According to this leak, as of July 1 2018 Thimbleweed Park has 98,491 unique players on Steam.
Other notable games (that puts into perspective the not so stellar sales of TWP):
Grim Fandango Remastered: 516,584
Monkey Island 2 Special Edition: LeChuck’s Revenge: 288,297
The Cave: 271,663
Day of the Tentacle Remastered: 265,169
Gemini Rue: 130,615
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition: 42,031
Wow! Stardew Valley almost 5 Million! On Steam alone. Plus Gog and every other format like PS4 etc
That game has exploded since release.
I don’t think that TWP figure is too bad considering this is an oldschool Graphic Adventure. Plus Gog figures you don’t know and other formats like Switch which I do believe were good numbers for Switch. I don’t think android or ios is even worth doing (financially) IMHO. Also I hope a lot of people (like me) got a big box edition and got some merch as well which helps.
In an ideal world GA’s would be a big genre but the lack of Publishers doing GAs means that the majority of players now especially the younger ones don’t know how cool they are!
Luckily there are still some cool young players around that do enjoy old school graphic adventures!
To put things in perspective, those player counts do not mean sales. I’ve got some games for free on both Steam and Gog (including Grim Fandango Remastered), so that surely skews those counts.
What is really sad to see is 4 games in that list are just re-issues of OLD games and then a NEW game like TWP would still be perceived as “old-school” because of its graphics, because of its makers, because of its non-single click UI,…
I bet if you would sell a SEASON PASS for TWP it would attract a whole new (wrong) crowd.
Or… a GOTY edition
True but I should imagine not too many people are getting TWP for free. Also, A lot of new games get a lot of expensive promotion. Kickstarter and social media are good, it got plenty of exposure on the retro scenes, Retro Gamer magazine (U.K) gave it a score of 90? I think. Which was what swayed me to get it now. Smaller companies have smaller budgets for advertising unfortunately.
They gave me 2 free games in the last 2 months. Not played them but still I will get round to it. I’ve been collecting up all the old Graphic Adventures from LA and others. Plus the awesome U.K developed Beneath A Steel Sky, Lure of the Temptress and the Aussie born Flight of the Amazon Queen are all free on there as well. Released to PD.
I don’t do Steam, I can’t get on with it. I find it very intrusive like facebook push notifications. I had Chaos Engine on that but gave up. I love Gog because it is DRM free and don’t bug you. I buy the game. I download the game, I play the game whenever instantly without having to jump through hoops just to play things I have paid for. They add new games to Gog all the time. Escape From Monkey just went on there I think, that is all of them on there now. I’m waiting for Westwoods Dune 2 but it has been a long wait.
If you are careless you can easily jump to your death in this game from those many ladders.
The key is to choose the right team, e.g. using the Knight to traverse most of the cave helps you preventing any fall damage. Or don’t choose the Adventurer, too many spikes in that area!
I always find it irritating when such lists totally ignore the many fine adventure games of Daedalic.
OTOH, I do get some satisfaction from the fact that their newer, non-point-n-click style games have worse numbers than the more traditional ones. (Obviously, they haven’t been out for too long yet).
Anyway, here’s the data:
Title
Players
The Whispered World Special Edition
161,751
Edna & Harvey: The Breakout
137,882
Edna & Harvey: Harvey’s New Eyes
219,442
A New Beginning - Final Cut
108,523
Chains of Satinav
188,342
Memoria
186,812
Deponia
743,347
Chaos on Deponia
249,600
Goodbye Deponia
168,319
Deponia Doomsday
123,013
Silence
69,338
The Pillars of the Earth
58,710
Deponia seems to be a bit of an outlier. Did they give that away for free at some point in time?
It’s also worth noting that quite a few of those games were sold DRM-free on DVD, back then when that was still a thing. So the numbers are likely not indicative of overall sales. The exception to that is Chains of Satinav, which always required Steam, even for its physical copy.
In the same order (as you list suggests) I would recommend to play the Daedalic games.
Yes and no: Especially in Germany they had the DRM-free DVD version. Beside that the Deponia series was sold together with several magazines (yes, we have still the printed ones ) and it was part of several game bundles (for example Humble Bundles). Plus: Deponia was the most popular adventure game from Daedalic in Germany - it was featured in several TV shows.
Remember these numbers are terribly skewed for games that have been on sale (sometimes in deep discount). Also games that were part of Humble Bundles where the play quickly booted it but never played it. Don’t read too much into these numbers. TWP has been massively successful on Switch and I have no doubt that is cannibalize Steam to some extent. By next month we will have sold more on Switch than Steam and Switch shows little signs of letting up.
The number of indie games on the switch is astonishing. Couldn´t have imagined that on a nintendo console in the 90s.
I wonder if that is just the right audience.
I mean @tasse-tee wouldn´t even be here without the switch port, right? See how you manage to reach a younger audience that isn´t even nostalgic about the old games that way? Good job on that!
I thought the methodology behind those numbers required players to unlock at least one achievement. If booting up a game counts as achievement these days, I no longer need to wonder how the current state of the world comes about …
But yeah, the numbers should be taken with a lump of salt. OTOH, they give a rare insight into an otherwise pretty black box.
Most games have a “givme” achievement. Often this is done for the exact reason of being able to see how many people started the game but didn’t get to the first “real” achievement. Devs use achievements as analytics. We love achievements that just monitor progress.
I also haven´t seen a single game so far where the one for finishing the game itself is not among the rarest achievements… Those that track the progress always make the achievement graphics look like a reverse pyramid.
