KickStarter The Failure of the Adventure Game Renaissance

[Wirdschowerdn]

As long as there's still Unavowed and Technobabylon 2 on the horizon, I'll be happy.

 

[Blaine]

I hear Technobabylon 2 actually won't have a single straight person in the cast.

Only about half of the cast in the original were gay, queer, or transsexual, and that's clearly not enough.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Oh my, yes!

 

[Brayko]

It's because the people who designed Adventure games are has beens. You know like big 80's metal bands deciding they could make a few bucks bothering with a tour. It's just from a generation that didn't age well and probably best served as being someones childhood hero. Like Bilbo Baggins for instance.

 

[SilverSpook]

The problem with the fragmentation of the market for indie games is that you hugely reduce the likelihood of that kind of engagement. It's not just that developers may not make enough money to make games full time, they may not get enough attention to justify making them at all. Releasing a game (like posting on a forum!) is a public performance; but if there's no audience, it may be hard to bother to perform at all.

True. It can be tough to keep going without that positive feedback. I will say though, that I jumped into a Twitch stream of someone and a bunch of friends playing Neofeud, and it was some of the most positive feedback I've ever had!

Blackthorne: Thanks! Neofeud has already been an amazing journey. And -- wow, you made Quest for Infamy? I still haven't even cracked the GOG nut!

 

[Aeschylus]

Daedalic is probably the today best and most important Adventure gaming publisher (sadly).

There were a couple years (2012-2013) when Daedalic put out some genuinely great adventure games. They haven't done anything better than mediocre since then, and have been shifting away from the genre, so I'm not sure if I'd agree with still calling them the best.

 

[SilverSpook]

Agreed. It seems to me that when you're starting to have, or having a renaissance of some previously more esoteric genre of something, it just takes a high-profile developer or studio to create not-so-great or poorly received product or series of products that draws the 'Golden Age' to a close.

 

[Werdna's Revenge]

I feel a bit like people like myself are part of the failure of the adventure renaissance. I remember when the double fine kickstarter was coming out and the excitement was at a fever pitch. There were multiple cool sounding kickstarters hitting all at once from devs that had made some 90's favourites. I think the high profile of Broken Age is what kinda stalled the momentum before much happened. The game simply was not what people wanted, and it turned into a great lesson in being cautious with kickstarters. Yeah it got finished, but it was simple and sorta lame. So as a person who got interested in checking out the new wave of adventure games it really set me off on the wrong foot, and I haven't tried a whole lot of other new ones (although I really should.)

 

[Korgoth of Barbaria]

It's dead Jim.

 

[Blackthorne]

Sure, the "renaissance" is dead, but yet... adventure games live on. Just to a smaller degree than some of us hoped. I'm learning to live with it.


Bt

 

[Dexter]

Some of the Point & Click games released on Steam since I posted last, slightly over a month ago:





http://store.steampowered.com/app/710820/BELPAESE_Homecoming/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/579760/The_Journey_Down_Chapter_Three/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/595560/Legend_of_Hand/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/678090/Symplok_La_Leyenda_de_Gustavo_Bueno_Capt

 

[MRY]

even if Ragnar's one game was really good

It was not. It had the striking quality of being a serious adventure game, and a serious multimedia fantasy story, at a time when both of those things were in vanishingly small supply. It also had strong visuals and overall production value. It's by no means terrible (unlike Dreamfall), but as an adventure game it's not "really good." The puzzles are bad and -- worse -- are not remotely integrated into the narrative, and are even hostile to the narrative.

I'll give you an example. About 40 minutes into the game (based on an LP), you hit the first puzzle. To solve it, you get a gold ring that has sentimental value to April, start fiddling randomly with a broken machine, and use the ring to connect two broken wires (unclear why you can't just thread the wires together. None of the behavior involved in this puzzle supports April's character traits or powers. It's just a random Castle of Dr. Brain puzzle that intersects with a random item.

These vestigial puzzles cling to a very dialogue-heavy game that doesn't really seem to want them in the first place. It's no surprise that the puzzles are gone by the next one. I would say TLJ is closer to Dreamfall/Heavy Rain/current Telltale titles than it is to Monkey Island.

 

[MRY]

Maybe I'm unduly harsh on it. For instance, when I started conceiving the post I was going to say that its graphics had not held up, but when I reviewed the screenshots, actually they look pretty good -- kind of Playstation era real-time on prerendered, but by no means objectionable. It could be that the game plays better than walkthroughs/LPs suggest.

 

[Blackthorne]

It is worth noting that Tell Tale, a "successful" adventure game company just laid off 25% of their work force. It's hard to make a business of adventure games these days, for sure.


Bt

 

[Sizzle]

Telltale hasn't made an actual adventure game since 2011, and are, in large part, responsible for the current adventure game drought & decline.

So, as much as it sucks that a fellow (former) adventure game developer is having problems, remember that all they've done for the last couple of years is pump out shitty faux-choice walking sims, so near-identical in structure and graphic style, that even their once-loyal fans are buying less and less of them.

 

[MRY]

To be honest, I was kind of amazed that Tell Tale had a staff of ~400 (the capitation is 90, I assume the 25% is ballpark). Sierra had 700 employees in the mid/late 90s, but it seems like Sierra was releasing way more games, and had revenue of $80M a year. Per Glassdoor, Telltale's is the $10-25M range, with 20 years of inflation.

Anyway, I have now decided that any single-player, single-purchase,* non-grind-oriented game is worthy of some modicum of defense, given the insidious nature of F2P and grind games, so I regard their problems as a bad thing.

