Your opinions
 

Every month many of our readers download adventure games directly from the Adventure Shop service. People seem to really enjoy the increasing selection of the back catalog titles, but we've also noticed that Adventure Shop is becoming a popular way to acquire new adventure games (games like A Vampyre and now Ceville).

We set up this forum to try and help anyone who runs into problems, but fortunately the vast majority of Adventure Shop customers are able to download and install the games they want without a hitch.

Have you had a positive experience with the Adventure Shop service? Perhaps you'd consider sharing your experiences in this thread. We'd like to give an accurate impression of Adventure Shop (especially to those who are still on the fence about buying and downloading a game on the internet), and it will generally help Adventure Shop serve customers better in the future.

If you have downloaded from Adventure Shop before, I hope you'll take a moment to give us your opinion by posting in this thread! We're interested in hearing your feedback, both good and bad.

Well, I have purchased more than 8 games from them and never had any trouble with downloading or activating the games :)

Also, they are always helpful with any question we have - either here on the forum (and other forums) or from their support.

The only thing I haven't gotten sorted out yet, is that after they redid the design, I still can't see my past purchases - although, they were kind enough to resend emails from ALL of them - which I of course made sure to save :)

Well I haven't bought anything yet but I did notice that the prices are really high, and you don't accept Visa Electron cards (verified by visa), if I'm not mistaken. I normally use GamersGate as their prices are very affordable (14 bucks for Still Life, 19,90 for Overclocked etc).

I recently downloaded Runaway: A Road Adventure. I usually shop in person at stores to get games, but I couldn't find that title anywhere, so I ended up buying it from here.

I downloaded the game without problems and everything ran smoothly. Thanks!

A pretty decent game by the way. If only it had more than just pixel hunts and inventory puzzles I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more. I set out determined to beat the game without any help, but by the last chapter I was running out of patience, after just five minutes of not knowing what to do I'd pull up the walkthrough. Overall I liked the game enough I'll probably play the second one sometime, and when I do I'll be sure to get it here. :)

Hi Puzzler,

Thank you for you rnice words about our service.
I played both Runaway.

I definitively prefer the second episode.

Give it a try if you have time.

Thanks,

I have buy some games and so far doesn't have any problem. So definitely is a good source to download games.

Playing the second one now. Once again, downloaded fine without any problems. :)

Puzzler,

The second one is by far better.
Have you seen the recent screenshots of the 3rd episode posted yesterday?

It looks even better.

Yes, I did see them. They look great.

I see a lot of games coming out that I look forward to playing. The lineup for this year's adventure releases brings a lot of excitement to the genre. Hopefully most of them will become available here, and hopefully they will be as good as they look.

I have downloaded two games from the Adventure Shop, Ceville and A Vampyre Story. Ceville would not run at first, so I emailed support. They got back to me within 48 hours, and their suggestion worked perfectly (which was to update the Microsoft .NET framework). I think it's a great way to buy games and will definitely use the service again in the future.

I have downloaded a few games and never had any problems until Ceville, it doesn't work properly and i can't get a response from customer support, i usually buy all my games from the adventure shop as it is easy and everything usually goes well. I hope i get a response soon.

Hello Newgamer2,

As I posted to this forum last week, we enountered several issues with our email provider, but everything is now running smoothly.

Could you please send me a copy of the email you've sent to the technical support?
It would be helpful to get your details and find out what is happening on both sides.

Damon

the response seems very positive. I shall look forward to buying my games from Adventure Shop. I played The Curse of Monkey Island last year or 2 years ago and I'm glad I can find more games like that!

I purchased the game there for the sole purpose of playing it right away especially when I read this.

"Immediately receive a serial number and personal download links via e-mail"

I downloaded the game but can't play it for lack of a serial number. They failed to send me one and my email to them went unanswered. Tommorrow I will contact my credit card company and put a stop on payment.

Why do the download instruction say you should have a download manager? Not really thinking, I thought you actually needed it to download the files, used it, downloaded all the files with it (except the first that didn't even work) and now I need to download them all again because the program doesn't apparently even function properly. It says I have downloaded the files but they aren't anywhere (although I'm sure they've taken the space anyways). Sure, afterwards I understand that the " a quicker and safer download, we recommend to do as follows" means that it's just advertising the program, but you'd think that it would be said clearly, these are the instructions after all.

(Edit): Well, eventually I did actually find the files, I'm still not sure where they were though (of course I didn't start by using search, then again, the "locate file" always went to the folder they were supposed to be but weren't), but I had already downloaded them manually too.

I'll just add my experience here for now.

The purchase and download
Cant say anything negative about this, I made a account, added my game, used Visa to pay and downloaded the game, all in less then 40minutes
Got a Email fairly quick with the confirmation of my order and tought, nice just wait abit and it's gonna be installed.

The problems
After installation I started the game and the activate dialog comes up, right check the mail for serial number, but sadly no number there, so read the whole mail and check my account.
After clicking the resend option and waiting 10min I go back and click it again (this has probably been done 10 times now) but still no mail about a serial nubmer.
So here I am sitting, waiting for my mail to the support to be handled by someone, unable to play my game.
I'we used similar services from other vendors, like GoG and I must say that the experience there was better, I got my serial when my payment was confired (instant) and I could start playing my game right after downloading it.
Hopefully my issue will be resolved fairly quick, but I'm still not going to play my new game to night by the looks of it

Best Regards.

quick update I got my key now so I guess I can add a smile and say I am good to go, still think it could have been faster but yay game up and running!:D

I purchased some games without troubles and some with troubles. My troubles were handled with care and were solved in a client-friendly manner.

