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KickStarter The Failure of the Adventure Game Renaissance

Blaine

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$540,000 (sans Kickstarter fees, which comes out to $500,000, plus whatever else they've raised) really isn't "budget." Budget would accurately describe a game like Primordia, which looks, sounds, and plays fantastic.

People, stop making excuses for this shit. There is no excuse. $500,000 is more than enough money to pay four people (two writers/programmers, an artist/modeler, and an audio guy) around $60,000 per year for two years working full-time to get a proper adventure game out the door, while covering shoestring overhead costs. Hell, that's a dream job right there, provided of course the team members have what it takes. If they're really necessary, a fifth and sixth team member would reduce their salaries to $50,000 and $41,000 per year, respectively. Don't try to tell me that two programmers, two artists, and two musicians can't produce a fucking computer game.

Thing is, they made bad decisions like hiring voice actors that aren't necessary and have taken far too long in development. In 1991, the budget for Space Quest IV was around $1m, which adjusting for inflation would be $1.8m today. Yet Space Quest IV sold something like 400,000 copies (hard data is difficult to find). They probably quadrupled their investment. Computer games were hot. They could afford to hire a luxurious number of artists and ancillary staff, use expensive, cutting-edge technology (like mocap), and of course pay out profits and bonuses to investors, directors, and company owners. These ancillary staff and expensive technologies are no longer necessary, especially considering that all the profiteers have been cut out. They don't have to fund Ken Williams' yacht or turn a profit for Sierra investors.

Today any asshole who takes the time can create game assets using free and open-source tools, or relatively inexpensive tools, with an inexpensive computer. All he needs is the talent. Take Factorio, for example: They use Blender, Photoshop, and Spritesheeter. Blender and Spritesheeter are free, while modern Photoshop costs $50/month for all necessary applications. These programs and a few simple tools are all the artists and modelers really need.

At this point one can only assume the raised funds are all but gone or committed and that they're working on it in their spare time, as they're able. That didn't need to happen.
 

MRY

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The best comparison might just be to Thimbleweed Park, which raised ~20% more and release. Whatever else one can say, it's clear that Ron Gilbert knew how to budget, plan, and adjust plans as the budget required. (Though despite that, it still took him almost a year longer than expected.) Every other Kickstarter adventure was just a dollar figure detached from any plan, and then development detached from any plan. By the way, that's basically how I develop (minus asking other people to trust me with their money), so I understand how and why it happens, but it's an objectively bad approach.

At the same time, though, comparisons to Primordia are quite misleading. Primordia was made "for free" (except for a couple thousand bucks Dave paid for voice acting and marketing), largely based on back-end royalties. But the back-end royalties were actually not the primary compensation. The primary compensation, at least for me, was having control of the story, working on my own terms and schedule, in the varying margins of an otherwise very busy life. The same is mostly true for Vic and James (the artist and coder). If these guys had asked me to write a story for them, I probably would've said yes, and I would've done it for relatively little money. (For example, I made $20/hour working on TTON, about what I made as a house painter the summer after high school adjusting for inflation.) But it would've been unreliable in a variety of ways: they wouldn't have the confidence of knowing I'm not a flake, I wouldn't have put in 8 hour days (on TTON, I probably averaged something like 25 hours a month, less than an hour a day), etc.

After making Primordia, I was convinced that if I went from "no one gets paid" to "everyone gets paid a little," I could make games much faster for not much money. But I'm now ~$8k into Fallen Gods, four years into development, and not a ton to show for it. Between the happy band of merry amateurs and the well-paid team of experts is a murky quagmire of low-cost risky investments, all of which take a lot of time and care and energy to manage.

I still think you could easily make Spaceventure for less than $500k. If nothing else, they could've just hired Dave Gilbert and his in-house artist Ben Chandler and writer Francisco Gonzalez (the trio that made Shardlight), probably for $100k total. But I can also see how you easily burn through the money hiring contractors who can't deliver what they promise.

