Spiderweb Games - Sale on Steam

You are still missing the point bud. And your "analysis" of why Steam users bail on the games isn't graphics and sound. Its mostly difficulty. The mass of game players can't handle choices. They go headlong into areas they can't compete in and get all flustered and quit. If you read the Avernum forums that was the chief complaint even though *over and freaking over again* it was said to try a different area. Most game players *say* they want choices but given them them bitch and moan. There is a reason the Bethesda games are the only really open series that are popular. They are freakin easy! Go try Gothic 1. Lots of choices. Lots of dying and *shock* its not that popular.

Don't know what factor difficulty plays here. But I guess people having problems with difficulty would go to forums more often than the ones who don't like the overall production value.
I played these games on the hardest settings and they were by far the hardest "modern" RPGs I have seen so far. But I never checked the easier difficulty levels and can't compare these ones.
But looking at the success of FTL I think that people can handle quite some difficulty before they get frustrated.
About decisions…well, Avernum has quite a few. Avadon however doesn't have more than a Mass Effect1/2 or Dragon Age 1. So I don't think that this is a deal breaker.
Gothic might not be the best example though I might be biased by being German.
From the German Wikipedia:
Commercial success: The Gothic Series is one of the most successful German Computer productions overall. For 100000 sold copies Gothic2 they received the Gold-Award of the VUD (2003). However the commercial success is mostly limited to german speaking regions and eastern europe. In western europe and american reagions Gothic stayed a niche game.
Well, Morrowind (released during same time frame) sold a lot more more but still.
And Gothic had some other serious issues like horrible controls.

The controls in Gothic were only bad if you were too lazy to learn them.

Silly arguments aside, I assume that Vogels business has taken a huge upswing since he got his games on Steam as well as the iStore. I wonder if that will get him to raise the stakes a little and finally go for a fundamental upgrade in his technology? With the new batch of KS games, he gets considerable competition on his traditional turf.

Gothic? horrible controls? - I could play G1 with one hand on the keyboard and a beer in the other while watching t.v at the same time - there is no argument - it was a myth created by morons.
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on topic.

I agree that in recent years Jeff has managed to swing more spotlight on the Spiderweb games by improved media techniques, blogging for example.

My Gothic comments were relative to Elderscrolls, not whether it was popular in it's own right. I stand by my comments that most gamers can't handle real choice when many of the outcomes are challenging. Read some of the Avernum reviews and for that matter Gothic. The term 'hardcore' rpg attracts most of us but it repels the masses. Hence the dumbing down craze…

You might take The Witcher as another example. As the games of this series had very hard decisions to do, which - in difference to most other games - don't have apparent outcomes. However the Witcher games were extremely successful and I think the decisionmaking was a big selling point.
But as I write that...it's actually quite interesting thinking what I quoted about Gothic "the commercial success is mostly limited to german speaking regions and eastern europe" and considering that The Witcher is from poland.

But in the end everyone prefers and dislikes different stuff and to simplify gamer groups as the praised hardcore and the despised "mass" isn't really doing it justice though I tend to do the same.

So for people like you maybe "everyone not playing Geneforge3 due to the graphics" is the mass while you are hardcore. And for me it's "everyone not playing games on highest difficulty" is the mass, or "people owning and playing phone and console games" are the mass while I consider myself hardcore.

@GhanBuriGhan
I think that Vogel himself should try his luck at Kickstarter to show presence (and with that increasing sales of past games) and gather Money for his next games.
While most companies only focus on one Game and almost start over with the next one, Vogel basically re-uses everything which makes remotely sense. And I am pretty sure that getting additional 20 000$ or so to spend on a couple of soundtracks, sound effects and tilesets would help a lot, not just for one game, but for several games following thereafter.

There are extensive demos of every Spiderweb game, so I'm a bit perplexed why anyone wouldn't know exactly what they were getting. Anyway, moving on...

Jeff has often said that he likes his way of working and that the current technology he uses is at the limit of his programming skills - I suspect he is vastly understating his ability but, on face value, he won't be dramatically upgrading the graphics in his games.

Then again, he changed quite a few ideas in the last two years, so who knows?

Yup, I appreciate those demos.

I just tried two of them again - based on positive word of mouth, but unfortunately they only served to remind me why I didn't play these games in the first place.

If you're on the fence, I highly recommend the demos first.

If he's going to make a change, I'd like to see him shrink the worlds a bit. At least with Avadon, while the breadth of the world was great, I'd say 75% or more of the tiles are basically just open, useless space. I like to explore, but it gets boring after a while if there really isn't anything there. I love old school games, but I got kind of bored clearing maps (I am OCD about seeing every nook and crany) when there wasn't much there to see.

Maybe his other games are different (I have Geneforge and one other I picked up on a sale, but haven't played them yet).

Geneforge is completely different to Avadon (other than his general style).

And Avernum also has a very different kind of world to explore.
While you have big zones in Avadon, you are limited to these. In Avernum however you can travel on a world map which is in a different scale. There is tons of stuff to explore and most of the zones you enter, like dungeons and cities, are quite full of stuff. In addition you often find encounters which is much too hard to face at the moment you find it. So that you need to come back later, which hardly happens in Avadon due to it's linear nature.