KickStarter Jane Jensen's Pinkerton Road Studio & Moebius Closed Down

[Telengard]

then the 'real world' settings.

That's an interesting thing to say, given that the genre has become associated with Nancy Drew-type real world "girls' games". Perhaps that's an incorrect association.

That's tough to definitively say. While Nancy Drew games sell shockingly lower than anything DeepOcean mentioned (downwards of a tenth), they're short games with a tight turnaround, allowing Her Interactive to have made a whole heck of a lot of them in a short space of time (much like the books they're based on). Mixed with a very loyal Mother/Daughter audience, there's money to be made there. Safe, trusted, fun children's brand kind of thing.

It's the suite of games approach, which can make them seem like they're everywhere. But at the same time, they're nowhere near bestsellers, and not pretending to be.

 

[Aeschylus]

There's a pretty simple explanation: Moebius was a 5/10 or 6/10 game at best (on an actual 1-10 scale). And while GK is a great game, there was no need for a remake, particularly not one that made the visuals worse.
It hurts me a bit to say this as someone who really loves Jensen's work for Sierra, but the studio got exactly what it had earned.

 

[MRY]

I think the celebrity developed adventure games generally would've fared better if they were low-resolution and more retro in design. It's really expensive and hard to make high res look anything other than horrible. (One of the many reasons Stasis is so impressive.)

 

[Hegel]

Broken sword 5: Owners: 124,431 ± 8,669
Hope they turned a profit.

How many copies did Broken Sword 2 sell?

 

[MRY]

How many copies did Broken Sword 2 sell?

Per Wikipedia, "According to Charles Cecil, it sold around one million copies in the mid-1990s."

 

[Hegel]

That's a lot, I guess the market has become more fine-grained.

 

[Barbarian]

Broken sword 5: Owners: 124,431 ± 8,669
Hope they turned a profit.

It sure did. Like I said, Cecil is competent as both a business man and a developer(well, despite his shortcomings in BS 3 and 4 that is).

Remember that is only Steam sales. The game was ported to android and ios and as far as I can tell the mobile ports might have sold even better than pc/mac. And that is not counting other oulets that sold the game. 125 thousand copies by itself is quite a lot for an adventure game in this day and age, specially one that was pre-funded through kickstarter.

 

[Barbarian]

And unlike the other devs who tried a comeback Cecil has already announced that he is still at it. There are plans for a new BASS and more Broken Sword sequels.

 

[DaveGilbert]

Adventure games are definitely niche, and thank heaven for that. I certainly wouldn't want to compete with Lucas or Sierra in their prime!

In all seriousness though, this news is saddening but not really unexpected. Trying to sustain a large company on these games is really difficult, if not impossible. The only reason we (meaning Wadjet Eye) has stayed around is because we've kept our company super small. It's just me, my wife, and a few contractors. We're very careful about how we spend our money (which is why we don't do localized or boxed versions, despite numerous requests for them). Our games will never be huge hits even by indie standards, but we're able to live and support our family and eek out a reasonably comfortable middle-class life. And that suits us just fine.

I'm sad but I can't blame Dave Gilbert for wanting that TellTale money, adventure games are even on a worse shape than traditional RPGs.

I might regret engaging with this, but... um, huh?

It sure did. Like I said, Cecil is competent as both a business man and a developer(well, despite his shortcomings in BS 3 and 4 that is).

Remember that is only Steam sales. The game was ported to android and ios and as far as I can tell the mobile ports might have sold even better than pc/mac. And that is not counting other oulets that sold the game. 125 thousand copies by itself is quite a lot for an adventure game in this day and age, specially one that was pre-funded through kickstarter.

Fun fact. My wife worked on a mobile port of Broken Sword back in 2005 or so, back before iPhones were even a thing. Just goes to show how forward thinking Charles Cecil was.

I've rallied about this before, but Steam Spy is a HORRIBLE indicator of how a game is actually doing. Some of our games have really comparatively low "owner" numbers on Steamspy but are actually some of our biggest earners. And there are some games with really high numbers that bombed so hard they almost shut off our lights. There's no way to really know for sure. And as a developer who is a bit uncomfortable with all this data being public, that also suits me just fine.

-Dave

 

[OndrejSc]

There's no way to really know for sure. And as a developer who is a bit uncomfortable with all this data being public, that also suits me just fine.

