Since I finished my three-part “sky is kinda falling” blog series a while back, we’ve mourned a major publisher going bankrupt, witnessed the high-priced Wii and DS launch of Broken Sword Director’s Cut, and seen 432 hidden object games be released… Okay, that last one may be an exaggeration, but casual titles are out in full force these days, so between the three issues raised, I guess I wasn't too far off. Now, for the record, even I wasn’t expecting some of the changes to happen this quickly, and I still contend that the real effects of deep-rooted issues have yet to truly be felt. The games releasing now are all the tail ends of the previous “generation” of production cycles, after all. Those were all greenlit under the assumption of a still-healthy market 12 or 18 months, even two years ago. It’s the new generation I’m more worried about. Will as many games get started at all in the current climate, or be seen through to completion? I’m convinced the answer is “no” (I know of some concerning evidence already, though I’m not really at liberty to discuss details). “How many?” is the question that really remains to be seen.

But that’s the despair just getting rehashed all over again. When I first wrote those articles, it was always my intention to follow it up with a message of hope, which I tried to indicate still existed, though perhaps that particular message was drowned out previously. Unfortunately, it took until now to actually get back to the blog, so the negativity lingered a little longer than I intended. I’d joke that it took me this long just to think of any reasons for hope, but while there’s probably a bit more truth in that than I’d like, really it’s because I was sidetracked with other things. Between an overwhelming number of new previews, interviews, reviews, and of course the inaugural Aggie Awards, my time has been pretty much taken up with current site content. And really, isn’t that a symbol of hope right there? Even while discussing dark times, there’s still a steady stream of new games to deal with, and there are always some good ones to celebrate at each year end. Whatever challenges the genre faces, I expect no different when the 2009 Aggies roll around.

Maybe that’s just blind optimism, though. What legitimate hopes are there really? There are no guarantees, of course, and perhaps the answer falls something short of tangible proof, but I think it qualifies as reasoned confidence. Here’s a bit of rationale for that faith.

Global popularity

While the genre always seems to be teetering on the brink of disinterest in major English language markets, it actually seems to be picking up steam in some parts of the world. Germany and France have long been leaders in this regard, but now that influence seems to be spreading out even farther. The Nintendo DS has made Japan a significant player on the worldwide adventure stage, and new game announcements seem to be coming from everywhere: in recent months alone, a whopping FOUR games from Italy, one from Malaysia, another from Israel, plus plenty more already in development throughout eastern Europe.

Now, these (mainly) independent development teams will face all the same challenges of any fledgling company in a niche business, so it’s unlikely the games will all come to fruition. But the encouraging part is simply the interest itself. If more games are being made worldwide, it simply stands to reason that more of them will succeed. That still leaves the not-so-minor issue of localization if they’re ever to benefit us, but the first goal is to have games to localize, and with enough developers in enough countries trying, some are bound to see their way clear. Our English language markets may be the genre slackers that rely on the efforts of other nations, but hey, so long as someone’s taking the lead, there’s something positive to follow.

UK publishing strength

When discussing the plight of North American publishers early in this series, I mentioned that the strength of the UK publishing market wasn’t strong enough to support the (English language) genre on its own. And while I still contend that’s true in the long run, I’ve been surprised and duly impressed by what I’ve seen out of Britain in recent months. Kalypso Media has really stepped to the plate with Ceville and the upcoming Gobliiins 4, while Ascaron continues its solid contribution with the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Fenimore Fillmore’s Revenge. It’s not a lot, but it’s encouraging nonetheless. By no means is it a good thing that North American publishers are disappearing, but it does force one’s attention to alternatives, and maybe the UK will play a bigger role in a new, more Euro-centric adventure landscape.

