I've posted about this before, but a few quick thoughts:
- Up through the mid-to-late 90s, adventure games were (in general) the computer games with the highest production values and strongest narrative. This is often ignored because now the VGA-era art is viewed as retro and inexpensive, rather than very fancy, and every genre has adopted adventure game (and perhaps we might say console RPG) levels of narrative. Playing, say, King's Quest IV today, it doesn't seem like a cinematic blockbuster, but a goofball low-budget title; but at the time, it was the former, not the latter. The heirs to this aspect of adventure games are cinematic shooters, narrative action-adventure games, and streamlined cinematic RPGs.
- These other genres have a significant advantage over adventure games, however, which is that they are capable of delivering current-year cinematic blockbuster audiovisualnarrative experience
in a summer tentpole narrative genre. Adventure games by and large can't tell action-movie stories, war stories, fantasy epics, or superhero stories. Action-adventures, cinematic shooter, and streamlined cinematic RPGs can tell those kinds of stories really easily. This makes mass-marketability much easier in those genres than in adventures.
- I would submit that it's no coincidence that the last adventure games to have real mainstream significance were Telltale's adaptations of comic books, action movies, fantasy epics, etc. Those games fit the criterion of the major classics (i.e., cutting edge production values) and managed to tell summer tentpole type stories.
- Looking at Telltale and at the adventure games from the 80s to 90s, it is impossible to know whether people were playing those games because they liked adventure gameplay, or because they yearned for high-production narrative games and were willing to tolerate adventure gameplay. (Myst is probably the most dramatic example of this -- clearly huge numbers of people bought Myst not because they liked Myst-like gameplay, but because it was a tech demo for CD ROM audiovisualnarrative capabilities.)
- If you make a 90s-style adventure game today, you are selling something totally different than the exact same game in the 90s. You are selling something with quite low production values, and you are selling something that actually has
less narrative (and less sort of "traditional" narrative) than games with much higher production values. Thus, whereas in the 90s people might settle for adventure gameplay to get something special in terms of production values and narrative, now people are settling for lower production values and lesser narrative in order to get adventure gameplay. This is a totally different proposition.
- Further, most adventure games today have inferior design to the memorable 90s adventure. That is unsurprising because while art, sound, and narrative creation are skills that are fostered at least as much if not more than they were in the 90s, designing adventure games is not. A major adventure game in the 90s would be developed by a professional designer immersed in other professional designers' puzzles and works. These days, it seems like the majority of adventure games are made by first- or second-time amateur designers (like me), working mostly in isolation, and recalling adventures they played many years ago. Thus, you are selling
inferior adventure gameplay when that is the factor that is supposed to draw people in, despite inferior production values and narrative.
- Hidden object games have siphoned off some fans of adventure gameplay, namely those who enjoy studying pretty scenes and finding hotspots. Hidden object games centralize this aspect of adventure gameplay in a way that makes it less frustrating. (For instance, the player is generally told what he needs to find, how many objects are left, etc.)
- The result is that the people who are going to buy adventures today are going to be fairly hardcore fans, motivated by a mix of nostalgia, contrarianism, and idiosyncrasy. The market for such people is fairly limited.
- That said, Steam has massively expanded the market. Thus, for instance, Primordia sold many, many more copies than every LucasArts adventure from the Golden Age. Apparently Monkey Island 2
sold 25,000 copies. Primordia has sold ~260,000 copies, so more than 10 times as many. Of course, Monkey Island 2 sold at a much higher price (Primordia has sold on average for less than $3). I expect Strangeland to sell fewer copies (but by all means,
wishlist and buy it!!!).
- Even at Primordia's success rate, though, making adventure games professionally is not really an economically reasonable proposition. It works for WEG in large part because Dave doubles as a publisher. The labor:return ratio on
developing isn't enough to go from passionate amateur to professional in most cases, but as a publisher, you can increase the value for the developer and skim enough of the profits to support your own development. In essence, WEG is capturing the return on a good chunk of the free labor of amateur developers (while also increasing the return to the developers on the remaining free labor), and that enables WEG to develop games in parallel. I don't think WEG could sustain itself if it operated like Sierra or Lucas (multiple develop teams paid a salary). There was some effort to do that with Francisco (the most prolific WEG publishee), and it didn't pan out.
- Other than making adventure games that are more beautiful, more compelling, etc., I don't think there is any way to expand the market without abandoning inventory-based puzzles. (It's no coincidence that Unavowed, which largely does away with inventory puzzles, is WEG's most successful in-house title.) Whether that is "dumbing down," I don't know. You can have very challenging puzzles that are not inventory based. (I don't think there's an inventory in The Witness, for instance?) But whether it's "dumbing down" or not, it would lose what I consider to be a key aspect of this genre (my love for Loom notwithstanding).
- From interacting with testers on Strangeland, I have become somewhat disheartened about the genre. Despite my love for it, I'm not sure that I could bring myself to make another adventure. There are not that many players left who like traditional P&C puzzles, even among our core fans. Designing those puzzles is a huge effort for me (as is writing the myriad "wrong solution" quips that nudge you in the right direction, the in-game hint system, etc.), and it's not at all clear that the effort is worth it. I probably would rather spend the time crafting RPG-style alternative paths and C&C, where you use recurring systems rather than bespoke puzzles.