I guess my bottom line is that the business/managerial side of game development is its own skillset separate from writing dialogue and designing puzzles. There's no reason to expect them to come in tandem, and in fact good reason to doubt they come in tandem. When you throw a big lump sum of money at someone who hasn't managed a game project in years, has never been responsible for the business side of things, and is unfamiliar with current development practices, the expected outcome should be more or less when a person with no money experience wins the lottery: feckless, reckless spending followed by a return to penury.
 

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Somebody needs to do the research and write a longform article about how the adventure gaming renaissance fizzled. So many questions you could ask all these developers.
 

MRY

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It is probably too close to painful events for people to talk candidly about, especially to the extent there are still potential liabilities to backers for unfulfilled projects.

One thing that I think cannot be underestimated is the Monty Haul problem applied to development. Making Primordia gave me enormous happiness based simply on: (1) finishing a point-and-click adventure (a goal since 7th grade at the latest); (2) releasing a commercial game that I myself developed (a goal since 4th grade at the latest); (3) making a game with such beautiful art, music, and voice acting (a goal since 12th grade at the latest); and (4) telling a story about various religio-philosophical ideals that I'd been thinking about for at least a couple decades. There are a lot of reasons why I haven't managed to release a game since, but one reason is that I can't get those highs again just by releasing another point-and-click adventure that is more or less as good as Primordia. There need to be different boxes that get checked -- whether it's making an RPG like Fallen Gods, a space opera like Star Captain, or a much more elaborate adventure game like Cloudscape.

When you take the greats of the Lucas / Sierra era, you get the same problem massively multiplied. When you made Space Quest IV, or QFG IV, or Grim Fandango, or Gabriel Knight, or whatever, then making some small adventure game with lower production values, more rudimentary puzzles, etc. holds no intrinsic "box checking" highs except maybe "managing a project without corporate oversight." There is incredible pressure to do something different -- flashy production values, non-adventure-gameplay elements, audience-broadening ideas, whatever. No one wants to be like Michael Jordan when he played for the Washington Wizards; you want to be like Michael Jordan the first comeback or at least Michael Jordan when he played for the White Sox. So all these guys and gals were not only taking on managerial and business responsibilities they might've never handled, they were all going to be inspired to do something other than a serviceable addition to their existing oeuvre.

Ron Gilbert is a somewhat special case -- partly because his ludography had already been so confused by Deathspank and The Cave (not to mention by the period of making kids' adventures) that simply making an enhanced version of Zak McKracken or whatever would suffice. But, yeah, I'm not at all surprised that these things have gone awry, while, by contrast, Quest for Infamy, Paradigm, Stasis, Alum, Dropsy, Nelly Cootalot, Resonance, and other "my first time releasing a commercial point-and-click" Kickstarters got finished. Heck, it's interesting that even among AGS games, the only one that hasn't yet delivered (AFAIK?) is Mage's Initiation -- Himalaya Studios already having released the commercial Al Emmo.

[Unrelatedly, another data point I just stumbled across on Wikipedia is that purportedly the budget on Day of the Tentacle was only $600,000.]
 
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Blaine

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But I can also see how you easily burn through the money hiring contractors who can't deliver what they promise.

Yes, for a long time now I've sensed a strong undercurrent of "we paid someone to do X, but they couldn't properly deliver" running through many of these troubled projects. It's an undercurrent because project runners virtually never come out and actually say so, for fairly obvious reasons.

This is just an unfounded personal theory, but I suspect there are a lot more low- or no-talent hacks floating around these days than there were in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

One thing that I think cannot be underestimated is the Monty Haul problem applied to development. Making Primordia gave me enormous happiness based simply on: (1) finishing a point-and-click adventure (a goal since 7th grade at the latest); (2) releasing a commercial game that I myself developed (a goal since 4th grade at the latest); (3) making a game with such beautiful art, music, and voice acting (a goal since 12th grade at the latest); and (4) telling a story about various religio-philosophical ideals that I'd been thinking about for at least a couple decades. There are a lot of reasons why I haven't managed to release a game since, but one reason is that I can't get those highs again just by releasing another point-and-click adventure that is more or less as good as Primordia. There need to be different boxes that get checked -- whether it's making an RPG like Fallen Gods, a space opera like Star Captain, or a much more elaborate adventure game like Cloudscape.

