I’m perfectly fine with people doing “artsy” games with little to no real gameplay. I enjoyed at least one of those (To The Moon). What I don’t like is the “my artistic ‘game’ is so much better than your childish kill-pixels stupid thing” attitude.
Tale of Tales is named after Giambattista Basile’s book Lo Cunto de li cunti? Uh, okay.
I wonder why their game didn’t appeal to the masses…
I can rephrase it for them: you caused nobody to give a shit.
I agree trying to appeal to the masses was probably a bad choice given how niche they are. They have probably around 4k loyal customers (judging current sales and yet unsold games) and probably sticking to a budget where that level of sales is sustainable is a saner approach. However, I’m pretty sure the Twitter conversation above is ironic.
Plus lots of developers say absurd or tone deaf things on Twitter or associate themselves with GamerGate; but I separate the people behind the product from the product itself.
-Todd
OK, that’s fairly awful.
So they make artsy little niche games, don’t invest in marketing, then are surprised when they don’t sell well. Hmm.
I enjoy an artsy-fartsy game once in awhile, but an apartment cleaning simulator doesn’t exactly pull me in.
In the article they explicitly state that they spent “a lot of money on a PR company that got them plenty of press”. I don’t know why it failed so spectacularly to reach people like me who were interested in it, but it doesn’t appear to be from lack of trying.
They invested in a PR company that got them a lot of press months before the game came out, when it was a Kickstarter.
Then nada.
And, if you were only vaguely paying attention and thought “Oh, interesting premise, and it looks pretty, and the setting in the Balkans is fascinating…” and then This War Of Mine comes out a few months later to rather large publicity, the mind conflates the two (mine did, a bit anyway) and thinks “Oh, this is that.”
Everything I know about this company and this game is contained within this thread and it’s enough to put me off for life.
I liked the Path, didn’t like Vanitas. Knew they were from the same company, but probably couldn’t have told you who it was or that they were responsible for this game or that it had been released.
(Also still haven’t seen Big Hero 6, still no kids.)
The Path and The Forest are their two biggies. Other projects were much smaller in scope/more experimental like Vanitas indeed.
The Forest is Endnight Games.
Tale of Tales did The Endless Forest.
Tale of Traveler’s Telltale games had the indie Lego episodic adventure game, right?
There’s certainly a market for their type of thing, but just as an avant garde freeform jazz ensemble doesnt advertise on Pop Bitch and hope to break into the Itunes Top 20, nor should have these guys been aiming their hopes at breaking into mainstream gaming.
I have some sympathy for the devs, having their hopes raised by a few websites praising their ideologies to high heavens and and passing it off as a games review was cruel on behalf of the reviewers. ToT are idealists and artists and have remained loyal to their principles, yet they sit in a niche out of touch with the market, even though in favour within certain parts of the media and this wasn’t communicated to them. This should have been pushed to the Guardian demographic and their haunts, not RPS readers.
Pretty much this, along with “Oh, they’re the ones responsible for The Path.”
I believe I watched a Giant Bomb quick look video on this. Could have been a Polygon overview. It seemed uninspiring-- not the sort of thing that shows well in a 20 minute bite. They were wandering around an apartment, like, cleaning toilets.
Ah, yeah, that’s the one i meant (The deer MMO one) ;)
I’ve been following Tale of Tales for a while. I think it is good that they decided to finally quit trying to make commercial successful games. Of course, every artist wants to sell his art for big money, but you cannot plan it. I bet Van Gogh did want to sell his paintings for good money. Did not happen. Artists struggling for recognition is pretty normal… That’s what I read from their blog, they are going back to their roots… If you compare videogame history with movie history, videogaming as an art medium is still niche. It took movies more than 50 years to become an “official” art form. And even nowadays most of movies are still pretty mediocre… I would not call them great (art).
also, I would think ToT games would better fit into the demoscene