(Even episodic is much less horrible than F2P or DLC.)

 

[Cross]

It is worth noting that Tell Tale, a "successful" adventure game company just laid off 25% of their work force. It's hard to make a business of adventure games these days, for sure.

Or maybe Telltale realized they were oversaturing the market with their own games? They were making like, what, 5 different episodic series at the same time? Considering other developers have already started making Telltale clones (e.g. Life is Strange, which sold millions despite not being based on a licensed property like Telltale's games), I think this particular brand of 'adventure games' is here to stay, sadly.

 

[Modron]

It is worth noting that Tell Tale, a "successful" adventure game company just laid off 25% of their work force. It's hard to make a business of adventure games these days, for sure.


Bt

Didn't they once shift all but like 5 people from the last 2 episodes of Tales from the Borderlands after it under-performed? Maybe they have just figured out they don't need as many people to pump out games?

 

[Jaesun]

The novelty of Tell Tales "Adventure games" has finally worn off.

 

[SilverSpook]

I just recently interviewed MRY / Wormwood Studios, and this topic of the current state of adventure games, as well as adjacent topics (recent complications of using Adventure Game Studio, AGS vs. Unity) were explored, especially near the beginning. Some echoes from this forum thread, but also some further insight, I think.



I'm not exactly sure how to take the Telltale downsizing, but I do feel there have been a lot of 'shocks' to not just adventure gaming but all of gaming, generally. The recent serial-failures* of large, highly-anticipated single player games, especially FPS's, RPGs and immersive sims, coupled with showstopping success of PUBG, it seems to me, are giving way to shifts in the entire gaming industry of galactic proportions (Starcraft II is free? EA Games abondoning large narrative games wholesale?). It would seem adventure games might just be catching the fringe of the havok, being on the remote spiral arms of these events. This, on top of the aforementioned difficulties of Steam overcrowding, and the Telltale layoffs sound almost par for the course.

(*Failures in terms of $$$, not necessarily quality of experience.)

This rise of F2P, as MRY mentioned, then monitizing 'freemium' style I think has something to do with livestream-heavy games like Overwatch and PUBG hitting entirely new levels of participation, business models and $$$ revenue. These are games that are eerily encroaching on territory of traditional spectator sports like football and basketball, with an emphasis on massive arena-competitions, passive 'spectating' both of stream-watchers and stadium audiences, and this is reflected in the way Twitch beer ads are starting to resemble Superbowl halftime material.

What does all of this mean? I'm not sure exactly, and frankly, along with other harrowing current events, it is pretty scary, even more so as a fledgling indie studio. But, as the saying goes, "The Chinese character for crisis and opportunity are the same," and in this time of upheaval, there are going to be a lot of crashes, but also opportunities, for those who are adaptive and are on the lookout. This or that genre or mechanic or trope may become less or more popular, but people are not going to stop wanting stories and experiences of depth that speak to them, are cathartic, and illuminate the moment they live in, however insane. It's a human thing old as fire, that no amount of autoclicking and pizza commercials will fulfill.

 

[Blackthorne]

For me, the fact that Telltale laid off 25% of their workers brings up a lot of personal feelings and opinions. I am honestly sad for those who lost their jobs - those people worked hard on their games, and they gave a shit, especially when there were probably higher-ups making poor decisions who are still employed. There were a lot of talented folks who worked on those games, and sometimes games made by committee really suck.

But I can't deny a certain bit of schadenfreude as an independent adventure game developer myself; the whole time I've developed my games, I used to get emails, notes, tweets, etc. saying stuff like "Why aren't you more like Telltale?" or "Do it like Telltale..." and I, maybe stupidly, refused. I made games the way I wanted to make them, I made the kinds of games I wanted to play. I was never a huge fan of Telltale, and the longer they were around, the more I disliked their games and I stopped playing them altogether as a gamer. So, there's a part of me that's smirking because even they couldn't "get it right" even after I had to endure all the protestations and unsolicited advice I got. Not like I'm doing any better, but at least I've always made games I liked and would want to play.

They're switching tech and getting rid of their engine, which I assume means they're moving to Unity or maybe even Unreal 4. Outsourcing your engine really gives you the room to focus on your game, rather than the tech which is nice. I wonder what their future endeavours will be, but - yeah - I got some schadenfreude about them stumbling. I'll admit it.


Bt

 

[Archibald]

From what I understood most of the people laid off were related to their old engine, basically released bunch of people that had "outdated" skillset. So I wouldn't read too much into this and not take this as a sign that their crap stopped selling.

 

[Blackthorne]

I don't think that it's because their stuff stopped selling, but I think it stopped selling in numbers they needed to sustain their bottom line.


Bt

 

[Azalin]

I just recently interviewed MRY / Wormwood Studios, and this topic of the current state of adventure games, as well as adjacent topics (recent complications of using Adventure Game Studio, AGS vs. Unity) were explored, especially near the beginning. Some echoes from this forum thread, but also some further insight, I think.

Wow,I didn't know that Pillars of the Earth bombed so hard until I heard it on this video,under 10k for a game based on a well known novel.Too bad,I am enjoying my time with Deponia trilogy at the moment and have Pillars in my wishlist.I hope it manages to sell more when all the episodes are released

 

[MRY]

I'm amazed anyone made it through the video -- for all Christian's effort to liven things up (with frogs, even!), I always worry that my endless, semi-coloned-and-not-fullstopped answers delivered at a dull drone would put the most charitable audience to sleep.