When you take the greats of the Lucas / Sierra era, you get the same problem massively multiplied. When you made Space Quest IV, or QFG IV, or Grim Fandango, or Gabriel Knight, or whatever, then making some small adventure game with lower production values, more rudimentary puzzles, etc. holds no intrinsic "box checking" highs except maybe "managing a project without corporate oversight." There is incredible pressure to do something different -- flashy production values, non-adventure-gameplay elements, audience-broadening ideas, whatever. No one wants to be like Michael Jordan when he played for the Washington Wizards; you want to be like Michael Jordan the first comeback or at least Michael Jordan when he played for the White Sox. So all these guys and gals were not only taking on managerial and business responsibilities they might've never handled, they were all going to be inspired to do something other than a serviceable addition to their existing oeuvre.

Interesting insights. Between incompetent contractors, the potentially overreaching drive to do something new, better, and different (often with a fraction of the resources, as you say), and mismanagement due to inexperience with management, we pretty much have our answer.

None of this is really surprising information, but my point is simply that the budget is rarely if ever the primary culprit. That said, even if no one is incompetent, no one overreaches, and there is no mismanagement, it may well be that a smaller team with a lower budget can't quite live up to the old games developed during the boom years, either in the developers' eyes, the fans' eyes, or both, but that can be chalked up to unrealistic expectations.

I'm not sure I really buy that wholesale, though. I'd absolutely put Primordia on about the same level as SQIV in virtually every category (aside from the obvious parodies, puns, and pop-culture references), and the latter's budget was far higher. Mocap, voice acting, and flash are heavily overrated, especially in the adventure game genre. Sierra always did push the envelope trying to incorporate every cutting-edge technology available, but that was a luxury they could afford (and also resulted in many unfortunate and very cheesy FMV implementations that have aged quite badly, but that's a different story).
 

MRY

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This is just an unfounded personal theory, but I suspect there are a lot more low- or no-talent hacks floating around these days than there were in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Undoubtedly. The industry has grown, as with an army, the "camp followers" grow even faster. There is now a bottomless pool of people capable of producing apparently acceptable work. I am old enough to remember when there was essentially no amateur on the Internet capable of producing pixel art on a NES/SNES level. As a result, guys like Jeff Hangartner (Tsugumo's Lair and later Pixelation) and Jaws-V-Soft got tons of attention. Basically they rediscovered the techniques that professionals were using, and the community grew. But now you can find essentially infinitely many pixel artists whose work is as good or better than those guys.

None of this is really surprising information, but my point is simply that the budget is rarely if ever the primary culprit.
Maybe, but I guess what I'm saying is that to make a Sierra-like game under Sierra-like conditions (meaning responsible developers working more or less business hours under more or less normal employment conditions) seems to require a Sierra-like budget. There are definitely a lot of efficiencies now (cheap engines, cheap productivity suites, tech like Skype or Google docs or whatever, cheap tax software, more user-friendly incorporation procedures, etc.), but at the end of the day, running a business like a business is really different from a group of amateurs screwing around in their free time. You can't just scale up from one to the other.

I'd absolutely put Primordia on about the same level as SQIV in virtually every category (aside from the obvious parodies, puns, and pop-culture references), and the latter's budget was far higher.

I was about to say that SQIV was many times larger than Primordia, but actually, looking at the rooms, it's not that much bigger than Primordia. Still, I think its puzzle complexity is much higher, and there's a lot more sprite animation, though Vic's art might have more character. In any event, I think the distortion is that Primordia's development cost was deflated by the fact that no one us was working under Sierra-like conditions. Also, I wouldn't accept a full-time adventure-game making job for $50k a year, or even $100k a year. It's just not that interesting to me as full-time gig. Though I've no doubt you could get someone better than me to work for those rates. :)

[EDIT: Also, looking at the graphics to Space Quest III, IV, and V, I am now even more profoundly sad about Spaceventure.]
 
