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Economics of a 2D Adventure
Thanks to The Grumpy Gamer (Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island fame), for his excellent look at The Economics of 2D Adventure Games. "First, this is only a thought experiment. This is not something I am planning on doing, or even have a huge interest in doing, so please don't feed the rumor mills. Second, this article contains gory and gruesome details about the games business and, in particular, marketing and distribution. If you'd rather remain blissfully oblivious to the horrors of what goes on behind the scenes, this is the place to stop reading. If you're one of those people that can't help but stare at a car accident, read on."
I agree. When was the last time you found a bug in a 2D adventure game? That's because it's just a new story on top of the same engine. As long as you make sure you can play through the entire game, you're pretty much fine. Really the only testing you need on the playable product is to play through the whole game a few times to make sure it's possible to win. The only real bugs that can occur then are broken room or item objects in the game. In most of these cases, the worst that happens is the user can no longer win, which is a valid choice for some adventure games. (Although recently most adventure games stay away from that.) On the off chance that there is some massive unintended error, the company can just patch it. Most users probably won't notice the bug at all and will be fine without it. No one is going to get pissed because they lost a death match over a bug.
Believe me, adventure gamers are going to be much more tolerant of bugs than players of other genres. These guys are used to dying for incredibly inane reasons. They've been trained to save every ten minutes in case something goes wrong. Click on a honey comb? Bees kill you. Walk over an ant hill? Fire ants. Look at old woman? Turn to stone. Unprotected sex with hooker? Death by horrible STD. Anyone who's played through a few * Quest games knows what I'm talking open.