-Dave

Publish it, you'll feel better.

 

[DeepOcean]

I might regret engaging with this, but... um, huh?

I don't like most Wadjet Eye games from a gameplay point o view, they feel very light on gameplay, that was what I meant by going after TellTale money, it wasn't a direct comparison, at least your games have gameplay even if I wished they were more challenging. Puzzle light adventure games unfortunately are becomming the rule these days, it Isn't just a choice of your company but is widespread. Anyway, I see you place alot of effort on your games, I'm not questioning their quality maybe I'm just some grognard with outdated tastes that isn't even worthy of having a product taking my tastes in consideration as some RPG designers seem to think, maybe I should let this video game thing to the new cool kids for once.

 

[Barbarian]

Fun fact. My wife worked on a mobile port of Broken Sword back in 2005 or so, back before iPhones were even a thing. Just goes to show how forward thinking Charles Cecil was.

It was also ported to several consoles and handheld consoles. I know there are costs for ports and remasters but they must pay off very well in the end considering the man keeps doing it. Cecil keeps a steady cash flow from games developed nearly 2 decades ago and that's quite an achievement. Talk about putting value into your assets.

 

[MRY]

I've rallied about this before, but Steam Spy is a HORRIBLE indicator of how a game is actually doing. Some of our games have really comparatively low "owner" numbers on Steamspy but are actually some of our biggest earners. And there are some games with really high numbers that bombed so hard they almost shut off our lights. There's no way to really know for sure.

Bundles and discounts make units sold pretty opaque. Also, Steamspy's sample seems weird -- I swear in the time we've sold like 20k+ copies of Primordia, the Steamspy dial moved from like 72k to 74k or something ridiculous perhaps based on over-sampling then under-sampling.

 

[DaveGilbert]

Steamspy is bizarre. I have no idea how their algorithm works. Technobabylon sold around 2-3k units during a recent sale and the Steamspy owner number went DOWN.

 

[MRY]

I think it is just based on what (public) Steam user profiles were sampled in the last assay. My basic understanding is that basically takes the percentage of sampled profiles that have the game and multiplies that by the total number of Steam users, and declares that the number owned. If anything, it's astonishing that it's even remotely close. I find that Steamcharts is a very good indicator of how a game is selling at any point in time, but it's basically impossible to aggregate into meaningful totals.

 

[Wizfall]

Not to say but Cecil with both BASS and Broken Sword (well mostly BS1) had perfect product for modern audience.
If some old school adventure games had a chance to stay strong today it was those (especially BS1) : great arts all over (graphism and musics), quality stories/dialogs, themes/setting/atmosphere that aged very well and easy gameplay (very suitable to mobile on top).

I'm in good spot for saying this because as an old gamer but who only have quite recently come to adventure game, i enjoyed those greatly while i could not get into older adventure game like the Monkey Island (most of them i just don't like the setting and i like easier gameplay too to be honest. I have no interest in Telltale games though, the adventure game feeling is totally lost in those).

To Cecil credit, he exploited his asset very well, especially porting BS to mobile very early on and racking a ton of money doing so.
But in my mind he had the right products to do it.

Edit : also BS5 was very bad (the worst in the serie by far IMO) and this is coming from someone who dislike 3D adventure games a lot.

 

[DaveGilbert]

According to my wife, Broken Sword/BASS/etc were created in a VERY easy to port coding environment, so it was a very small time/money investment for them to port to everything they could. If AGS games weren't such a royal PITA to port, we'd do the same!

 

[Blackthorne]

For us, we're keeping our projects and teams smaller; Quest for Infamy was a HUGE undertaking, and we made it mostly from passion. I'm glad we did, though - it wasn't a financial juggernaut, but we're still around and making games, and we'll probably remain so for a while. We probably won't have a huge output of games over the years, but we'll keep making them.


Bt

 

[Name]

I remember there is a mention here that Jane Jensen devoted her time to writing gay erotica because of depression.

 

[SniperHF]

Steamspy is bizarre. I have no idea how their algorithm works. Technobabylon sold around 2-3k units during a recent sale and the Steamspy owners went DOWN

It's the sample, it's not always the same. There's a margin of error listed by the owners and it can be a pretty big number. For Technobabylon it's almost a third of the total owners. That's pretty huge.