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Blackthorne

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We made Quest for Infamy for an infinitesimal amount, especially compared to some of these other projects that haven't even delivered a game, which is a great personal accomplishment for me; I'm also a guy who wanted to make a "Sierra-Style" game since I was in 6th grade and poking around with BASIC. A lot of people contributed to Quest for Infamy, and many below any kind of scale you'd find in the games industry. It was a passionate project for everyone involved, and most of us knew that getting into it. There was the hope of money and success, but that hope was really more that we could use that success to make more games. I often wonder what kind of game we would have made if I had the $500,000 some of the "old-timers" got. (about 10x our budget) and would QFI have succumbed to bloat? Bad outsourcing decisions? There are a myriad of problems that can come with having TOO much money and too little control... I really like how QFI turned out - there are a few things I'd change and add now, but hindsight it 20/20. (Hell, if I could get $100,000 to go back and do a "special edition" of QFI, I'd jump on that chance. This is just daydreaming, though) But all in all, QFI turned out well for us and I think being creative in the face of a limited budget contributed to that.

We'd had the fortune and luck to have been working together for almost 9 years when we decided to make QFI - having done remakes of King's Quest III and Space Quest 2, we knew how to make and produce a game in this environment and climate. Most of these old developers basically crawled out of the sludge with little insight into how games were made today, how the fans even liked or remembered their games, and they plodded into it with the previous mindsets established by the companies they worked for. That just didn't work in this manner, ala Kickstarter, etc.

I'm sad that the excitement for adventure games has fizzled out somewhat, and much of it due to old-devs who over-promised and under delivered. Mark pointed out so many amazing games made in the wake of their failures... yet they're overlooked because they're not made by semi-deified game designers from 27 years ago. Which is a shame; a lot of folks here didn't overlook these games, which is awesome, but the larger part of a possible fandom did.

So, I know I plan to keep on making games, no matter how long it takes, because I enjoy playing them and making them. And that hasn't waned in the almost 30 years since I've started playing Adventure Games. I hope other small devs continue to do it too, and that somehow we can reach a medium where we can make our games and receive the financial support we need to make them, even in our spare time. I'm not looking to buy a small uninhabited island in the South Pacific to christen "Steveland" but helping to pay some of these nagging monthly bills would be nice!
 

Boleskine

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I disagree with blaming the old devs for any and all failures of adventure games to find wider audiences in the past few years. Everyone got caught up in the excitement of the kickstarter renaissance, and as a result people overestimated how popular adventure games could be. They were and still are a mostly forgotten and niche genre. Double Fine's kickstarter was not so much an adventure game pitch as it was a pitch for a well-known studio behind some recent cult classics to try making a retro-styled game and document the entire process.

I do agree with the criticisms of the management and planning on Spaceventure and Hero-U. Both projects came to the table with almost no preparation but received a lot of money because of the name recognition, nostalgia, and related factors. I can sympathize that for smaller developers it's frustrating to see that, especially if they've done more work and development before asking for money (by necessity, not choice). I just don't agree that the failure of Spaceventure and Hero-U cast a huge shadow over every other adventure game project or the genre as a whole, or that they've made people less willing to back smaller projects. Many kickstarters have come and gone in the last 5 years, and regardless of Spaceventure and Hero-U it was going to be more difficult for those later campaigns to get funded simply because there was more competition and less visibility. There have been successes and failures, and nobody outside of communities like this really talks or cares about Spaceventure or Hero-U anyway. I doubt these projects specifically have had any effect on other projects' relative outcomes or kickstarter in general.

If one looks hard enough they could probably find numerous examples of smaller kickstarters failing to finish their games. Here are a few that have not yet delivered:
  • Jack Houston and the Necronauts
  • Mage's Initiation
  • The St. Christopher's School Lockdown
  • Asylum (budget isn't quite "small" but definitely not a big project from old devs)
  • Bolt Riley (the game was released to Early Access on Steam, but judging reviews and comments it's just a demo with a few screens and has been abandoned by the devs)
It would be just as unfair to blame these projects for what happens with other smaller adventure kickstarters, and that would be pointless anyway because many of the smaller projects have been released and enjoyed modest success. Regardless, each developer is ultimately responsible for their own project and shouldn't blame others for their own shortcomings.

