet post. Marketing, after all, is arguably the art of carefully combining words together, giving every one of them as much meaning as possible.

The part that sticks out the most is comprised of the last two words: “Season Finale”. Up until this point, nobody knew there was such a concept as a season to Uru Live. Episodes, sure. However, it was generally assumed (by me, and by every person whose opinion on this matter I’ve read) that those episodes would not be subordinates of a greater structure, whether seasons or anything else. The episodes, one believed, would either just go on and on, be replaced by a different model, or – along the platform as a whole – get cancelled altogether.

(Those episodes, by the way, were announced to take place “within a single week each month”. This has already proven to be a lie, or at least an exaggeration. Instead of one episode per month, we have had one episode every fifth week, which has over time led to increasingly large discrepancies, to the point where the previous episode “Familiar Voices” overlapped between late July and early August, and the upcoming one won’t start until early September. That is to say: neither July nor August had a week’s worth of episodic content, but only half each. You can twist and twirl this all you want, but you cannot deny that this is a marketing promise which simply has not been met.)

Because the shock over the existence of seasons jumped into everyone’s pair of eyes, few took a closer look at the statement. Many are under the impression that this upcoming episode is the “season finale”, whatever that may entail. But the sentence implies that this is not the case:

Be sure to join in now as this episode serves as a lead-in to the Myst Online: Uru Live Season Finale.

“A lead-in to [the] finale” is far from the same as “the finale”. It suggests that either the following episode (mid-October?), or even one soon after that, will make for the finale. The former is the most likely, and a theory on why already exists:

Gametap’s birthday is in October, right? That probably means that if Gametap reviews its games each year, it’ll be around October-November. Then if I were Cyan, and there were even the remotest chance that Uru’d be canceled, I’d want there to be at least some sort of closure around then.

This, however, does not address what all the buzz is about. The worry is not that there’ll be a finale with the obligatory climactic storyline, including a cliffhanger. It’s about what comes after that.

A season is a greater construct wrapped around and comprised of episodes. Episodes, in Uru Live, are surrounded by significant gaps: so significant, in fact, that four out of five consecutive weeks don’t contain an episode. This is rather intrinsic to the concept, and as such unsurprising: in a TV series that airs weekly, it’s six out of seven days. Or a daily soap: 23 out of 24 hours (gasp!).

But likewise, seasons also tend to have gaps. Sometimes, just the summer. Sometimes, everything but the summer. And sometimes, such as between “Lost” seasons 3 and 4, the gap is actually three quarters of a year. Can you imagine Uru Live surviving for three quarters of a year, without any new content? Untìl Uru did for over two years, some might argue, but people didn’t pay a subscription fee for that.

Now, nobody is suggesting that Uru Live will have an inter-seasonal gap that long. But how are we to know? The only other GameTap product I know of that uses “seasons” would be Sam & Max, and the gap between its seasons 1 and 2 is indeed almost half a year. Whoever signed off on that episode description apparently didn’t realize the amount of distress such a vague description with an entirely new concept (“we have seasons?”) would cause. It is possible and conceivable that, in the end, there is nothing at all to get agitated over: perhaps the change from one season to the next will see no gap at all, and the term will merely correspond to a pivotal plot advancement. But what if there will be a break between seasons? Even a single month may cause so many people to unsubscribe that GameTap’s analysts won’t be able to write it off as a mere statistical aberration. Such a gap can be good in that it may allow Cyan to focus on some minor, but long-needed bug fixes (did anyone say “Bevins”?). It may also tell GameTap that there are, indeed, people who subscribe solely or mainly for Uru Live and don’t care about their other content (which may or may not be a good thing). But more likely, it’ll only further expand Uru Live’s one critical flaw: namely, that low staff leads to slow story progression and content addition, and low story and content quality, all of which combined lead to lack of subscribers – which, in turn, would be crucial for getting additional staff.

Whatever it turns out Cyan and GameTap have in mind when they say “season”, this was, sadly, poorly communicated. As much as I sympathize with their intention to maintain vagueness around their episode descriptions for added effect, this was one of the statements where it just didn’t fit. They didn’t leave the sentence out and instead gave it its own paragraph; as such, they ought to have made it crystal-clear just what it is they were trying to say. That it starts with “Be sure to join in” isn’t helping.

Update: Cyan’s Ryan “GreyDragon” Warzecha writes:

“The Season Finale episode will be the final content update of the 2007 calendar year. The content schedule for 2008 has yet to be finalized.”

Let’s see, how do I put this mildly? Good luck, Cyan. You’ll seriously need it.