How many copies this game sold......

[Dave Gilbert]

I liked how Dave pointed out in his talk how profitability and graphical quality were somewhat inversely related.  Really kinda makes you think....

Kinda. Players definitely care about the graphics - they wouldn't have complained about Deception as loudly as they did otherwise! - but they care MORE about the gameplay, story and puzzles and things. As with anything, you need to balance your time and money to where its most effective. By spending so much time and money on the graphics for Convergence, I spent LESS on the game design and it definitely suffered for it. That's the main reason why it didn't sell as well as it could have. That and I sucked at PR back than.

[amateurhour]

I wholeheartedly agree that graphics are important, but there's SEVERAL different groups of players that each have a different opinion of graphics. I mean Mega Man 9 on the XBLA system sold VERY well because it was a pure adaptation of the first 4 original NES games and didn't have the clutter of the later entries in the series, just as, in an opposite but related fashion, [new shooter x] will be a AAA title because while it doesn't update the core mechanics from [new shooter w] it does look much, much prettier.

Angry Birds may not look like much on the surface, but it does stand lightyears apart from most of the flash games you'd find on Newgrounds with physics engines in them. An adventure game kind of fits that mold too. The story is important, but you'd need the perfect balance of retro looking but HD quality graphics, the right amount of playtime (can't be too long or too short, which is why an episodic format would probably work best), and a unique puzzle system to even have a shot at tapping a wide market rather than a niche market.

Also you always have to look at your surroundings in pop culture. The Walking Dead adventure game that TellTale made last year sold like hotcakces but that was probably 20% because it was a unique and entertaining adventure game and 80% because The Walking Dead is a multi record breaking television show with a 10 year established fanbase.

I don't think an adventure game will ever be the next angry birds and I honestly don't think, even with the resurgence of the classic adventure game creators on Kickstarter and the resurgence of the nostalgia for those games, that they will ever have more than a small but deeply devoted fanbase. Having said that, with the advent of things like kickstarter and the moves people here are making toward making tools like AGS more portable, it's getting easier to reach that fanbase and I wouldn't be surprised if some dev teams/companies on this very board didn't get the opportunity in the next couple of years to really establish themselves in those markets as a full time game dev studio.

[m0ds]

I just spotted this survey (not sure if it's linked before here) with 270 respondents, which lends some non financial weight towards this subject:
http://www.chronerion.com/ (scroll down)

[blueskirt]

I think is better that the adventure games not get to be "the next big thing". If if gets bigger companies will take notice, and little indie will not be able,to compete with them.

As long as you guys talk, share insights, listen to one another and have these lengthy discussion about game and puzzle design, plot writing and interface intuitiveness, you guys have a head start. It is easy to ape someone else's work, it is harder to understand what makes a game or setting good, what ticks with the players, understand why some game design are clearly better than others, figure out the pitfalls a design can fall into when one apes rather than creates.

Which is why I am always skeptical when I see newcomers appears out of the blue with a commercial project or a fangame when they have no apparent prior experience other than "I liked game X and wanted to make something similar."

[Igor Hardy]

Which is why I am always skeptical when I see newcomers appears out of the blue with a commercial project or a fangame when they have no apparent prior experience other than "I liked game X and wanted to make something similar."

Oh, I don't know. The first adventure game released by Daedalic was crudely drawn in MS-Paint and advertised with the slogan "By the people who loved Monkey Island". Not that I particularly liked Edna & Harvey personally, but it was successful, kickstarted a proper company, and the titles that followed were much more impressive.

[ThreeOhFour]

Crudely drawn!? Edna and Harvey!?

How dare you!