Adventure Gamers - Forums

You first presented a premise that adventure games are dead. Then you went on and elaborated on why that is. Well I think you are basing your whole argument on a
false premise. Adventure games are far from dead. Let me just name some of the examples of the last few years:
Broken Age, Dreamfall Chapters, Kentucky Route Zero, Walking Dead 1/2, Game of Thrones, Fables Wolf Among Us, Stanley Parable, Gone Home, Resonance, Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls, Broken Sword 5.

Most of these are above average to superb games, and they show that the genre is healthy and thriving.

The venting comes more from people getting upset and raising hell over the KQ trailer that was recently released. 

As for me, if I knew I was getting KQ1,KQ3,KQ4,KQ5,KQ6,KQ8, SQ1-4, QFG1-4, etc quality, I would easily pay $50 without thinking twice.  I love adventure games.  I would rather buy a good adventure game and play it for 10 hours and be done with it than buy a FPS and play it for 60 hours.  I have a hard time finding the 10 hours to play pretty much any game let alone play a single game for 50+ hours.

Most people wont.  I think the amount a game should cost should not be determined by how much time a person will play it, but instead the man hours that go into development.  The more work it takes to make the game, the more it should cost.

I wear t-shirts all the time.  They get the most use, but my formal Suit that I wear 3-4 times a year at best I paid a lot more for..why?  The quality of the product.

Whoever was talking about average pledges from kickstarters,you need to look at medians, not means.  Kickstarter campaigns have huge outliers that cannot be taken into consideration when looking at what people are willing to spend on a game.  Adventure game fans are the cheapest gamers out there, that’s why games are not made for them.  Even the “best” new games out there don’t have sales figures to warrant the amount of time spent on their development.

SoccerDude28 - 12 December 2014 07:43 PM

Broken Age, Dreamfall Chapters, Kentucky Route Zero, Walking Dead 1/2, Game of Thrones, Fables Wolf Among Us, Stanley Parable, Gone Home, Resonance, Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls, Broken Sword 5.

I think chucklas was talking about traditional adventure games, of the open-ended exloration and puzzle-solving variety.  Many of those wouldn’t fall into that category.

Also, part of the point of his original post was explaining why some of the only adventures that are financially successful these days are truncated, episodic games.  So if you exclude the episodic games (which only serve to reinforce chucklas’ point,) it becomes a much sparser field.

chucklas - 12 December 2014 07:47 PM

medians, not means.

MATH TEACHER!! 

Lambonius - 12 December 2014 07:51 PM

SoccerDude28 - 12 December 2014 07:43 PM

Broken Age, Dreamfall Chapters, Kentucky Route Zero, Walking Dead 1/2, Game of Thrones, Fables Wolf Among Us, Stanley Parable, Gone Home, Resonance, Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls, Broken Sword 5.

I think chucklas was talking about traditional adventure games, of the open-ended exloration and puzzle-solving variety.  Many of those wouldn’t fall into that category.

Just because some of these games don’t fit the narrow definition of what an adventure game used to be, that does not mean they are not adventure games. Maybe then, the answer to Chucklas’s arguments is that adventure games are far from dead, but rather have taken on a variety of new and old shapes and forms.

chucklas - 12 December 2014 07:47 PM

Whoever was talking about average pledges from kickstarters,you need to look at medians, not means.  Kickstarter campaigns have huge outliers that cannot be taken into consideration when looking at what people are willing to spend on a game.  Adventure game fans are the cheapest gamers out there, that’s why games are not made for them.

Interesting claim, can you substantiate it with any data? I’m not being a smart-ass, I’m genuinely curious and I acknowledge the possibility that this could be true. Are there statistical indications that gamers in other genres are more generous in their giving to Kickstarters than adventure gamers are?

Even the “best” new games out there don’t have sales figures to warrant the amount of time spent on their development.

Sure, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that the problem is that adventure gamers as a culture aren’t willing to pay as much for their games as gamers in any other genre would be for a game of similar length, production value, prestige, etc.

Other factors could be involved in a game’s financial failure: the development cost could be too high, the size of the potential audience could be too small, the audience could be fragmented across too many different products and not have enough money to buy them all. (Or enough time to play them, which may become a bigger constraint in a saturated marketplace than even money is.)

I’m sure you know this. I feel like I’m not understanding what you’re trying to say. If you’re trying to say that many adventure game developers are not financially successful, then I really don’t know what to tell you except to say yes. The dirty secret of the games industry, like all creative industries, is that most ventures are not financially successful.

A saturated marketplace only increases this. When you have a situation like the one currently where there are more adventure games being made than (I suspect) the audience can support, that is good for consumers, but makes it harder for developers to succeed. Supply and demand.

Edit: Well, OK, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. There is some extent to which, when the adventure game scene is vibrant and full of exciting new games, this increases the interest and awareness of potential players who, in less vibrant times, might go off and do other things instead. So to some extent, the saying that “a rising tide lifts all boats” is also true. This is why we see two adventure game campaigns both benefit from cross-promoting each other on Kickstarter, why we see new forum members showing up here whenever there’s a major announcement like the new King’s Quest, etc. But at the end of the day, the potential audience is only so big, and once it can’t grow anymore, you run into the issue of more games than the audience may be able to support.

chucklas - 12 December 2014 12:10 PM

YOU!

For the most part, that is it.  Back in the “glory days” of adventure games, we would pay upwards of $60, $70 for a single game without thinking twice about it.  Fast forward to the last 10-15 years.  Fans of adventure games, have worked their asses off to make remakes of some of the classics (for free).  Others have created their own new games and have either given them away or asked very little in exchange.  It is a labor of love they would say.  Then the greedy ass gamers would download and play, and often enjoy the games.  Interest in the genre became more and more alive and then attempts were made for more commercial games in the genre. 

