Sundays’ Question!
How many copies of Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken, Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2 were sold?
Where are all those folks now and why they’re not buying Thimbleweed Park?
Why Ron didn’t work on Zak?
0 copies were sold.
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I tried to find sales earlier for the PnC genre but found very limited information. I’m wondering what the best selling point-and -click adventures of all-time are.
That is, quite literally, the million dollar question. It’s easy to say “go find them”, but that’s actually really really hard. If every Monkey Island fan bought TWP, we would have sold 10x the copies. One issue is “Monkey Island fan” doesn’t necessarily mean “point-and-click fan”. TWP isn’t MI, I can see people who loved MI not liking TWP. Or, at least reading about TWP and saying “that’s not the game for me”. If we were trying to optimize sales based on MI fans, we would have made a different game, but that’s not the game we wanted to make.
Ideas are cheap, execution is hard.
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A lot of these people have “grown out of” playing computer games. There should still be ways to reach many who would otherwise still be interested…
Such as making MI3 (with a few extra measures).
This is quite possible. After leaving school I didn’t really play video games for about 10 years.
There must definitely be ways to attract some of the old guard but I think the real key is opening up such games to the current and next generation of gamers. I think some concepts need to be modernised as to fit into the current gaming zeitgeist and I think it can be achieved without negatively affecting the gameplay nor peeving off the loyal faithful. Also, I think TWP is setting a reasonable platform for future endeavours. It isn’t doing badly as far as I can gather.
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No, it’s not doing badly at all. If you compare it to other point-and-click games or 2D narrative games, it’s kicking ass. It’s when you compare it to modern 3D games that its not matching up, but we never expected that. Ultimately it will do the numbers we expected, it’s just going to take a lot longer.
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What do you mean by zero? It was converted for a bunch of different systems so it must have had quite a success back then.
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I know the numbers are not exact, but SteamSpy shows over 500k owners for Monkey Island 1 SE (a little bit less for MI2). There should be a way to point all those users into TWP’s direction… Or maybe most of them got the games in a sale.
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Wow, I would have expected in the 200-300K range. Thanks for the info!!
@David can confirm it. Trust me 
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View SteamSpy numbers with suspicion if the game has been out for more than a year. Many of those units were at deep discounts, or part of bundles where no one ever played (or was interested in) the game. 200K is the more likely “real” real numbers, but that’s only on Steam. I heard they did very well on iOS and consoles, but I bet many of those units were purchased by the same people. The thing about anything that is a “cult hit” is that the same people buy it over and over. Psychonauts is a great example of this.
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That was my gut feeling (200K/300K range)
Poi facciamo i conti! 
[I’ll deal with you later!]
So, what is the most likely explanation? off the top of my head the possibilities are:
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MI fans haven’t been reached.
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MI fans perceived TWP as a new Maniac Mansion, not as a new MI. And they wanted the Caribbean at all costs.
2.a) MI fans perceived TWP as a new Maniac Mansion, not as a new MI. They wanted Guybrush at all costs.
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MI fans “pirated” the game. (makes sense, told like this
) -
MI fans preferred to watch youtube even if this meant not to solve puzzles (not plausible)
–
Basically I don’t understand, because I liked TWP almost as much as MI. the difference being due to the setting: TWP could never beat MI because the caribbean is too exotic and fascinating. But TWP was as good as it could ever be.
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Don’t forget that MI is also available on GOG and it was sold (at least in germany) as a boxed version. So in total I think we will reach the 500K.
btw: Several friends of mine bought the boxed version. They aren’t playing any computer games today (and so they don’t use steam) but as they saw the box in the store they instantly bought it - just for the memories. And I think that is the “problem” in reaching these old fans: TWP is a new game.
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That can’t be right. It must have sold at least one copy – the genesis unit from which all bootlegs and cracks came from.
Or better, a Caribbean game with Ron’s new UI that will revolutionize adventure games.
He was referring to the typo in my name 
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