Digital distribution

I already touched on this in one of the earlier blogs, so I won’t discuss it in detail again. I’ll just say that its time has apparently come. Not “on the horizon”, not “slowly building momentum”. It’s arrived, with not one, not two, but FIVE games released exclusively through digital distribution since the last blog entry. Gamers may embrace it only reluctantly for a while yet, but if one wants the likes of Emerald City Confidential, The Legend of Crystal Valley, and Ankh 3 today, it’s download or bust… Or perhaps waiting many long months in the hopes of a boxed release – a release, which, if it ever comes at all, will come only on the shoulders of its downloadable success. We’re only at the very beginning of the digital future, but the future is apparently now, whether we like it or not. Not all publishers are on board yet, but the short-sighted holdouts are getting fewer and farther between.

De-saturating the genre

This may sound like a backwards step – and it is – but hear me out. While it’s long since stopped being a mainstream market force with AAA-headliner titles, the adventure genre has nevertheless seen relatively good times in recent years. As AG staff veterans will attest, it was once a struggle even to find ten worthwhile names just to fill up the Hype-o-Meter. For the last several years, it’s been a question of which games to leave off. In other words, though clearly not the genre heyday of old, there have been lots of interesting adventures of late.

So far so good.

More games mean more potential sales, of course. And there’s nothing that piques a publisher's interest like more sales, so more publishers began getting involved. Then more developers saw opportunity, and so more games were announced. Gamers just lapped it all up as good news, and for a while there it was. But, just like all unrealistic expectations of unending growth inevitably collapse, so the genre hit its ceiling somewhere along the way. See, more games didn’t mean more gamERS. Or at least, not nearly as many as would be required to sustain that kind of ongoing expansion. At some point, then, the same niche market became over-saturated with adventures. I’m pulling simple numbers out of a hat for example, but where once only two adventure games were released, a fan could afford to buy both. When three were released, they could still afford two. When five were released, they still bought two, and three went unpurchased. And those three unpurchased meant trouble for their companies. And since gamers made different choices of their two, it meant shared trouble for every company. It’s basic math: when there’s less money to go around than there are products requiring it, some or even all of those products are destined to fail.

I don’t know when exactly we hit that point, but hit it we did. There are no reliable sales figures for games (and even if there were, those would tell only a small part of the story), but enough adventure companies have indicated (to me, unofficially) the financial challenges to know that they weren’t alone in feeling the pinch. Lighthouse is only the most extreme example (so far, but let’s hope it doesn’t spread much beyond that). Sure, the failure of their UK distribution partner (uh oh, there’s that problem back again) and the troubles of their parent company were the final nails in the company coffin, but they weren’t bought out in the first place because they were thriving, but struggling fiscally. Underselling products will do that.

I know, I know, this sounds like the downer stuff all over again, but the point is, it was time to scale back anyway. As much as ideally the thought of more games, more selection is better all around, the reality is that we’re all better off with fewer games better made. And hopefully that’s one of the secondary benefits of the obstacles facing the genre today. Instead of flooding the market with so many games that few can succeed, perhaps fewer games will mean all can succeed. The challenge, of course, is to ensure that it’s the BETTER games that get picked up and endorsed, but for that we’ll just need to hope that current developers continue to hone their craft and publishers show they’re brighter than they act sometimes.

There are other reasons for hope beyond these points, some of which have been mentioned previously. The casual market could yet broaden the adventure game fanbase, while indies will continue to provide a solid contribution that isn’t so dependent on fluctuating market forces. And who knows, the belt-tightening for other publishers might just make lower risk (albeit lower payoff) investments like adventure games worth a closer look in future. Wishful thinking? Sure. Impossible? Definitely not.

I realize that none of these reasons amounts to anything more than a silver lining in a dark cloud, but that’s the reality we face, and isn’t that better than grumbling about the lousy weather?

It was 1997. On a sunny afternoon, near the end of the summer, two seemingly unrelated things happened in my house that, in hindsight, proved instead to be indivisibly connected. First, after a sleepless night, I finally finished A Gabriel Knight Mystery: The Beast Within. Secondly, convinced by a friend of his, my father subscribed to our first – extremely slow – internet connection.

Let’s focus for a moment on the first thing: I was so mesmerized by the end of the game that I played it four times in a row, just to absorb it all. Each and every time, when I heard the melody accompaning Gabriel and Grace’s final dialogue on the bridge over Neuschwanstein, I was reduced to the verge of tears: I spent countless summer nights with them, sharing their struggles and joys, and the one thing I knew for sure was that I wanted more. So, later the same day, I fired up the newly-established connection and searched three simple words on AltaVista: Gabriel – Knight – Sierra.