Here are bigger kickstarters from old devs that did complete and deliver:
  • Broken Sword 5
  • Broken Age (yes they went way over budget and split into two parts, but they DID finish the game in the end)
  • Tesla Effect
  • Obduction
  • Pinkerton Road (Moebius and GK remake)
  • Thimbleweed Park
It's clear that Spaceventure and Hero-U have struggled because the Two Guys and Coles have not been active in the gaming industry. Their programming, writing, and art skills can still be great but the business has changed drastically since they left Sierra. On the other hand Jane Jensen did continue making games after her Sierra days (Gray Matter, various casual/hidden object games), and she teamed with Phoenix Online who also had some recent experience (and beat Tim Schafer to Kickstarter by 2-3 months for Cognition). Moebius didn't sell or review well, but Jensen should get credit for having a plan going into her campaign and having private funding already secured. Her original pitch for the "CSG" was confusing to some but otherwise her studio released Moebius within 2 years and the GK remake about 6 months later. Al Lowe and Josh Mandel also deserve praise, but the saga of Replay Games is another matter.

The same thing goes for Broken Sword, Tesla Effect, Obduction, and Thimbleweed Park. All of those developers have continued working in the games industry since the old days. Charles Cecil and Revolution continued porting the BS games to different platforms after the series' 4th game in 2006. Chris Jones and Big Finish were making hidden object games for a few years before their Kickstarter. Rand Miller and Cyan were porting Myst and Riven to mobile platforms. Of course Ron Gilbert has worked on many games and finished The Cave 1-2 years before Thimbleweed Park.

My point is, I don't think it's fair to blame "old devs" for adventure games not being more popular since the kickstarter craze. That's just a trend that's been in motion long before kickstarter came along, but of course the genre is not dead or dying. Most of the old devs have been very successful precisely because of their years of experience in the gaming industry. Outside of adventure games this is more obvious with Fargo, Obsidian's many Black Isle alumni, Jordan Weisman, and so on. Of course the name recognition helps them get a good start, but as we've seen simply receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars doesn't guarantee success down the road.

The Coles and Two Guys are more of an exception when it comes to the old devs because they did not continue working in the gaming industry after Sierra. Another interesting example is John Romero, who has been working in gaming but launched a fairly lazy campaign last year that he had to cancel due to lack of interest and harsh feedback. In that case name recognition did not give him a free pass. So I'd argue that while people are going to be more careful with how they pledge, they will in almost all cases respond positively to a project that shows they've done a lot of work or simply has a very strong pitch and clear goals (like Strafe).

The old devs are good people. They didn't come to kickstarter to scam anyone. It's just that the Two Guys and Coles saw what Al and Jane were doing, received tons of encouragement from old fans to also jump into the fray, then did so with almost no planning. Sadly the last five years shows just how unprepared they were, but I highly doubt their troubled development has spread bad karma to any other projects or adventure games in general.
 
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Blaine

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I'm not entirely sure who you're arguing with, because I haven't seen anyone actually making the points you're refuting. Just as an example:

The old devs are good people. They didn't come to kickstarter to scam anyone.

Who are you addressing? Who said they were bad people or had any intention of scamming anyone?
 

Boleskine

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Read the post above mine.
I'm sad that the excitement for adventure games has fizzled out somewhat, and much of it due to old-devs who over-promised and under delivered.

That is the point I responded to. I'm not really "arguing with" anyone, just having a discussion.

My comment about the old devs being good people is just an addendum to my train of thought. At worst one could consider the Spaceventure and Hero-U projects to be soulless cash grabs that capitalized on a wave of nostalgia for 90s adventure games (I have seen some people suggest this elsewhere, like on the kickstarter comments sections). Nobody needs to have explicitly suggested that in here for me to make a simple statement reinforcing my own belief that their woes are due to naivete rather than any bad faith going into kickstarter.
 

Blaine

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I did read it. Over-promising and under-delivering doesn't necessarily mean they're bad people or that it was done intentionally.

Blame is being placed on phenomena that are largely unpredictable or uncontrollable (or used to be), not on people... well, except for talentless hack contractors, who are responsible for being bad at what they do. We don't even know who they are, though, just that they're a part of the equation.

