Adventure Gamers - Forums

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 don’t think you can blame fans for the low Thimbleweed Park kickstarter average pledge. Blame problems with previous kickstarters releases. Average pledge for Tesla Effect was $85; Broken Sword $55; Dreamfall $70, etc. Fans were willing to put the money down, now there is just a mistrust in the the process.

Also I don’t think I’ve seen adventure gamers here refusing to pay more than $10-$20 for a good adventure game.

If you want to blame anyone, then it should be the other genre’s where Rockstar fi gives you a game for 60 dollars with entertainment duration of +70 hrs. Some RPG’s go even beyond 100 hours.

Then by comparison many AG’s last a max of 10 hrs and most of the time even less.
People start to make comparison with enjoying a movie in the theather where you pay 10 dollars for 2 hours of entertainment, so if a certain AG lasts roughly twice or 3 times as much, would you then really want to pay more than 20 dollars for it?

Reduced prices are the direct result of the rise of digital distribution and of developers trying to compete in a saturated marketplace. This isn’t just happening with adventure games; it is happening in every genre on PC. It’s even worse on mobile.

AAA console games aren’t seeing the effects as strongly yet because: 1) those AAA games are so high budget that there’s inherently fewer developers who can compete in that space 2) the console world is still heavily curated and is only just now starting to let more indies onto the stores with fewer barriers to entry 3) the shift to digital distribution isn’t as far along there. However, even in AAA console games, this shift has begun, which is one of the reasons why several mid-tier studios and publishers have had financial trouble.

I question your premise that the same people who are pledging to adventure game Kickstarters are also buying Madden for $60. I think those are different demographics which may not overlap very much. I also don’t understand why you’re blaming the Kickstarter backers when surely it’s the non-backers who are getting the lower sale prices. Honestly, I don’t even see how anyone can blame the non-backers: they don’t set the sale prices, they respond to the prices they’re offered. Ultimately the law of supply and demand is to blame, not developers, nor consumers.

All this being said, it is true that it is hard for adventure games to be made with a low price per unit, because that means you either need to keep the budget low or you need to sell a lot of copies which is hard for adventure games to do. Keeping the budget low is also a challenge. Adventure games tend to be expensive to make because they are driven by content, not systems, and they need a lot of unique art assets which often get used just once rather than re-used as in other genres. That is labor intensive. So the main way to control costs is either using a simpler art style or having less content.

The problem isn’t that people aren’t willing to pay more for adventure games.

The real problem is that no company in their right minds wants to invest money into a 60 dollar point and click adventure game lol

It’s time to face reality the adventure game audience today just isn’t big enough to justify sinking tons of money into a point and click adventure game and that is the main reason why you see New Adventure Games with simple mechanics and cheaper prices.

Telltale and Double Fine know that adventure games are for a niche audience and that’s why their games either have super easy puzzles like “Broken Age” or no puzzles at all like most of Telltale games.

They know they have to appeal to a more mainstream audience if they want to be really successful.

P.S. Big budget 60 dollar games are a sinking ship and I would feel sorry for any adventure game developer who decided to get on in it lol

Id be more inclined to blame the person who just pines over a few classics (and some high profile dev names) and doesnt bother to notice great adventures are still being made and doesnt support games like: primordia, resonance, whispered world, blackwell series, night of the rabbit, kentucky route zero, quest for infamy, deponia, the cat lady, etc etc etc.

I don’t believe anybody paid $70 for an adventure game back then. People also didn’t buy boatloads of adventure games, you were lucky if your mom bought you 1 or 2 a year.

For me it really is a matter of content vs. cost.

As one who works on adventure games (Hi, Chuck! ), I totally get the frustration.  At the same time, I think it’s totally valid to say that games in the $50 - $60 dollar range should offer more content than games in the $10 - $20 range.  I’m VERY picky about buying mainstream games full price, unless I am absolutely sure I’m going to enjoy it and get a solid value for my buck.  I’ll generally wait on triple-A games until the first or second price drop, with only a few exceptions.  The most recent game I payed full price for was Dark Souls II, and that game was well worth the money in terms of play time (quite lengthy), challenge (quite challenging), and replay value (practically endless because of all the possible build variations.)

I think $20 for a 10-15 hour game is reasonable, but I have a very hard time justifying paying $30 for a game like some of the recent Telltale games (not bashing, just an example of a developer that makes shorter games at higher prices!), since a full season generally only runs in the 8-10 hour range.  For me, an 8-10 hour playtime should correlate to a $10 - $15 game.  Basically, at $40 - $60, I’m expecting something like 40 - 100 hours of gameplay.  I don’t see that as unreasonable.

That said, when it comes to adventure games, I will also often spring for a whole bunch of “full-priced” $15 - $20 adventure games in one pop, and sort them out and play them later over the next several months.  I also go out of my way to support indie developers and purchase their games, even if I don’t always get around to playing them.  So I don’t know; I guess I see both sides here.

Yes, the price of Adventure games sure has come down. I can remember paying like 50 dollars for my first adventure game. But, that is when things were new and uncertain and there wasn’t that much of a demand for them. But I for sure wouldn’t say that new adventure games are terrible!  I have been re-playing Book of Unwritten Tales for the past week and for the money spent, what an enjoyable game.  Even having played them before, I still am spending days on each game The Sherlock Holmes games that I have been playing too are so re-playable and I spend weeks and weeks figuring those out.  I think, at least for me, the difference in playing adventure games is the difference in walkthroughs and the internet.  The first time I played Simon the Sorcerer 1 it took me months and months. I had no internet and of course then, no walkthrough.  Now when we get stuck, we just look at a walkthrough or a youtube gameplay. But, there are so very many great adventure games now. I sure can’t wait until the next chapter of Book of Unwritten Tales comes out!  One of the best games that I have ever played.

The biggest selling computer game of 1992 was Kings Quest 6. The biggest selling computer game of 1993 was Doom. I think that is a telling watershed in the history of computer games.

TimovieMan - 12 December 2014 07:29 PM

FPS games cost 50-60$ as well, and most of those are 10-15 hours long, which is similar to the length of an AG.

Maybe if you only look at the single-player campaign length, but that’s not what most FPS’s these days are about.  Today’s FPS’s are all about multiplayer, and that extends the playtime exponentially.  A 10-15 hour campaign PLUS endless multiplayer is a very different value than just a 10-15 hour campaign. 

That said, contemporary FPS’s are still a huge rip-off.  Today’s FPS’s are basically the same game with a different skin (and sometimes not even that!) each time.