The first displayed result was the Official Gabriel Knight Site, which – in an elegant crimson and gold layout – informed me that a sequel (what a relief!) was indeed in production. There, I also gathered some information about the first Gabriel Knight game, which I hadn’t had the chance to play yet. Without hesitation, I begged my father to buy it for me on his next trip to Milan and after a few weeks, there it was, in my hands. I installed it with trepidation and then, much to my discouragement, I found that it was completely in English, a language I wasn’t very good at back then (or even today, some can argue).

With the aid of an old, tattered English dictionary, I managed to play through the game but sometimes it was hard, no matter what: Jane Jensen’s descriptions, which today sound so poetic and rich, were almost incomprehensible to my younger self, so I decided to register on the Gabriel Knight board and seek help. I wrote a brief presentation post, explaining my problems, and the response from the community was outstanding: they welcomed me warmly and tried hard to help me, clarifying the hardest passages for me – like Gabriel’s dream of the Dragon, which wasn’t even subtitled – and giving me hints on how to proceed when I was stuck (the Voodoo Code puzzle can really be difficult, sure, but try it without understanding the majority of the words!).

When I finally finished the game, I posted my thoughts to share them with other fans and hear their opinions. Then, we patiently waited together for the release of Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, speculating over any tiny bit of info the developers gave us, and when it was released I remember how envious I was in having to wait another three months for the localization, and at the same time how happy I was reading on the boards how good the game proved to be.

Unfortunately for me, after those two years I lost touch with the community: academic commitments and strict deadlines greatly reduced my free time, so I had to put it aside. Then, almost a year ago, I discovered Adventure Gamers’ community and immediately felt at home: I almost forgot how great it is to have a passion and to share it with other kindred spirits. My fellow Adventure Gamers started to introduce me to the newer adventure games, but I never lost my fascination with the heyday of Sierra, and I began to wonder about that old board: would it still be up? Would I recognize anyone? So, motivated by the fun I was having on this forum, I set out to find what happened to my other beloved and too-long-abandoned community.

Not only did I find what I was looking for, but a few months ago I rejoined and instantly felt like time had never passed. The community I remembered and loved was still there, even without new games to wait for and play, sticking together just because it was good. Nonetheless, at least one important thing had changed from the past: the atmosphere.

As many people know, Sierra was acquired first by Cendant and then by Vivendi S. A., which later became known as Vivendi Universal. The new management didn’t seem to care at all for the requests of board members and fans of that certain genre they weren’t producing anymore; they stuffed all the boards in a generic “Classic Games” directory and made pretty clear that they weren’t supporting them anymore. Still, in spite of everything, the community persisted, continuing to keep alive the glories of those beloved series whose intellectual rights lay forgotten and dusty, and which are – again, despite every attempt to keep them dormant – still alive and kicking even nowadays. Jane Jensen – the “Last Dinosaur on the Block” as she called herself in an open letter to Sierra – was right when she said that those stories, those characters would never die.

This doesn’t mean, however, that one can’t try to kill them, and Vivendi tried hard to drive the final nail into the community’s coffin. In fact, after the recent corporate merger that created the colossus Activision Blizzard, it was made public that only a few forums would be transferred to the new server; that is, only the boards dedicated to the Sierra franchises that Activision Blizzard planned to continue producing. The other forums were to be taken down and discontinued: King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest, Police Quest, Quest for Glory, Gabriel Knight, Phantasmagoria, Laura Bow…

As of today, these boards are no more. They have welcomed fans and adventurers from all around the world for more than a decade, and today they are closed.

