The Grumpy Gamer Speaks

Ron Gilbert, well-known for his work during the golden age of LucasArts adventure games, is also well known as The Grumpy Gamer. Gamasutra has up an interview with Gilbert, discussing his career in the post-Threepwood period of his life. From the article: "It's actually kind of frightening, you know. You sit down with a publisher and the minute you mention anything like an adventure game or something story-based or adventure-game-like in any way, the meeting's basically over. So the publishers do have a huge resistance to this. And I think a lot of it is that they cannot point to anything like this that is successful in the market today. So it's very difficult for them to put anything behind it. It's a very difficult process."

Comments

Re:more GTA bashing - yea.

[NeilTheStupidHead]

Don't get me wrong, I play San Andreas just as mush as the next guy. SA looks great, the game play is fun and the controls are easy. And yes, I can pull a lot of social commentary and some story out of it. I also turn SA off and fire up my old consoles and play Chrono Trigger or FF7. Even though these games look like crap by modern standards, I still enjoy them because, either because of the quality of the gameplay or the story. Heck, I even bust out the old Infocom text adventures on occasion.

What can it possibly cost?

[Cadallin]

To DO an adventure game nowadays? Let's say you wanted to do a SVGA (SCUMM-style) 256-color 640x480, animated, with full voice acting game? Let's say you pull all the stops, go whole hog, and get like, Tony DiTerlizzi to do your background paintings and Character designs, put together your own studio, etc? I mean, jesus, it probably wouldn't be more than like $500,000. How can the market NOT support this? Even with fairly modest sales you'd expect a couple million in revenue. Let's suppose you sell 60,000 units at full retail price of like $40 and recoup $20 of that after packaging and the retailors cut, that's still $1.2Million. And honestly I'd expect a game with decent writing and production values to EASILY sell in excess of a hundred thousand units.

At this point I'd half expect someone to be able to make a game in their freaking basement, and then jump start a studio off just a few thousand digital download sales, with a few thousand in revenue. I mean really, we've got the Gimp, various free audio editing tools, Python is Free/Free. Studio recording equipment is Ass-cheap. What's stopping people?