A New Legend Forms Around Legendary Adventure Game Designer

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 10, 2012

So file this one away under “Adventure Games Are Dead and Other B.S. the Games Industry Tries to Sell Us.”

There’s really only one topic I could comment on today, and that is the amazing crowdfunding success experienced by Double Fine Productions. In case you missed it (it’s sort of the top story everywhere in the games-related biz right now), here’s the run-down. Tim Schafer, a game designer who’s known more for his games than for his name (he worked on Day of the Tentacle, the Monkey Island series, and was lead designer for Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Psychonauts, Brutal Legend, etc.), decided that he wanted to do a good-old-fashioned point-and-click adventure game again with a small team from his studio. But to do that, he needed funding, and — well, the publishing world isn’t interested in giving (good) terms for that kind of thing anymore. ‘Cuz, you know, Adventure Games Are Dead. It’s been repeated often enough by marketing guys and many gaming “journalists” for over a decade, so it must be true.

There’s a little side-story out there about how Schafer complained in an interview that no publisher would fund a sequel to Psychonauts, to which Minecraft developer Markus “Notch” Persson offered to do just that, which he could pay for in something like one week’s worth of income from Minecraft‘s sales. But Schafer decided to try and “crowd-fund” a traditional adventure game instead, using the money not only to fund the game itself, but to fund an “open process” to document what really goes into making a game like this.

So could he do it? Could he get $400,000 in funding in just over a month through Kickstarter? Well, it was worth a try.

The results were a little better than expected. They hit the $400,000 goal in just under eight hours. After twenty-four hours, they’d blown all of Kickstarter’s previous records, hitting over $1 million in funding, with over 30,000 contributors.

Someone on reddit created this little image to the right illustrate what happened.

So I guess they will be able to afford to make a little adventure game. Woot!

I also have little doubt that Notch’s name and cheerleading was just as important as the reputation of the team involved. And I enjoyed his own little artistic contribution to commemorate the event:

So what should we take away from this? Besides a totally awesome new point-and-click adventure game coming soon from Schafer & co?

Here are my thoughts:

Adventure Games Aren’t Dead: They are only “not as profitable as major AAA publishers would like.” But then, we indies have known that, and we’ve been enjoying new, decent-quality adventure games for frickin’ years now. I actually get a laugh whenever I read somewhere about how the genre is long-buried. It didn’t die, it just retired young and is partying it up on the beach in Acapulco. But it is super-cool to see the genre get big headlines again.

The Era of the Giant Middleman is Over: See the above picture by Notch. Now, this doesn’t mean that the behemoths are going to go extinct, or that we don’t need these guys at all. I mean, you only need look at the difference between sales figures for Games Sold On Steam versus Games Not Sold On Steam to realize that these guys aren’t going anywhere. But the giant, all-powerful gatekeeping middleman publisher / studio model is really an artifact of the 19th and 20th centuries, the entry-level optimizations made possible by the combination of technology and the industrial revolution. A historical blip while technology caught up with ideas. Alternative models are popping up weekly, and the traditional publisher-developer system which was the one true way to sell games for three decades is becoming just one of many.

Tim Schafer Can Do It, But You Probably Can’t.  Or as former Gamepro senior editor Sid Shuman comments, “Indies who see Kickstarter as an ATM are asking for trouble.”  Indie developer Dave Toulouse writes, “It’s not a recipe. It’s just the story of the week. Tomorrow we’ll all be back to doing the best we can with the resources we have. That’s the only true way to do things.” I don’t share Dave’s disappointment that the money didn’t get redistributed to fund lots of indie games – I would rather see a game succeed because of a truly impassioned community, and I’ve never been a fan of redistribution for the sake of “fairness.” I would like to see more opportunities for indies to get visibility and succeed on merits other than “luck,” however. While luck isn’t everything, there’s still too great of a dependency on it. The bottom line here is that this whole thing happened because of several factors: The right team with a proven track record coming up with the right “story” at the right time and getting viral attention. Luck was a factor, no doubt. But that’s not a repeatable process, and even far more modest expectations from Kickstarter by relatively unknown indies are likely to be met with grave disappointment. It is what it is. But for now, I’m happy to celebrate the successes of fellow game developers and the indie process. Like Minecraft, this is a a special example of what is possible, not what is likely.

And the possibilities are endless.

The “One Size Fits All” Sales Model Is Dead. The bizarro thing that many Kickstarter projects have shown (I’m also thinking Rich Burlew’s Order of the Stick reprint funding, and more…) is that is almost seems that many people are more willing to contribute to a future project than to pay for an existing product. And it’s not limited to crowdfunding. I’m talking indie bundles, paid betas, DLC, Pay-What-You-Want, “freemium”, sponsorships, subscriptions, collectors editions, and everything else. It’s clear that the old way (which I’ve admittedly clung to with my own releases) of selling a product at a fixed price is often NOT the best way to go. It will always be an option, and a popular one, but its era of dominance is at an end. Indies need to be more creative. And yes, I mean me, too.  With a global economy (especially for digital downloads), customers and fans are just too friggin’ diverse in their tastes and means. While $25 for a “big” indie game in a niche genre is pretty reasonable for a middle-class American,  it’s far too expensive for many potential fans, and is leaving money on the table for a few others who would be happy to contribute more.

This is a great time to be a gamer. Seriously.  It’s the new frickin’ golden age as far as I am concerned. I am overwhelmed with games to play – both indie and mainstream – and time is a far more limiting factor than money. We’re still getting plenty of high-end AAA games with incredible graphics and streamlined gameplay; retro-gaming has made a pretty nice resurgence; and the indies are on fire. Life is good.

Have fun!

Filed Under: Adventure Games, Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 13 Comments to Read



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