One would think that after Chainsaw Monday, after all these years of neglect, the fans would finally give up. But that assumption would be wrong. Ever since news of the closure spread, fans have outdone themselves. They have stored old memorable threads, they have created mailing lists to keep everyone in touch, and moreover, have begun to work on a new project entirely of their own: a Gateway Community that will once again bring together all of Sierra’s most devoted fans, regardless of genre and game. Where a cleft once divided the community into smaller groups of members dedicated only to a particular game or series, now there is the chance to bring all of them back together and rebuild the huge, wonderful community that it used to be.

This new community will consist of a network of different boards, such as the Gabriel Knight 4 Campaign, the Quest for More Glory, the Sierra Help Pages, Sierra Chest and other dedicated sites. This new endeavour is not only a way to keep alive the memory of the series we continue to love and in which we continue to believe and hope for future developments, but it’s more importantly a way to keep together groups of people that have a passion in common and who, through that passion, have met and made friends with each other, if only on the net. My best wishes go to this new Gateway project, with the hope that – like the mythical Arabian Phoenix – from the ashes of the old forums an even broader community may rise. And if some day our beloved series do come back, we will be vindicated. In the meantime, it’s a pleasure to be a part of such a strong community.

When it comes to adventure game ports to consoles, many struggle to make the transition from the PC format without some sacrifice in quality. Recent adventure games for the Nintendo Wii have fared better in this respect – in particular the Sam & Max and Strong Bad series suiting the console and its remote point system well – but for every decent release, there have always been a handful of poor imitators waiting in the wings. This was particularly the case back in the ‘90s, where many PlayStation/PlayStation 2 adventures struggled with poor controls (the gamepad truly wasn't a good substitute for a mouse) and developers failed to adapt the games to suit the console.

Yet it is with some interest that I'm looking forward to the release of Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars – Director's Cut on the Wii and DS, curious to see how the game will make use of each platform’s unique control systems. The reason being is that Revolution Software has been one of a handful of companies that have managed to port computer-based adventure games across to a console successfully whilst bearing in mind their various strengths and weaknesses. Broken Sword is already a great example of this, and although the PlayStation version was a decent conversion only slightly hampered by loading times, it is the Game Boy Advance release that impresses the most.

If consoles are a particularly tricky subject for adventure crossovers, handheld machines have even more limitations regarding memory and graphical prowess. Where Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion was an appalling port that tainted the franchise's reputation by using a poorly implemented control system, grainy graphics and scaled down puzzles, Broken Sword was an almost perfect conversion. Revolution managed to take into account the limitations of the Game Boy Advance and fit the game to the system, rather than mindlessly porting it across. With the realization that the handheld wouldn't be up to the full challenge, voices were kept out in favour of subtitles and despite shrinking the graphics and animation down in resolution, it's so expertly done that it's barely noticeable. Rather than eliminate the cutscenes, they are presented in a series of stills that do a good job of portraying events to the player. The master stroke, and a move that actually improves the game, is the ability to move George Stobbart with the control pad rather than pointing and clicking, with the buttons carrying out examinations or actions. It's a decision that really suits the system and shows that with some adequate planning, adventure ports can work on most console platforms. Even now, although getting on in years and only possible to find in the second hand market, it's still worthy of your time and attention.

Then again, it’s probably just easier to wait for the Director’s Cut versions at this point, since they should be out later this month. Having seen footage of the Wii version, it already looks visually better than the original game and seems to make good use of the remote's capabilities. Hopefully we'll find out soon whether the Director's Cut on both the Wii and DS will live up to the game's illustrious pedigree and improve on an already well-received adventure, but I’m confident that if any developer can pull it off, it’s Revolution.

What’s that expression about bad things coming in threes? Following the two dangers detailed in my previous blogs, that means there’s still one more ominous storm cloud hanging over the genre. Thank goodness for small mercies, as this last one is probably the least threatening of the three. On the other hand, it’s perhaps the most disappointing.

Today’s threat to the health of adventure games: Nintendo.

No no, you didn’t get sucked into a vortex that thrust you back in time a decade, when console games were widely cited as driving yet another nail into the genre’s coffin. (Not that I knew that at the time: I was too busy jumping on Goomba heads and collecting Tri-Force pieces to care back then.) As we all know, adventures survived that onslaught, and even rebounded to form the thriving little niche market as we’ve come to know it.

