Sam & Max 2 Cancelled

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That's true, but it is on moments like these that a good game can turn the tide. For a moment, there were almost no sales for RPG games, then came one game that sold a lot and changed the whole thing.

Adventure games virtually dominated the market for years, maybe there's some latent market for a really good one. Lucasarts decided it was not worth the risk.
 
Eh, I don't know if there's really anything disappointing about this decision. Given how small the adventure game market is today, any new adventure game from LucasArts today would either not sell well (and it would, most likely, suck - remember Escape from Monkey Island?), or it wouldn't be an adventure game at all, but rather some kind of action game - in which case, all the people waiting for an adventure game would hate it.
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So your advice would be 'never try' :)?
 
To a certain degree, yes. Thing is, there are 'classic' adventure games out there, made by smaller companies working on much smaller budgets. These games don't sell well, though - just well enough to cover their costs. LucasArts, meanwhile, could never settle for such results. They would spend more on the game, and they would want it to earn more. So, they'd start messing around with the gameplay, simplifying it, and ending up with something that really doesn't satisfy anyone. In short, until somebody else makes a classic adventure game that sells a million copies or something, LucasArts simply won't have enough confidence in the genre to make a good adventure game.
 
Nah, no small company has the ability to distribute a million copies - if there's going to be a new 'fad', it'll be because a big company took a risk on something (ie, Origin with FMV... or Origin with MMPRPGs...)
 
But in both cases, there was somebody in Origin with a sufficiently high reputation for EA to believe in the project. Like I said, it's a confidence thing - so yeah, I suppose under some circumstances they don't need to wait for a hit game. However, this does not appear to be the case with LucasArts.

(as for the distribution abilities of small companies, there are many small studios out there whose games are published in millions of copies because there are bigger companies willing to publish their games)
 
Nah, at the very least UO was a huge risk - during development, they believed they'd get a subscriber base in the hundreds... and would have to chage up to $50 a month to maintain the game.
 
why isn't syberia 2 cancelled if there is no market for adventure games? besides, there are tons of fps & mmorpg games out there, it's the perfect time to release something unique, different... actually, always is a good time to release a great game.

long life sam & max!
screw lucasarts!

http://www.savesamandmax.com
 
Signature number 17507 or something. Yarr! *Is seen doing unknown things to every LA-executive's alarm-clock.*

(Not-quite-relevant information: I recently played the Syberia 2-demo, and it at least has the looks. The animations are bloody stupid, though.)
 
Cassiel said:
why isn't syberia 2 cancelled if there is no market for adventure games? besides, there are tons of fps & mmorpg games out there, it's the perfect time to release something unique, different... actually, always is a good time to release a great game.
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Not for the people making it though. You can have great unique games that people don't buy, because the market is geared towards FPS and MMORPG games. Syberia is made by a real small time developer. Its costs and budget are much smaller than what Lucasarts puts together for any project. Much like EA, Lucasarts won't make many small time games that appeals to a niche market.. which is all Syberia 2 will do.
 
is the adventure games market that small? as small as the space simulation games market?

btw, is it ok that a normal user like me can see the ip of all the users? for example, i can see ChrisReid's ip on his post, right above my second post: IP: 24.17.32.116 if that's ok, sorry to bother you :)
 
Cassiel said:
btw, is it ok that a normal user like me can see the ip of all the users? for example, i can see ChrisReid's ip on his post, right above my second post: IP: 24.17.32.116 if that's ok, sorry to bother you :)
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Yeah, if it were hidden here you could just hop on irc and /dns me to get the same result. A lot of boards for visible IPs, and it just encourages transparency and makes people doing silly stuff less likely as it can be clearly seen by everyone from the very beginning.
 
Cassiel said:
is the adventure games market that small? as small as the space simulation games market?
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Each genre waxes and wanes. Flight sims, particularly the WWII variety, are a perfect example. There will be years-long stretches of time without any arrivals of significance, and then immediately there's a glut of them and they become the most popular thing.

I blame Freespace for killing the space-dogfighter genre, and Freelancer for keeping it dead. Starlancer and I-War 2 were valiant efforts, but not really jumpstart material. Without a proper Wing Commander or X-Wing in the near future, there's really no reason to expect much activity either.

FPSes seem to have some intense staying-power, though. They're always the technology vanguard, and always popular enough to sell. It's amazing that people never get enough, but there's no figuring people. I'll buy Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 with all the rest of the sheep, though, so I guess I can't act too surprised.
 
I don't think space sims are really dead - they've just migrated to consoles for the most part. (Witness Rogue Squadron series / Star Trek Shattered Universe / Battlestar Galatica et all - although this seems to imply you'd need an extremely popular franchise to compete at all).
 
Frosty said:
I blame Freespace for killing the space-dogfighter genre, and Freelancer for keeping it dead. Starlancer and I-War 2 were valiant efforts, but not really jumpstart material. Without a proper Wing Commander or X-Wing in the near future, there's really no reason to expect much activity either.

FPSes seem to have some intense staying-power, though. They're always the technology vanguard, and always popular enough to sell. It's amazing that people never get enough, but there's no figuring people. I'll buy Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 with all the rest of the sheep, though, so I guess I can't act too surprised.
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Hey hey, now. Don't be blaming Freespace for the death of the space-dogfighter genre. It was a really solid game. As for Freelancer, well, that's more of an action space sim (kinda like how you wouldn't call Diablo a RPG). As you've mentioned, FPS's have quite a bit of staying power. Companies such as EA or LucasArts, see that and will feel compelled to promote products that they feel will bring in the most cash flow. If the market has no demand for an adventure game, then why make one? To take a chance and see if the time is right? Why risk it. Just let some small company produce an adventure game, wait and see how it sells and then follow suit if it's a hit. If it doesn't succeed, then you can still pump out another Sim game/expansion or another Star Wars game. Why risk any of your company's money when you can just let a smaller upstart company be an indicator of what's to come?
 
Give it a few more years. One of the big selling pointd for FPS is the GRAPHICS. People buy new ones because the look better. But already we see classics emerge like Counter Strike. OTOH Graphics cannot improve much more, so I predict that FPS will soon go the gameplay route (Halflife, Unreal) much stronger again. And in the even longer run (~10 years) this will destroy the hype about them I think.
 
I really want to post a witty internet picture to tell you off, but I think just calling you really, really stupid will suffice.
 
There are a lot of reasons to the decline of the space combat sim market. Maybe it just got old in relation to other genres. Very few people even have joysticks, and now they want to play other kinds of games. But since it’s a market thing, look also consumers and not just to the suppliers. No specific game killed the market, if there was still demand for it, there would be games being made. Maybe this will change.
 
If you had to point to one single game that scared away publishers, you'd pick Freespace 2. Freespace 2's spectacular failure killed a number of Very Good Things, including Privateer Online. Now, I don't know if it was through any fault of its own (okay, *I* know it sucked, but that's an opinion) but Freespace 2 was the first big space sim game to show that the market wasn't there anymore.
 
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