Adventure Gamers - Forums

I hope it performs well despite all the drama surrounding its release.

I’ve always wondered why Steam and GOG don’t or can’t release sales figures. Is there some kind of law pertaining to digital goods that doesn’t apply to physical ones?

Jade - 05 November 2014 02:01 PM

I’ve always wondered why Steam and GOG don’t or can’t release sales figures. Is there some kind of law pertaining to digital goods that doesn’t apply to physical ones?

I think they can’t, it’s up to the developer/publisher if they want share.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter just released the number of first month sales.

There are some statistics, I don’t know how accurate they are:

http://steamcharts.com/app/262000#48h

Interesting. So it wouldn’t be as much related with the digital nature of these games as it is with the confidentiality of sales figures in general? And by that logic, a retail store like Best Buy wouldn’t have the right to publish specific figures either?

wilco - 05 November 2014 02:09 PM

There are some statistics, I don’t know how accurate they are:

http://steamcharts.com/app/262000#48h

I wonder where those numbers come from.
Right now it says “50 playing”
Does that mean 50 playing who are NOT using Offline mode?
How else would they know how many are currently playing unless the players were logged into Steam while playing?

Henke - 05 November 2014 01:35 AM

It would be a pretty boring discussion if everybody thought the exact same thing.

I get the feeling that much of the things that bugs the most disappointed people are of the subjective sort (meaning graphical style). So it would be interesting to hear exactly how you guys think the remake should have looked like.

This art style and better VAs.

Mainmenu backgrounds have some nice ambient animations too to set the mood.

Minimal approach and get rid of 3D animations and try something like cutscenes
of GK20.

tomimt - 05 November 2014 03:36 PM

I think it’s the online players only. But I don’t know how common it is for Steam players to be offline. I know I’m always online, as Steam starts for me automatically.

Yeah, I think it’s online only, don’t know how representative it is. It says GK all-time peak is 335.
For example Vanishing of Ethan Carter has a all-time peak of 1.431 and sold 60k in the first month - 77% on Steam.
Is it possible to extrapolate anything? Don’t know, probably not, too many variables.

I agree that it should be like the movie industry. Don’t know why games have to be so secretive.

Shnubble - 05 November 2014 09:16 AM

Metacritic shows an average of 76 for Gabriel Knight 20th anniversary edition, which is pretty damn good considering they are scoring a remake.

How do you figure? While you have to fight nostalgia, you already have a proven and highly rated game to build up on. The MI remakes hit a metascore of 86 and 87.

Mmyes, Monkey Island remakes. I can’t deny the high metacritic scores obviously, but it seems to be an exceptional case to me.

Also, they are, IMHO, very basic remakes. They didn’t try to update the puzzles for a more modern audience. They even kept the engine more or less the same.
The Monkey Island remake benefits from adding voice acting, which was something the original lacks. And they upgraded the graphics to a higher resolution and updated style. Cartoony settings are easier to polish up to higher resolutions than going for a realistic style. I think that was mentioned already earlier.

Perhaps Pinkerton Road and Phoenix Online could have scored even better if they kept the remake more basic and true to the original….eg only update the graphics, not change anything in the style, keep characters 2D with exact same design, don’t change the puzzles at all. Perhaps that would have resonated better with the core audience, but that would make the remake more unnecessary to me than some already feel with the way Jane Jense chose to do it.

Henke - 06 November 2014 02:32 PM

If you look at the graphics of all the three GK-games I think a combination of paintings, photos and 3D is a very logical choice.

Is it? Perhaps by some alien Mr.Spock-logic that completely ignores aesthetics.
But maybe you simply misunderstood me. I wasn’t talking about the characters vs environment. I think a slight difference is excusable here, if it’s consistent or intentional.  I was talking about the scenes themselves, which are frankenstiened together pretty poorly, in my opinion. The problem is not the nature of the material, the problem is it’s still obvious what’s what. For example a photograph sits right besides a 3D element or another photo which is obviously from a different environment with different lighting and sometimes even the wrong perspective or scale. Many elements stand out oddly and the style changes between scenes, too. This is nothing we have to agree or disagree on, this is simply a fact.

subbi - 06 November 2014 06:21 AM

Cartoony settings are easier to polish up to higher resolutions than going for a realistic style. I think that was mentioned already earlier.

I think there’s a reason why the cutscenes were received almost entirely positively. What’s easy or hard to do doesn’t matter for the player, only if it’s well done or poorly. Except for some fans of course, who are apparently willing to cut anything created for their favorite genre an incredible amount of slack or are simply used to ignore poor production values as long as the story is captivating enough. In the end that’s up to everyone individually.