But now Nintendo is a threat again, albeit for entirely different reasons. The issue this time is specifically ports of PC adventures. Now, on the surface you’d think this notion is not only wrong, but in fact completely the opposite. After all, ports expose whole new audiences to adventure games, and that’s never a bad thing, right? Well… not so fast.

First of all, let’s sidestep momentarily and ponder what happened to the Wii and DS as the potential champions of the genre we once believed they could be. Remember this Wii article? The uncharted future was so promising then. But two years later, that future still hasn’t been charted. The only original adventures to reach the Wii in that time are Zack & Wiki (which some claim isn’t an adventure anyway), Harvey Birdman (itself a cheap Phoenix Wright rip-off), and Strong Bad (simultaneously released on PC). Not a very imposing lineup, and there are no potential bright lights on the immediate horizon other than So Blonde’s alternate console version and Another Code R.

The DS has fared a little better, but not much. The early success of Another Code/Trace Memory and the Ace Attorney series had us practically giddy with anticipation, and the Hype-o-Meter routinely featured a new handheld adventure or two. But while Professor Layton delighted puzzle lovers, Cing delivered again with Hotel Dusk and now has another new game in the works, and Capcom may or may not be able to squeeze a little more life out of its quirky courtroom series, lately we’ve been left to pick through underwhelming offerings from Touch/Mystery Detective to Unsolved Crimes to Jake Hunter. Even then, almost everything is from Japan. That’s not a problem – the Japanese often make great games, and they could be from the moon for all I care where a game originates – but the fact that no Western developers are embracing the opportunity is disturbing. There are some German companies with plans for DS versions along with PC or console counterparts, and that’s fine, but none designed exclusively (or even primarily) for the handheld system.

Clearly, then, neither platform has come close to realizing its abundant adventure game potential. And while we’d like to naïvely believe that there’s hope yet, the reality is that we’re now getting ports instead. Adventure Gamers will be increasing its coverage of ports for both systems, so this issue will soon come into greater focus, but we’re talking about the likes of:

Agatha Christie (twice), CSI, Sam & Max, and Nancy Drew for Wii

Myst, Syberia, Ankh, CSI, Runaway, Secret Files, and Sherlock Holmes for DS

Good games for the most part, but ones we’ve already seen before, and they’re now outnumbering their original game counterparts. Is this a blip? A phase soon to pass? Maybe. But let’s face it, publishers aren’t renowned for sacrificing the bottom line for the benefit of creative expression. Porting games is undoubtedly cheaper and easier and carries far less risk than investing in new games. Hmmm!

It’s not just adventure ports that are a threat, though. There’s also the small matter of adventure game publishers diverting focus to console endeavours of other genres. The buyout of Lighthouse wasn’t the only time the company was in the news last year. They also proudly announced their license to begin making games for Nintendo systems. Not adventures – any games. The Adventure Company had done the same thing not long before that. Probably just a coincidence that those two publishers are the most noticeable examples of meagre upcoming adventure schedules, huh? Now City Interactive, one of the genre’s more prolific current publisher/developers, has just made a similar announcement.

The catch with these announcements is that they’re always spun as good and positive things for everyone: “More platforms means more games, more players, more money, more development, more growth, more more more! Yah, baby!” But often it’s not more at all. It’s simply different. What once was in a company’s left pocket is now in its right. What once was on the front burner might now be on the back. Sure, theoretically a company could hit it big in new markets and really expand, but that’s not about to happen with the kind of titles pushed by our “adventure” companies broadening their horizons. No knock on Monster Band or Puppy Trainer intended, but as a shareholder I wouldn’t be counting my millions just yet.

What we end up with, then, is the same number of dollars, the same number of resources, the same number of manageable projects before… except now they’re spread out. Where before there may have been the budget to publish six new adventures a year, now there’s budget for three new adventures and three ports. Or one new adventure, two adventure ports, one original non-adventure Wii and two non-adventure DS titles. The numbers are entirely random just to illustrate the point. Whatever the actual distribution, the attention formerly dedicated to new PC adventures is now spreading thin and spreading fast.