I see what you mean, but "I disagree with blaming the old devs" is pretty clear-cut.
 

Blackthorne

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Just for clarity, I don't think the old devs were malicious in intent in anyway; there was no scamming intended. Some didn't do their homework, though, or properly vet producing partners and/or team members they hired. I also don't think they're entirely responsible for the waning interest in the adventure game revival, but the delays, etc. definitely contributed to it. Boleskine pointed out a lot of great games above, all received with varying degrees of admiration and success. I will say Jane Jensen quit the game because of the reception of both Moebius and the Gabriel Knight remake. And Replay's LSL... it's just sad how that all went down. All in all, there's been some hits and misses from Kickstarted adventure games, and the level of enthusiasm has been reduced greatly since 2012! I can't believe it's been five years since we first put together our demo/pitch for Quest for Infamy. Those were great times, and definitely different times.

I hope the pendulum swings back yet again, and a larger section of the gaming public finds love for this genre again. I also hope projects like SpaceVenture and Hero-U ARE good... because at this point, the genre needs more winners than it needs more losers.

Bt
 

Boleskine

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I also don't think they're entirely responsible for the waning interest in the adventure game revival, but the delays, etc. definitely contributed to it.

If possible, could you specify reasons you feel that way? I get the sentiment you're expressing, but I just haven't seen any tangible or measurable negative effect that a few troubled projects have had on other adventure games, campaigns, or the genre. However I also don't think the adventure revival mattered much to people who weren't already fans. Maybe you, MRY, Dave Gilbert, or other devs have some insights or data on how the size of the adventure game audience has changed in the last five years?

The Double Fine kickstarter obviously brought a huge influx of backers to kickstarter, paving the way for other projects (big or small). Even then campaigns like Pinkerton Road, Tesla Effect, or Spaceventure struggled at points. Here are some pledge stats:
  • Double Fine: 87142 backers, $38.29 average
  • Pinkerton Road: 5836 backers, $74.59 average
  • Tesla Effect: 6963 backers, $85.90 average
  • Spaceventure: 10809 backers, $49.94 average
  • Hero-U: 6093 backers, $67.15 average
My impression has always been that the Double Fine campaign wasn't really about adventure games for the majority of their backers. Those people were just excited by the idea behind the campaign (no publishers, film the process). There was that smaller group of us who did get excited when Tim said he was going to make an old-school point-and-click adventure. For us it felt like a revival when we saw the other old dinosaurs come out to play. The diehard adventure game fans did their best to keep those projects afloat - average pledges on Pinkerton Road and Tesla Effect are really high. I remember in those comment sections people were also encouraging one another to help out smaller projects, too.

I just don't agree that delays and disappointments on projects like Hero-U or Spaceventure has caused interest in adventure games to go down. If such an argument was to be made one could point at Broken Age (over budget, split in two parts, mixed reviews) but I don't think that much of a negative effect outside of people being disappointed with Tim himself. Overall Double Fine that opened the kickstarter door for everyone else to follow, but eventually people developed fatigue and went broke from pledging to so many projects.

Adventure game popularity definitely spiked in mid-2012, but to me it simply returned to its previous normal maybe with a slight boost. Basically the 2012 adventure revival was a flash in the pan (with rare exceptions later on like Dreamfall Chapters or Thimbleweed Park). It seems in the excitement of 2012 everyone overestimated how commercially successful adventure games could be, not considering how much more crowded both the adventure genre as well as indie gaming would become in the couple years that followed.

Ultimately I respectfully disagree with you and don't think it's fair or accurate to suggest adventure game x or y didn't sell as many copies as they could have partially because of a few bungled projects. I view it in the opposite way: without that short-lived revival many of these games would not have been made in the first place, so overall the effect has been a net positive for the genre.
 

Blackthorne

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I don't think it's as reductive as game x or y didn't sell as many copies as they could have partially because of a few bungled projects; but enthusiasm for more adventure games, and newer adventure games, has noticeably waned in the general public since 2012, and a lot of the people whose enthusiasm has lessened have been disheartened by some bungled kickstarters. You definitely have a good point there at the end with "without that short-lived revival many of these games would not have been made in the first place, so overall the effect has been a net positive for the genre." and that is also true and probably the most optimistic way to look at the situation.