I've rallied about this before, but Steam Spy is a HORRIBLE indicator of how a game is actually doing.

It's surely better than counting active players like we used to do.

 

[JarlFrank]

It's just me, my wife, and a few contractors. We're very careful about how we spend our money (which is why we don't do localized or boxed versions, despite numerous requests for them).

Just asking hypothetically, if someone offered you to do German translations of your games on a royalty basis (like, say, 10% of profits made from sales to Germany), or for a very reasonable low fixed price (say, 500 bucks flat instead of a cent-per-word rate), how would you react? It's one of the biggest markets for adventure games and some players here tend to prefer playing games in their own language.

 

[Barbarian]

I remember there is a mention here that Jane Jensen devoted her time to writing gay erotica because of depression.

Yeah, she mentioned that in her blog a couple of years ago. She started writing that stuff to help her deal with bouts of depression(???) and fell in love with it so much that she now devotes most of her time to it. If you ask me she should have kept that shit private, since it is quite embarrassing. She still uses a pen name so I guess at least originally she knew that very well. And the gay fetish quite obviously reared its ugly head quite prominently in Moebius(it was cringeworthy). Must be a big part of her life right now or something.

It is a shame that she will be doing that instead of working on games now. Gray Matter showed she still had it. Never read her "serious" novels, but I assume they are infinitely better than the gay softporn shit as well.

 

[abnaxus]

Guess never a Gray Matter 2 then.

 

[DaveGilbert]

Just asking hypothetically, if someone offered you to do German translations of your games on a royalty basis (like, say, 10% of profits made from sales to Germany), or for a very reasonable low fixed price (say, 500 bucks flat instead of a cent-per-word rate), how would you react? It's one of the biggest markets for adventure games and some players here tend to prefer playing games in their own language.

Honestly I would still say no. It's not just a matter of translate the game and you're done. There's often a lot of programming that you need to do internally to get it working right, programming which often goes beyond the scope of most translators. So it's not just a money investment, it's a time investment. There's a German translation of Gemini Rue that was spearheaded by one of the biggest adventure game companies in Germany (Daedalic). Even though they did all the translations (and voice acting as well!) there were a lot of things that I had to recode myself. AThis resulted in almost a month of extra work for myself, but I put up with it because translating into German seemed like a sure bet.

Sadly, it didn't earn us a dime. If our best-selling game, translated into the language of the biggest market for adventure games, spearheaded by the biggest company IN that market couldn't move the needle, it seemed pointless to try and do it again with any other game/language. I've always felt bad about that, and it's always been the biggest complaint we get from players (alongside "Why no boxed versions?"). But like I said, we're a tiny shop with limited resources and need to focus our efforts to where they do the most good. Translating has proven to be... not that.

To be fair, our difficulty is mostly the fault of the AGS engine. It makes translating games much more difficult than it needs to be. We could be wrong about the market, but in hearing the experiences of other developers we feel we made the right call.

 

[DaveGilbert]

Whatever happened to the shift away from AGS?

TLDR version: I'm sticking with the devil I know.

Long version: I took some time off last summer and took a Unity class, with my short-term goal being to get the first scene in Blackwell Epiphany working in the engine. Suffice to say, it didn't go too well. After spending weeks of trying to get the engine to do the most basic things (things that I originally learned in a weekend when I first picked up AGS in 2001) I decided that it just wasn't worth it. AGS has its problems, but so does Unity. I'd just be trading one set of problems for another. At least with AGS, I know what those problems are and I know (mostly) how to deal with them. So I decided returned to AGS.

Out of the 100 things I need from an adventure game engine, AGS does 95 of them. The remaining 5 are sometimes so hair-pullingly aggravating that I wish I could set fire to it. The difficulty in porting, the lack of save-game compatibility between versions, the translation difficulties, its unpredictable steam integration, and its inefficient memory allocation (throw a few full-screen sized animations with alpha channels and watch it choke) are all deal-breakers for some people, but I can usually work around them. And so I do.

I'm more of a designer/writer than a programmer. I know AGS VERY well at this point, so using it lets me focus on the stuff that I'm actually good at. Learning a whole new engine while designing a whole new game was a bit too much for me to handle. If I ever found myself with an actual budget, I would hire someone to code our games in Unity or just plain build us a better engine. But until that day comes, I'm staying on the AGS train.