It should go without saying, but I have absolutely nothing against the DS or Wii. I have one of each and I’ve been a big fan of Nintendo since the very first NES system. I don’t care if adventures come out on PC or Wii or DS or any other platform. This isn’t about preference; it’s simply about numbers. More isn’t always more; more is sometimes less. In this case, more platforms can mean more product on shelves, but fewer actual games and still fewer original adventures.

The Nintendo influence may not seem like a big deal. And in isolation, it isn’t. But as with the two problems before it, the issue is that the adventure market is so (relatively) tiny, its corporate participation so limited, that it takes so very little to disrupt its ever-delicate balance. Can the genre withstand the influx of ports over new adventures? Sure, all things being equal. But these days things are anything but equal. On top of a crumbling economy AND North American developers potentially bailing out AND the casual market cutting in with serious competition AND with cheap ports replacing original adventures… pretty soon you have a problem.

I realize these last three blogs have painted a bleak picture for the genre, and again I want to emphasize that there’s always room for hope. Often when one door closes, another opens, and so long as there are enterprising developers with a passion for the genre, we’ll continue to get new adventures some way, some time, somehow. But this is the road before us. It’s not one filled with fertile fields but rocky obstacles. It’s a journey we still plan to take right along with you, but let’s at least move forward with eyes wide open.

Now, please excuse me, as I need to go play Safecracker on Wii for review.

Note: This article's subtitle has been changed from "Killing a genre softy" to avoid any potential confusion. The original phrase was purely facetious, and was never meant to be taken literally. The threat is real, but any adventure fan knows the genre will never die! And certainly not if Adventure Gamers has anything to say about it.

I’m sure we’ve all heard the argument that “Doom killed the adventure genre.” And true enough, id Software’s phenomenally successful 1993 shooter literally blew the doors wide open for 3D action games. It didn’t kill adventures, though. It mercilessly shot the genre with a BFG, wrestled the mainstream gaming crown from its pacifistic head, and even kicked it a little when it was down, but Doom didn’t kill it.

You know what might? I-Spy.

Okay, I promised in my last blog that I wouldn’t speak of the death of the genre (but hey, it worked better with the Doom imagery), and Scholastic’s children’s games are barely known in wider circles, let alone a threat to topple the once-mighty adventure. But the I-Spy games were a precursor to a very real and imminent threat, and in the second of three attempts to depress the hell out of everyone (no, not really, but it may have that effect), the subject is none other than: casual games.

Casual games aren’t new, of course. They’ve been around practically forever, and come in all shapes and sizes and gameplay types. Until recently, there’s been enough separation between “us” and “them” that it hasn’t been much of an issue. But in recent years the “hidden object” games have exploded in popularity, and as evidenced by the start of our recent feature focus, they’ve now become impossible to ignore.

There are two central concerns where these seek-and-find games are concerned, and each has the potential to impact adventures significantly. The first is that adventures are becoming more and more like casual games, and the second is that the casual games market itself is quickly forming a shadow that looms over the entire genre.

Let’s begin with the issue of adventures becoming more casual. For the sake of convenience, we’ll include episodic gaming in this topic, even though there’s nothing inherently casual about shorter, episodic games. The fact that those released (most notably from Telltale so far) have trended along these lines, however, indicates a correlation if not causation. (And I promise that’s the last time I’ll sound all science-y).

Let’s face it, today’s adventures are getting easier. Not insultingly easy, but easier than the olden days of weeks-to-solve puzzles, help hotlines, and mail-order guide books. With walkthroughs at everyone’s fingertips and the pace of life getting more and more hectic, fewer and fewer people are willing to devote the same kind of time and energy to complex puzzles, and developers are accommodating us. Simpler puzzles and in-game hint systems abound, and the days of Myst are over. Some say good riddance, some lament, but few would argue the point.