I've been involved with the Adventure Game scene for a long time now, I've seen it wax and wane many many times - 2012 was the apex of when many of us thought there might be a larger commercial viability to adventure games. Perhaps the sentiment was too great... it's settled down into a trough in some ways, but the cream always rises: there's still new games being made, and some great ones coming up in the future. This is a great discussion, though, and I'm glad SOMEONE somewhere is engaging in it. I feel like all my old forums and avenues where we discussed such things have all gone away, and I'm glad adventure game fans on the codex still like to talk about these things. (Even when we might disagree.)
 

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I'd actually view the current moment as one of the lowest points for adventure games since around 2000, post Grim Fandango. I don't think you can pin the blame on any single reason ... quite a few factors went into it. Telltale (who, believe it or not were once viewed as saviors of the genre in a way) stopped making adventure games, the 'enthusiastic amateur' scene with AGS has mostly fizzled after a great run, and until Thimbleweed Park all of the adventure game Kickstarters produced either nothing, or stuff ranging from garbage to mediocre. I'd argue that half-baked stuff like Moebius and BS5, and trash like Broken Age did more harm to enthusiasm for the genre than the ones that haven't been completed though.
 

MRY

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I think of what Blackthorne is talking about more as a missed opportunity, and sometimes missed opportunities go beyond just the the loss of what could have been to also include the loss of the hope of such a thing happening. A person who has all but the last winning lottery number and watches the wrong last number come up doesn't just miss out on the jackpot; he also may come away dispirited about the prospect that his life ever will turn around. So too, I think, with adventures.

At least for me, I hoped that the combination of three prominent QFG-clones, including one by the Coles, would prove an entry point into the genre for people who had been scared off by lies about impenetrable puzzles and lousy interfaces, or a reentry point for people who had drifted off to RPGs (myself included, frankly). I also hoped that a high-budget "old school" Double Fine adventure would reinvigorate the traditional Lucas Arts style point-and-click. While I now associate Double Fine mostly with incomplete, fairly unattractive games that get by on "whimsy," at the time of the DFA Kickstarter, I associated the company primarily with Psychonauts, one of my all-time favorite story-telling games with fantastic environments and pretty good gameplay; and I associated Tim Schafer with a two adventure games with great mood, if not entirely great puzzles (FT and GF) and one with famously good puzzles (DoTT).

There seemed to be a real chance that these games' successes would expand the adventure game market, possibly displacing the AGS bargain-bin commercial games, but on balance turning out for the better. In practice, however, only QFI really delivered on its promise, and two haven't come out at all, and no such renaissance really happened.

A second trend, in my view, is consistent with Aeschylus's point re AGS fizzling. I don't follow the community any more, but there have been a few really promising people to emerge from that (like Matt Frith with his Theropods game). Still, what strikes me is that Dave was able finance WEG's growth by publishing three titles (Gemini Rue, Resonance, Primordia) released practically in the same 12-month span, all developed independently from WEG with minimal outside support. Each of those games reached a larger audience than prior AGS/WEG releases. In the five years since then, he relied on titles in-house via his salaried team (Ben and Francisco), with the partial exception of Technobabylon (where WEG provided coding and art around the skeleton of what had previously been a freeware series). As far as I can tell, there are no third-party games in the pipeline for WEG. (I assume that Lamplight City is another in-house game like A Golden Wake and Shardlight.) I think that partly reflects Dave's being able to rely on his back catalogue to fund his own development, and I think he enjoys making games more than publishing them (who doesn't?). But it also partly reflects that in 2011, Dave could go to the AGS forums and at the drop of a hat find three commercial-quality titles, something that I don't think is possible any more. It's too bad because my understanding is that AGS today is much, much better than it was when we made Primordia in terms of compatibility and stability. Meanwhile, WEG's next major in-house title is a narrative combat-free RPG with streamlined puzzles, which sounds more like a hybrid QFG/TellTale title than a continuation of the classic genre.

Still, Thimbleweed Park has been a roaring success, and that alone means that we should see at least one more traditional game even in this trough!
 
