Don't read too much into them but see sales figures up to May 2001.

Thanks Peter! You know, with sales figures like that for Myst, Riven and Carmen Sandiego, I wonder why Broderbund went under.

I think Broderbund were quite large, and covered a numbe of areas?

Good point.

Thank you very much for sharing these

Wow. Poor Clandestiny. I think I shall put it higher on my to-play pile in sympathy.

I thought Journeyman Project 1 had done better than that. For one thing, it was in several discount bundles in the mid-90's. At one point, I had three copies!

OTOH Sierra's numbers don't surprise me at all. Everybody played King's Quest back when. I bet Infocom's numbers were pretty high too, at least compared with the numbers of pcs people had back in the 80's.

I remember hearing or reading that Myst's figures eventually cracked 10 million - what with the trilogy and all...so Myst III & Riven should be higher now too. Course some of that is due to fans like me who have a number of personal copies one way and another (plus those we gave as presents).

Susan

It's interesting to see that the King's Quest series sold 7 million units until 2001-2002 or so. However, if one divides this with 23 years, then we only get about 300,000 units pr. year or so.

The longest Journey proobably sold about 300,000 units in the first year or so, I'd guess. 7 years from this the sales could easily reach 1 million games or so.

Back in 1999-2002, companies could afford to sell 300,000 copies each year just to stay in business. Today, publishers etc. expect to sell 3 million units pr. game during a game's first two to six weeks or so.

And adventure games just doesn't do this...

/Karsten

Don't read too much into the numbers, it's possible some of the figures exclude non-US sales for instance.

I hope that newer ways of publishing games (like GameTap or digital downloads) will reduce the break even point to what Adventure games can achieve.

Peter, hi,

Thanks for the figures. Question arising: the 1,000,000 figure for 'Gabriel Knight series'... since it has a date of 1993, is that figure actually for Sins of the Fathers only? I would have thought the 3 games would have sold over a million copies collectively.

Regards,
MetzO'Magic

Hello Metzomagic,

The Gabriel Knight figure is one I collected off the Internet - it was for the series, but where I got it from didn't indicate how the figure was arrived at. Sorry, I no longer have the references. It may well be low.

I'm not sure that GK3 sold that well, it had one or two bad reviews which may have impacted it.

There may be other ways of gathering at least comparative data which might be interesting. Like one could regularly analyse Amazon sales charts.

Cheers,

Peter.

Though considered to be best-selling games in those days, the sales figures of the Journeyman Project 1 and 2 look a bit poor today.
According to Broderbund's Mike Salvadore in a press release (1996) the series sold approximately 500,000 copies. As he mentions that 200.000 of The Journeyman Project 2 were sold in the year after it was published, JMP 1 would have sold 300.000 copies by then.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Broderbund...h...-a018490706

You know, often when developers stop making adventure games, that is just a temporary setback. Somehow or other they often come back to making adventure games, even if they have to create new development companies to do it.

For publishers like Broderbund who once published adventure games, the story isn't so positive. It seems that once a publisher drops adventure games (or disappears altogether), they very infrequently surface again to begin publishing adventure games.

I'm not sure what the implications are, though it undoubtedly isn't good.

Peter -- I agree that online distribution would definitely solve certain problems, and may be the wave of the future. Before that happens, though, I think online distributors of large games like adventure games need to somehow solve the problems of long download times, frequent glitches encountered by people who are the first to download, and costs that are exactly the same as the boxed versions of the game.

The Presto figures came from Presto. "Approximately 500,000 copies" won't be a number close to half a million.



I wonder if casual games (like "Azada" etc) will evolve to having more complex story-lines, and thus become Adventure games in all but name. But that's wandering off topic.

Good question! Want to start an additional topic?

Does it matter? Even if the figure is 460.000, it means that sales of JMP 1 were higher, and that was the question I responded too. But of course this isn't all hard info (coming from Broderbund or Presto; which stays unclear in the article). But the games must have done very well for Presto, otherwise it is a miracle that they published The Jourman Project Turbo! and the remake Pegasus Prime. But even these numbers amaze me, as these are great games. Like some other figures mentioned in your listing; it upsets me to read that another great game like Obsidian sold 80.000 copies.

You're right that none of this is hard info - all is an approximation, on the order of, all measuring slightly different things. Perhaps the most interesting and important numbers are those from Ivinia about how low indie sales are.