A request to AGD to help influence indie gamers to make PCAs

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likalaruku
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A request to AGD to help influence indie gamers to make PCAs

#1 Post by likalaruku » Sat Aug 20, 2011 12:37 pm

Okay, basically all you have to do is sell a few Point & Click Adventures through Bigfish Games; a site that over the past 2 years has lost it's become flooded with HOGs (games that combine Myst with the picture search from Highlites magazine).

Basically the indie developers who sell through this site will try to imitate anything that becomes a hot seller, & it's getting a little stagnant with the lack of variety. Most of the customers are adult women & being one of them I can only imagine they'd love to sink their teeth into something like this.

I'm not seeing that you actually charge for these remakes, but BFG sets a $7 on 90% of games, & a baby could afford that.

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Re: A request to AGD to help influence indie gamers to make

#2 Post by DrJones » Sat Aug 20, 2011 4:54 pm

I think AGDI stated time ago that they can't afford to make full and long games like the remake of QFG2VGA for a price as low as the usual prices in BigFish Games, but that they would like to do some small and casual titles that could be sold in sites like that one. They can't sell their remakes anywhere as part of their contract with Vivendi/Activision, so they should create new titles.

They did an experiment with a Hidden-Object-Game called Postcards of Anozira that might have been sold at BigFish Games. Indeed, I just searched and there it is:

http://www.bigfishgames.com/download-ga ... index.html

Have fun! :)

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Re: A request to AGD to help influence indie gamers to make

#3 Post by Anonymous Game Creator 2 » Wed Aug 24, 2011 7:25 am

It's not really that BigFish charges too low an amount, because they sell games in such high numbers that the low pricing point is mitigated by the sales volume. They also changed their pricing system to work a little more in favour of developers. I'm told that their best-sellers generate 300K profit for the developers (after BigFish deducts their cut) in the first year alone.

The main problem with releasing adventure games into the casual gaming sphere (aside from many portals being family friendly and not accepting games with adult humour like Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman's Mine), is that they don't require complex thinking, and this means the adventure genre doesn't resonate well with the casual audience at large. For this reason, if you want to make a non-risky game on BigFish that's going to sell, you're better off just making a straight HOG instead of blurring the lines between genres. Because at those sites, you already know the audience you're selling to.

The Al Emmo's Postcards From Anozira HOG game that Dr. Jones referenced above was just an experiment into this genre. It wasn't even particularly well-received by the casual audience, but its profit margin to date is 2,600% of the initial development costs and counting. Say what you will about HOGs, but they are easier to make and much safer profit-wise than adventure games.

For a unique insight into this phenomena, take a look at these recent "Let's Play my own Game" videos that Dave Gilbert has been uploading to Youtube. Dave developed the casual adventure game "Emerald City Confidential" for PlayFirst, one of the larger casual gaming portals. They were very adamant that he adapt many aspects of the game to keep casual gamers satisfied, and the end result, according to him, was a sort of mish-mash between genres that didn't really please adventure gamers OR the casual audience.



Given this, I think that weaning the casual audience onto more traditional adventure games can be done via iHOG games, as opposed to developing a more traditional adventure like Emerald City Confidential with some HOG/Casual elements tacked on top of what's otherwise a classic adventure game design. We have another such experimental iHOG in the works which will involve inventory items and speaking to characters like an adventure game. It seems that more HOG/casual gamers are getting tired of the traditional HOG games and seeking a greater challenge. So I see iHOGs as a good passage to facilitate this.

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