When I go shopping with little boys, they go running straight in front to the boxed games for popular consolles. They touch them, read them, insist to buy them. The price? It’s an adult thing of course, who cares…
So… I think when TWP park will be in shops, it could attract also a good slice of audience.
Well I think mobiles, Xbox and PS4 are the base today for concrete earnings. The gameplay for point and click on mobiles and console is not even closer to the classic one for which is been designed for but I think many old fans and players are now moving to these kind of platforms. Now consoles and mobiles have reached impressive quality for games and maybe grown players (me included) prefer sometimes play on PS4 for example and instead work on pc or Mac. Also piracy is a big problem indeed on windows/osx. I think market now is too wide and diversificated, and capitalism is always been a problem.
PC games always used to have a drastic loss of value. And, there were also bundles in the 90s. But, while games were boxed, transported and stored on shelves back then, which caused additional costs and drastically reduced the profit margin, they now get sold digitally, which allows even bigger cuts in consumer price. So the consumer witnesses a bigger decline of the prices nowadays, while the profit margin might be similarly low for the developers. Of course, this increased decline of the consumer prices has an inevitable psychological effect on the consumers.
“Why should I buy a game at the release price, if it costs half the amount after only a year and a quarter two years later?” - mindset of many consumers
By the way, on consoles, there are PlayStation Plus and Games with Gold, which might have a share in the decline of prices.
Also, the number of game releases has increased, due to the higher number of competitors (especially indie developers).
Key to me is the atmosphere. Why I loved MI (and MI2) is because of the atmoshere. I had that with TWP and that’s what I am looking for. Still, the Melee Island Top View Map is not going to be replaced feeling-wise for me but the atmosphere catched me and I would love to play any other game from Ron & Gary’s team.
I have no idea about actual numbers but remembering how many of my friends played (and bought) MI and especially MI2 I am very sure, in total it sold quite well at least in Germany. A confess I had a pirated copy of MI first but put it on my birthday wishlist since I wanted to really own the game and not just some floppies containing the game. Same with TWP - I will be very happy to get the box to “really” own it.
But … I am not a regular gamer at all today and also wasn’t back then and I might be A-typical.
I sincerely hope there will be another game - backed through Kickstarter or ideally funded by TWPs returns.
Assuming you are italian, back in the '90s there was no law against game piracy. It was a common practice to have a bunch of games monthly (cracked and copied).
As for me, I have purchased Zak, Loom and Monkey Island after having finished them, because I felt that the authors deserved my money for their efforts.
And one problem is: There aren’t stores where you could by a boxed version. 
In the (big!) city where I live there is only one store left that is selling boxed versions of PC games. Hm… Oh, wait, there is a GameStop store but I’m not sure at the moment if they sell PC games. Anyway: Back in the 80s and 90s there were far more stores.
I came across an interesting article today, regarding the distribution of sales between boxed and digital copies in Germany, as I was wondering how well a box would do specifically in that market. Unfortunately it’s in German, but the gist of it is that in 2016:
- 31% of PC game sales were physical copies, amounting to 36% of revenue from PC game sales
- 81% of console game sales (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo) were physical copies, amounting to 85% of revenue from console game sales.
There’s definitely a trend towards digital, especially on PC, but I would imagine those numbers to look quite different compared to, say, the US market.
Of course, I understand that selling a boxed copy makes you a lot less money than a digital copy would, and comes with additional costs and headaches (like providing patches), so it might still not make sense from a business perspective. But there’s obviously still a demand for physical stuff in the parts of the world where I live, which is not explained by a handful of collectors.
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In the centre of the city I live close by (population 85,000), I know one shop that sells games, and a few more around the outskirts. There’s also a GameStop in the centre, but I guess they only sell the latest handful of AAA PC hits at a highly inflated price.
Thing is, 5 years ago that one shop would have 2 aisles of PC games and then a separate section for the top 10 best selling games. Nowadays there’s 1 aisle left, including the top 10 which take about 20% of available shelf space alone.
Now, I am kind of curious if the reduction in shelf space is a result of dropping box sales, or part of the cause. It appears that in 2013, 63% of PC game sales were still physical (down to 48% in 2014, according to the same source). So I guess I must assume that they threw games from their shelves because they were no longer worth it and not the other way around. But of course doing so certainly must contribute to the trend towards digital.