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Boleskine

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I agree with the missed opportunity angle, but adventure games must be in better shape than they were before 2012. Maybe we're just in a lull right now - many of the games kickstarted during 2012-2013 surge have come out, and the pace at which new titles were announced or crowdfunded inevitably slowed down after the spike.

Putting aside financial success, here are some kickstarter adventure games that have released:
  • Detective Grimoire
  • Shadowgate
  • AR-K
  • Nelly Cootaloot
  • Alum
  • The Slaughter
  • Read Only Memories
  • Her Majesty's Spiffing
  • STASIS
  • The Book of Unwritten Tales 2
  • Dropsy
  • Dead Synchronicity
  • Duke Grabowski
  • The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça & Pizzaboy
  • Goetia
  • The Eyes of Ara
  • Quern - Undying Thoughts
  • Demetrios
coming soon:
  • Tsioque
  • The Journey Down Chapter 3
If there was potential a few years ago to expand the adventure game market, Telltale realized it by removing the barrier that modern gamers would have to the genre: puzzles. Now Dave is doing the same and Francisco also said a similar thing about his upcoming game. I was also hopeful that Telltale's success and the kickstarter-fueled adventure revival would lead to a new golden age for classic point and clicks. Even if everything didn't work out exactly that way, I still say the end result is positive: more games that could not have otherwise been made, and at least a few new eyes on the genre.

At the same the decline of Daedalic and Dave's shift away from puzzle-driven adventure games might suggest a downward trend. I'm of the opinion that after the 2012 spike, things settled back down to about what they were before. Diehard adventure game fans still love adventure games. The casuals who stopped by for Double Fine Adventure have settled on Telltale-style games or moved on altogether. Who knows, maybe we'll have another mini revival. Hero-U looks in better shape than it's been, and at least they seem to be on track for finishing the game at some point. I don't expect Spaceventure to ever finish - maybe they'll release a first episode then fade away after that. Asylum has potential to be a flagship release for adventure and horror fans, but I have no idea what they've been doing for the last couple years.

Overall, adventure games simply still being alive seems like a miracle, and I think that's due to the floodgates that Double Fine opened. We may be back to being a small pond, but we're still here.
:positive:
 
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MRY

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Well, the negative assessment would be that it is like when a dying tree puts out too few leaves in spring to survive another year. "It's more leaves than the tree had in winter!" may be true, may still be a sign that things have gotten worse. Still, the genre has survived many other death pronouncements, and I'm sure that as the tools get better, and cheaper, and the ranks of artists and coders continue to swell, there will always be adventure games getting made.
 

Boleskine

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But have things gotten worse than pre-2012, or have they returned to normal relative to the anomalous, unsustainable spike of 2012-13? Sure there have been higher profile missed opportunities to expand the point-and-click audience, but the smaller games found a way (even if they didn't put a dent into the market or had disappointing sales).

The adventure genre could definitely be healthier than it is now, but it's still healthier than pre-2012. My takeaway is that, with few exceptions, puzzle-oriented point-and-click adventure games just don't sell very well outside of the core audience (unless they're hidden object games). That was the case before 2012 and it's still the case now. In retrospect it was a really long shot that Broken Age, Tesla Effect, Moebius, Hero-U, Spaceventure, etc. could have all been successful enough to power a genuine revival.
 

MRY

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Worse in the sense that the white knight you thought was going to ride in and save the day turned out to be Don Quixote.

I am curious what would happen if the developer of Gemini Rue or Resonance released an adventure now -- would they capture comparable audiences, or has the market shrunk since then? My assumption with regards to WWS has always been the latter: any adventure we release will sell many fewer copies than Primordia, even if it is better.
 

almondblight

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My assumption with regards to WWS has always been the latter: any adventure we release will sell many fewer copies than Primordia, even if it is better.

Didn't you mention that sales for Primordia have been relatively steady?
 

MRY

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Yes, a fact I attribute to having achieved critical mass. (Perhaps "critical" is the wrong word, given critics' view of Primordia.) I assume a big part of the problem these other games are having is getting the same number of eyes on them.
 

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