Oh yeah, and silly me:
Of course because where does a drummer sit on stage?
That´s right in the backround!
Well, maybe they’re more like Hüsker Dü or the Pixies (with Kim Deal) reunited… Ron is the Black Francis of Games for me 
Whatever, while I think it is right from Ron to point out TWP has not been like winning the lottery for him, I think it is also fair to notice he/they surpassed every other expectation with the game.
As I said, I think it’s probably a combination of factors that lead to just breaking even.
-Okay it’s not Pixel Arts, as Ron said, proof is Stardew Valley. It also proofs there is in fact a market for games that rely on wit and idea rather than bombastic presentation. That’s a very good conclusion I’d say.
-It’s probably not PnC adventures. Even though interface and graphics may have cost being labelled a „throwback game“, TWP still got remarkably good ratings. Why? Because it is a great game to play yesterday, today and tomorrow. So I think it is not correct to state that PnC adventures are done when TWP as an actual game for itself got so much appreciation.
So…
-Maybe it was partly the promotion, since even an adventure lover like me didn’t hear of it until now. I didn’t follow the process so I don’t want to make false assumptions, but maybe the target group wasn’t so clear and therefore wasn’t tackled where it needed to be? I’m a lot around „retro gaming sites“ like Emuparadise etc., couldn’t find any hint to TWP there. Also, I don’t know how „grown up publications“ have been triggered by the marketing campaign, like „men magazines“ and other gadget publications. Let’s be honest, first and foremost this is a „Rosebud game“, giving ripe men the toys they once loved as kids. All the success of the emu consoles such as the Nintendos and Segas with retro games come this way. I suppose they also don’t outsell today’s games, but they are quite popular and can create revenue via higher prices because the target group is now mostly grown up and quite wealthy. Maybe TWP could have created more success if marketed differently – but again I don’t want to point fingers at anyone.
-Maybe it was partly the main characters. I love them, but probably they didn’t resonate with younger players? The only „young“ character, Delores, was also the one most settled in the world of the today’s parents generation with her C64, so she probably couldn’t be the hero-ine for today’s kids like Guybrush was for us.
-Maybe it was partly the overall setting in the „parents world“ of the 80s? Did it possibly exclude whole generations? It sure almost cut out me, since I started 1990 with an Amiga. I experienced the last days of the C64, but if the graphics had been C64 style, I’d probably not bought it. Personally I would have wished the graphics even more 90s, a bit less „square“ MI2-style.
-Maybe it was partly the story itself? The dead body directly at the start scene made instantly clear it wasn’t too kid friendly. It shows very quickly it‘s an adults game, but not in a Wolfenstein kind of way, that attracts younger players even more. It’s a „Kid’s can’t understand this“ adult way, so you lose a lot of possible audience, I suppose. Again, nothing that bothered me personally.
-Maybe it was partly the interface, as Ron stated. I’d be curious to know how succesful the Special Editions were because they try to lift the past games into today’s gaming habits. The switchable versions are a great feature which could please a lot of different people. I myself feel strangely divided. I like the speech (no clue why it wasn’t an option in the classic version) and the overall higher resolution oft he special edition. The new interface is crap for me. Apart from the old interface I like the pixel graphics sometimes better because they leave room for imagination. The old guy in the shop e.g. of MI1 looks totally different for me in the Special Version now that his face is so detailed.
-Maybe it was partly re-start issues. PnC have not been done this way a long time, so a lot of people are just not used to them. Now that TWP is out and reopened the door a bit and paved some way again it could well be there is a good chance to reach more open minded players and success for a next game. Especially if it featured a more mainstream appealing story, like MI.
And if there is no chance to get the rights of MI back, why not work around it? Why not trying „The Monkey of Secret Island“ with some new characters that feel closely related to beloved ones in a carribean environment? Many games with license issues also overcome those by introducing editors – what if you could rename the main characters like you wanted and if you spelt them a strangely familiar way, even triggering a hidden speech version with those edited names?
It’s just my thoughts and guesses to prevent the conclusion that TWP shows adventure games are dead. I certainly don’t feel so.
Losch
Sorry, but this not true. If you haven’t heard about TWP then you must been living under a rock. My favorite example is, that even one of the biggest German radio stations reported about TWP.
And even these sites reported about TWP. One example is Lemon64.
We have suggested that and other “workarounds” in another thread, but Ron won’t like to do that.
Thanks for the heads-up. What’s your assumption then regarding TWP failing to hit the charts?
Short version: The story and the setting. It’s obviously a game from nerds for nerds.
I’d agree, though I’d not see myself as a total nerd 
I’d rather file it under “Special Interest”. Like Big Lebowski, a Hüsker Dü album or a Tom Robbins book. Nothing bad about it at all for me. As I said, cult stuff. Everybody involved can be proud of that.
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Tom Robbins huh? I’ve certainly enjoyed all of his books. I didn’t really “get” The Big Lebowski though. I prefer Fargo (<3<3<3) and The Ladykillers. (But I believe I prefer the original Ladykillers.)
The shelf with Tom Robbins:
The Mario shrine:
PS My wife introduced me to Tom Robbins. Those books are all hers, including his first book which I got her as a b-day present.
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One big advantage that TWP has over MI or MM is that we are not living anymore in an era where videogames say on the shelves of shops for a few months before disappearing. TWP is for sale online potentially forever. So there always can be new people who discover it, new groups, new demographics, new fanbases who will at some point hear about it and play it.