Of course, there’s still online retailers of various size that will get you a wider selection of boxed copies, but if you want your game right now, ordering from those isn’t really an option.
I don’t think that it has been a decision of the stores. Any store would be happy to sell as many games as possible. I rather think it’s caused by the fact that there are companies (such as Double-Fine) who hardly sell their games in boxes any more. Also, there have been a lot of complaints about boxes which contain only Steam software. The games industry just seems to neglect boxes, maybe because it’s easier to provide updates via Steam. DRM may be a reason, too.
I guess that those online retailers would be predestined for TWP, because it’s rather a niche game and it would be financially very brave to distribute the boxed version via hundreds of actual stores.
As a home-brewer of retro-games for ancient consoles from the 1980s, I can attest to this. Few things are more thrilling than releasing your games in the same way as you remember them from way back then: on a hardware cartridge, with molded shell, label, manual, and hand-controller overlays; all neatly packed in a beautiful cardboard box with gorgeous custom artwork. 
And the fans and collectors love them too. As a matter of fact, when I pledged for Thimbleweed Park, the first thing I did was look for the “boxed copy” level. 
Can’t wait!
-dZ.
Why are steamspy figures stuck at 50.500? It’s so unnerving.
It’s actually 45,000 today though I am not sure how it works: if the owners topped at 50,500 and then dropped to 45,000 is that because people removed the game from their drives?
If so, aren’t the subsequent increases in ownership most likely new purchases? (I don’t anticipate that many people reinstalling the game)
As far as I can tell (having access to the “real” numbers), SteamSpy is wildly inaccurate. Don’t pay much attention to what they are showing. They are basically scraping data from imperfect sources.
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Thanks for letting us know! I was thrown off because the Gamasutra article you posted a while ago was mentioning that if you take the lower bound from SteamSpy it’s supposed to be accurate with a 98% confidence. I think pretty much ecery baker wants TWP to be a commercial success and not just a critics one (that was achieved already 
), and SteamSpy is the only source we have, so it’s a little bit disappointing to know that that is inaccurate.
No. SteamSpy numbers are not counts but estimates.
What they do is to visit a sample of Steam user profiles and see which games they have in their library. Then, they use this data to estimate the total number of Steam users who own the game.
The fluctuations that you see are just a statistical phenomenon and they are not necessarily related to users removing or adding the game from/to their library.
If you want to take into consideration SteamSpy numbers, you should know that:
- These numbers are not about sales nor money. You can’t use them to estimate how much a developer has earned.
- Every estimation has a margin of error. For example, “50,000 ± 5,000” owners means that SteamSpy has estimated that there are between 45,000 and 55,000 owners of that game on Steam.
- The more a game sells, the more SteamSpy estimations are accurate. Indie games that don’t sell much are difficult to analyze and you should completely ignore SteamSpy estimations for these games.
- Special phenomena like Steam “free weekends” can hugely mess with the estimations. Personally, I consider irremediably flawed any estimation about a game that was in a “free weekend”.
- The more time a game has been published on Steam, the more it’s probable that its ownership numbers have been influenced by the phenomena cited in point 4.
Said that, SteamSpy estimations about Steam game owners should be on average quite accurate, taking into account the margin of error that the service shows near every estimation. “On average” means that there are a lot of cases in which SteamSpy isn’t able to calculate a good estimate but also that there are even more cases in which the estimation is quite correct.
Also, under specific circumstances it is possible to estimate from SteamSpy numbers and other Steam data how many Steam users have actually purchased a game. Since this is a very delicate topic and a methodology that would become dangerous in the hands of those who haven’t studied statistics, I think that it’s highly unlikely that you’ll see it disclosed on the web.
Further readings:
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So basically, only Terrible Toybox knows the accurate sales numbers: how many installations, the gross amount, and so on. Correct?
Yes. And Steam. And GOG.
Twist: not even Terrible Toybox knows!
There is some truth to that. Some platforms (not going to say who) have really bad real-time reporting. We don’t know anything concrete until a royalty statement is done.
Then, ultimate twist: “Ron Gilbert is a puppet, TWP will never be released”.