Bump.
I almost only have positive experiences, and the negative ones were solved quickly and professionally. I have one tiny little complaint though:
I get quite a few emails from the Adventure Shop. Some of them are sent by The Adventure Shop, but there are also a lot of them sent by Sherlock Holmes. This is confusing since it's not always directly clear from the subject what the mail is about. I hope you can change the sender to Adventure Shop so you have a more consistent output, and leave Mr. Holmes in his imaginary grave.

Like tsa, I'm also receiving Adventure Shop emails from "Sherlock Holmes". Those emails SHOULD be labeled as sent from "The Adventure Shop". This is most probably an unintentional mistake from the people handling the newsletter, but it MUST be fixed.

Otherwise, I am enjoying the service and its wide selection of titles, all reasonably priced in my opinion.

Now fix your newsletter! ;)

Will we get an answer to our request soon please?

Apparently not. :frown:

I was about to say the same thing. Why ask for feedback if no one is available to reply? I apologize for being harsh, but it certainly gives the impression that they don't even bother reading.

I'm also thinking about new members or forum visitors that lurk in here. Surely those numerous unanswered threads with users having problems with payments or activation don't offer a positive outlook on the Adventure Shop. Perhaps those threads are all answered via PM, but regardless, site owners should PUBLICLY answer all these threads, this one included.

Come on. Get your stuff together.

Just for the record, I've already alerted the Shop guys to the complaints on this thread (as I do with any others that go unanswered). Nothing more I can personally do beyond that, I'm afraid.

Thank you Jackal. Let's hope they answer soon.

Hi Folks,

Apologies for not getting back to you earlier.
The reason why the emails are labelled as Sherlock Holmes is very simple.
They could be identified as SPAM if labelled "The Adventure Shop" because of the word "SHOP" !!!

Is that a major issue?

Thanks

Damon

Yes, because your site is called The Adventure Shop, not Sherlock Holmes. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, your site isn't at all about the character of Sherlock Holmes; it's about selling all kinds of adventure games. These might include Sherlock Holmes titles as some of them, but still.

Perhaps naming your newsletter "Adventure Newsletter" or "New Adventure Game Releases" would do the trick, since it would remove the word "Shop"?

I agree with DeadWolf. I would just name the sender The Adventure Shop because you can learn every email program there is that mail from The Adventure Shop is not spam.

We'll make a try this friday, and we'll see if the newsletter is rejected by servers because of the sender name.

Damon

Thank you Damon!

I like the selection of games and convenience, but to be honest the only reason i still use the shop is because i have come to accept that playing an adventure game once is sufficient.

My overall experience with account security and customer service is really dire and everytime i buy a new game my husband lectures me on how foolish i am.

If the same range of games was available on the highstreet i'd buy them there, and to be honest i don't think that the price of the game reflects the fact we are just downloading it and not getting the box, the disk, the shop, the face to face customer service, etc etc.

We don't even get a free phone number, which i would be using right now actually because yet again (omg) i'm being left waiting to play a game i paid for 3 days ago.

Damon, did you get any complaints about the newsletter being chucked in spamboxes? I got mine no problem!

Strange, I have very good experiences with customer service, and I often buy games at the Adventure Shop because they are much cheaper than any boxed version I can find.

I checked the numbers of newsletter being opened since we changed the name... -35%

But we'll keep it this way ;-)

Damon

Louise, we are trying our best to serve our customers with the best service possible. I will not give any particular example, but be sure that I do my best to help our customers. You can reach me by PM is you have any particular issue not being solved by technical support.

Adventure genre has been considered as a niche by the european retailers for the last 3 or 4 years. This is the reason we created the Adventure Shop, to offer an access to the community to the developers and the publishers supporting the genre.

I answered you on an other thread. Have you tried to resend the confirmation email for BM3?

Thank you for 'solving' the email issue, Damon. I really appreciate it.

My purchasing experience with Adventure Shop has been.... eventful. I encounter at least one issue per purchase (usually just little inconveniences), so I would still purchase games through them. However, my last purchasing experience (Gray Matter) was really an ordeal and can hopefully be fixed for future purchases.

First, am I the only one who had problems with the "high speed" download? This usually seems to work for me, but for this game, it was very VERY slow and, more importantly, would stop when the download reached around 65%. No matter what I did, the download would stop there and eventually terminate altogether. The worst part was that, after having waiting for 1.5-2 hours for the download to get that far, instead of restarting from 65%, it would restart from 0% or (oddly) from 23%. This was so frustrating that after about 3.5 wasted hours, I turned to the manual download. Herein came my next frustration. You CAN download the games yourself, but...well....not really. If you try to download them without downloading yet another download manager, they will all try to download at once and give you a wait time of nearly 5 hours as you suck up all the bandwidth in your city. Finally, I resolved to use the download manager, download them manually, and just leave for about 5 hours to let them download. To my utter relief when I returned home that night, the games were properly downloaded and ready to be installed and played..... almost..... On the up side, once I had finally downloaded each of the 4 parts, the game installed perfectly. Summary: please fix high-speed download :(

Then came the part that was, admittedly out of Adventure Shop's control: The copyright protection software -- TAGES. Oh...good...gravy...... That company seems to have more bugs or server crashes (resulting in buyers being cut off from their games for who knows how long) than they know how to deal with. This is not A.S.'s fault. However, I would not have purchased this game, I think, or would have at least waited and purchased another one in the mean time instead, had I known I would have to deal with TAGES-during-holiday-season. So a suggestion from me would be to put the name of the company who is doing the copy-protection software for the game IN the game info/description on your website. That way, we can at least know what we're up against in the not-so-stressful holiday season.