It’s not a game by nerds for nerds. It’s a game that explores an certain aesthetic from the past, and so what, I like Art Nouveau, was I born in 1880?
Aesthetics used to be explored for decades long and sometimes an entire century. The only thing particular about the 20th century is that it had short spans of very different kind of design and art that lasted for a decade max and were replaced by something else. But if you think about it, there is no reason why those would not be explored deeper for a while. THere are plenty of art or fashion movements that fed on the past. Most of the 19th century was feeding on medievalism. Just before it, the 18th century was a throwback to antiquity. THe eightes used the fifties, the nineties used the seventies. If you put yourself in the 22nd century, you would see little difference between 1987 and 2018, it’s just the same kind of distant past, there would be little time before MM and TWP anyway.
And again, the eighties are massively popular with kids who did not experience them (and maybe that’s why it’s popular with them, they can enjoy the good things and discard Margaret Thatcher, cocaine, and Small Wonder). You don’t need to be born one precise generation to find a certain charm in TWP. And also because, as I said before, they avoided the pitfall of making TWP nauseously eighties with too much cheap references to the decade.
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Indeed. But the current sales aren’t/weren’t enough to finance a new game by Ron Gilbert. And the sales in the future will decrease and reach a low level, so Ron and the other devs can’t live from the sales. And…
… these will only be a few people.
The sales of Grim and the Special Edition of Monkey Island were high just because they weren’t available for a long time. They were bought by people like us that would like to do a trip in their childhood.
It is. Have a closer look. Remove the 80s visuals. Even if you turn off the annoying in-game jokes there remains the Thimblecon for example. And the whole ending is made for nerds - I doubt that a lot of “casual” players will understand that ending. You even have to know that there was a Kickstarter campaign (and what a “Kickstarter” is) to solve the game.
Of course! I never said anything against it. Maybe there will be in 10 years a massive run on TWP. For example Bladerunner wasn’t a success too - and now we have a second movie. So maybe a nerdish story will be popular in 10 or 20 years. I can’t exclude that. But it’s more likely that this won’t happen.
Indeed. And a lot of young people discovered and played TWP already. But these kids are not the masses.
And I think TWP is already very popular (considering his “special interest” genre). Much more popular than other adventure games. (Can you name for example all Daedalic games?)
Not for me. I got it mainly because I like Broken Age and Double Fine in general. I actually typed a fairly wordy reply about how all of this pixelated pre-SVGA stuff has essentially always been “old” to me. I could still share it if you’re curious I suppose.
Curse of Monkey Island is a game from my childhood in the late '90s. Escape is something I played in the early 2000s as a teen. I played the older two a few years later (around '03 or '04) thanks to some abandonware website, after a friend had loaned me Day of the Tentacle which was really enjoyable. I was a 16+ y/o adolescent by that time.
I’ll answer the second part of your post first. 
So you knew these games? Then buying the Grim and MI wasn’t it a trip to past?
It is similar with TWP: We would like to remember the good old times but with a game that we haven’t played yet.
Of course there are “new” players. But the majority bought the remakes because they played the game(s) in the past.
I might’ve skipped CoMI on GOG recently if it wasn’t a game from my past, I suppose. I replayed it a few years ago and it was the least memorable of the bunch, with Elaine relegated to a gold statue and similar detractions from the original Monkey Island games. Grim is a game I tried back in the day and didn’t like for whatever reason. (Not the controls. Escape from Monkey Island was fine by me.) As a rule of thumb that doesn’t translate to me buying the game. If by “know” you mean “know of” then that applies to a great many games. I used to subscribe to Power Unlimited until by '07 or so I noticed I wasn’t reading them anymore.
Here, I’ll just dump the unedited stream of consciousness wall of text. It was about the graphics of Thimbleweed Park being among the best if not simply the best I’ve ever seen period.
I’m obviously more a decade and a half less removed from all of this than today’s kids since I supposedly saw the fall of the Berlin Wall live on TV, but perhaps I should point out that for me all this more pixelated pre-SVGA stuff has always been “old.” I replayed the Curse of Monkey Island demo a few times in the late '90s before I was able to borrow it from the library. It was one of my first adventure games, probably my first “real” adventure game besides an edutainment title (Who’s Oscar Lake) and some kind of historical graphic novel adventure about WW2 and a teddy bear. (I think it was called Operatie Teddybeer.) Admittedly I also had Dragon Lore but I could never really figure that out.
I doubt it’s all that different in principle to when I first became acquainted with DoTT after it was recommended and loaned to me by a friend in '02 or '03. The game looked dated, but good. I had already played CoMI a few years prior, which was probably my first real adventure game, but besides picking up the occasional similar game like Discworld Noir or Broken Sword at the library I was unfamiliar with the LucasArts games. I played Escape from Monkey Island after DoTT. I do, however, think the style has aged better than the early 3D from my earlier computer experiences, like Tomb Raider, Terminal Velocity, and Interstate 76.
I didn’t really play any of those older games Thimbleweed Park visually references to some degree until '03-ish, easily a decade past their prime. DoTT was loaned to me by a friend and when I looked up a little about it I was able to acquire MI1, MI2 and Fate of Atlantis from some abandonware site. The rest of the LucasArts games (e.g., Loom, The Dig, Full Throttle, and just a few weeks ago Maniac Mansion) I didn’t play until a few years ago mainly thanks to GOG. I have no special nostalgic attachment to the style. By and large they’re just good games, and some of them (mainly Loom and Monkey Island) also look pretty great. I’m less enthused by MI2 even though it technically has more colors.