But now games are going even further. By their very nature, adventures are still perhaps the most demanding, least rewarding games on the market. Who likes wandering around for half an hour not knowing what to do, or slaving over one puzzle just to run smack dab into the next obstacle? Well, we do, but only to an extent, and that “extent” has begun to slide. Seeing this trend early, adventure giant Jane Jensen was among the first to embrace it, co-founding Oberon Games and creating the Inspector Parker series and BeTrapped!. Revolution’s Steve Ince went the casual route with his first solo effort as well, albeit in the more action-oriented Mr. Smoozles Goes Nutso.

For a long time, however, the “trend” seemed stuck in neutral. But the trickle-down effect has finally begun. While not replacing their regular adventure counterparts (merely adding to them at this point), both the CSI and Nancy Drew series have now launched distinctly casual installments. And it doesn’t stop there. From the new indie series Casebook to the upcoming Three Cards to Midnight by still another genre legend (the creators of Tex Murphy), it’s clear that this is now indeed a trend, not a fluke. It’s even working the other way, as more adventure elements are being added to casual games, like in the recent Mystery Case Files: Return to Ravenhearst.

No point hiding our heads in the sand and hoping the trend passes. Trends do pass, but we’re only at the beginning of this one, and even when it finally subsides, I suspect the genre won’t ever be the same. Not dead… but not the same.

Having said that, we’d be lucky if that was the only challenge posed to the genre by casual games. The other one is even more ominous: namely, that the casual games market will severely erode the adventure game market in its own right. We’ve been lulled into a false sense of security in recent years by the genre’s increased prosperity, all the while oblivious to the ground swell of popularity of the genre’s nearest competitor.

For those who haven’t played them, hidden object games are basically “adventure lite” experiences. They’ve got a story framework, they’ve got puzzles, they’ve got pretty pictures. They rarely give you any freedom or exploration, but instead offer the one thing that adventures so desperately lack: a constant sense of challenge and fulfillment. Ten minutes of an adventure means practically nothing. Ten minutes of seek-and-find games means twenty small victories. Sure they’re largely ongoing “pixel hunts”, but it’s this continual feedback loop that makes the casual games so much more appealing than adventures for many people.

And guess what? They’re cheap. The adventure genre was basically kept afloat by DreamCatcher in the last dark period by offering adventures at “budget” prices. And budget games always do well, almost regardless of quality. Now most adventures have edged back up into regular game price ranges, and suddenly a purchase is not so automatic. The economy’s in the tank, and everyone’s looking for value, and you can’t afford to be wrong with that extra $10-20 dollars. The new “budget” value, then, is casual games. More rewarding AND cheaper begins to look better and better.

Publishers and developers love them, too. As Jensen noted in a recent interview, ”casual games have a short timeline and lite budget. So things happen very fast. You have a month to do the design, in another month you’re seeing weekly builds and in 5 months you’re shipping. A big adventure game takes a lot longer all the way around.” What does that mean for the consumer? It means the market is being flooded with them, and those that like both hidden object games and adventures now have to choose. And if there are twice as many new casual games released at half the cost of an adventure... well, you do the math.

Can the two co-exist? Yes, but not comfortably. There will always, ALWAYS be room for full-fledged adventures. Snacks are great, but people will inevitably crave full-course meals from time to time. Still, the two share the same general demographic market, and whenever competition exists, something has to give. Will already-reluctant publishers still be as willing to invest in new adventures as they become increasingly speculative?

If there are any positives stemming from the influx of casual games, it’s in their ability to popularize digital distribution and draw attention to adventure games that didn’t exist before. The existing adventure community has always been slow to embrace change, and the acceptance of downloadable games is no exception. But because casual games are typically offered only by download, they’ve helped force the issue. Whether that ever translates into more adventures routinely downloaded remains to be seen, but at the very least popular casual game portals like Big Fish Games are now offering adventures as well. It’s small consolation, but it’s a start.

Love them or hate them, then, casual games are here to stay, and the genre will need to find its way through this new reality. No, I-Spy won’t kill adventures, but in keeping with the spirit of its name, take a good long look at the gaming landscape now, because it may not look that way much longer.

Next week (or thereabouts), stay tuned for part three of this “reasons to make you investigate new hobbies” series. (Just kidding. I hope.)