But now, for whatever reason, perhaps because we have been given so much for free, perhaps because adventure games don’t really support online play or have high levels of replayability, adventure gamers refuse to pay more than $10-$20 for a new game.  More often than not, they know they can just wait a couple months (because they understand that the games wont sell) and the prices will come down and hell I can get that $20 game for pennies if I wait for a bundle or a sale.  It is so bad, that adventure game fans complain when they get episodic releases of their games (see TTG) as now they have to pay for each chapter.  Greedy developer trying to get me to pay for a game when in the past all I had to do was wait for a new game to come out for free (and even then, “fans” would bitch and moan that the games were not coming out on time and they had to wait).  B-O-O-H-O-O!  Eff them all! 

So now, we are upset because our games are made into episodes and that hurts the overall quality of the game.  I don’t have the open worlds I used to have (I wont pay for it, but I want it anyway).  The game play suffers, the quality of the product suffers.

At the end of the day, if you aren’t willing to pay out full price for a game, don’t complain when the games are not catered to you!  Until we as a community show with our wallets that we are willing to pay for a game, we wont get one.  It makes me angry.  I want great adventure games, but I wont get them.  The genre is dead and it is our own fault. 

You might say, well look at Broken Age, or Thimbleweed Park.  Those games have brought in lots of money…ok, let’s look at them.  I will look specifically at Thimbleweed as the kickstarter craze isn’t having as large of an influence as it had on Broken Age…

Yes Thimbleweed Park is over 500k right now, but let’s look at the numbers for what they are. 13,566 backers…only about 900 have pledged more than $50.  Yes, less than 10%.  90% of those who are the die hard fans who are putting trust in someone proven, etc are not willing to give more than $50 for a game.  What company would ever put money into development if they know that the main fan base would, for the most part not want to pay more than $20 for a full freaking game.  Yet those same people pay $60 every year for Madden where the only difference between this year and last year’s game are the rosters of the players who could be updated through a free online update every year.  Yet no one bitches about that.  Or if you don’t like sports games, think about CoD or Assassin’s Creed, etc.  Once again, if you aren’t willing to pay for a good game, don’t get pissed off when the games that are made aren’t catered to you.

By being outraged when the new KQ trailer isn’t want you want it to be, you not only look like an asshole, but no developer wants to deal with you.  They would rather create a game for a less vocal, larger community that will pay bigger amounts.  Why would you want a smaller client who pays less and complains more?  That is terrible business.

Anyway, that’s it.  Adventure games are dead.  We killed them.  Now I hope the new KQ is at least fun even though it isn’t going top be what I really want it to be.

I totally agree on the dead part.
Market forces are now troubling everything, its not just AG genre, Survival horror was THE shit back in mid 90s, now again the new surge is copy paste material of old ass designs explored in PSX/Ps2 era.
AG Devs are also fixating upon old ass conventions and nostalgia.

Get out of it and invest in quality title and maybe then Market will take the Genre seriously, which cannot happen without the backing of BIG publishers. Sony, Bethesda or
Activision.

It needs one BIG hit to totally change the conventions, (like HeavyRain priced 60$)
spawned TTG , which made QD’s design even more towards old ass Dragon’sLair, but now everyone wants to copy it since market has accepted it.

I know plenty of people, (Bustin Jeiber generation to be precise, who loved Skyrim like anything, ask them if the know what Elderscrolls is, and they say NO.

Then There are plenty of Single player action adventure games not making the money for publishers like Bioshock and even ND games, ND can only work under Sony.

So its not just AG genre which is doomed.
AG needs to be big hit with really good quality like QDream.
And AG Devs/players need to be more adaptive to ACCEPT the change in genre itself.

Else , suffer and always bet on Indies.

nomadsoul - 13 December 2014 01:49 AM

Then There are plenty of Single player action adventure games not making the money for publishers like Bioshock and even ND games, ND can only work under Sony.

Nancy Drew must be working or they wouldn’t be making god knows how many ND titles per year.

My response would be:
1. New adventure games aren’t terrible
2. I’m not unwilling to pay more money
If consumers really were unwilling to pay more, I don’t think the response would have been to make cheaper & inferior adventure games. More likely they would get out of the market which has not been popular since Wolfenstein 3D came out.

chucklas - 12 December 2014 07:47 PM

  Adventure game fans are the cheapest gamers out there, that’s why games are not made for them.

completely bogus claim. Player pledges on a kickstarter will lean to whatever the lowest tier it takes for them to get the game, set by devs. Players of all genres are cheap, and complain about prices. So dont bother comparing the dollar numbers of broken age, a kickstarter that required 15 dollars to receive a game, with other genres that required 25+ to get something playable. Instead look at the number of people who paid the lowest amount to get a game (counting lowest “early bird” limited tier and normal lowest tier).. and you’ll find the statement of “adventure gamers are the cheapest fans out there” is total garbage.
% of fans for kickstarters who were as cheap as they could possibly be and still get a game:
wasteland 2: 53%
project eternity: 62%
project phoenix: 50%

double fine: 55%
jane jensen: 30%
tex murphy: 51%

You cant just jump in and compare at the $50 tier, when not all price points are the same, and not all extra-packages are created equal.

Kickstarter pledges are not orders—or even pre-orders.
Instead they are gambles.

So donating $20 to a Kickstarter is actually a lot more generous than paying $60 for a finished game.
With a finished game you can read reviews and check out the finished product before slapping down your money. With a Kickstarter, you really have no proof the game will ever be finished—or be anything like what was promised.