Sam & Max, + The Adventure Company - what's the relationship?
Has anyone actually been to "The Adventure Company" website they have, excluding Sam n Max, the worst line up of games. There games are on the $9.95 Bargan shelf at Walmart. I purchased murder on the orient express and the 2 disk set wasn't even in a jewel case just 2 paper sleves and a piece of cardboard. How did you get Ubisoft to put there name on CSI ? Each time I see the Adventure Company on a box or JoWooD I get very skeptical of the quality of the game inside. I just mean to say I dont wan't to ever see season one in the bargan bin with poor packaging. :eek:
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Murder on the Orient Express came with a book, didn't it? I like jewel cases too, but I think the full-length mystery novel included in the box kind of made up for the paper sleeves...
--Erwin
* unless you're an administrator or something
Aren't you an administrator? What with the bold and italic name?
I have a question though, was Sam & Max co-worked with Jowood and adventure company?, i though it was all pure telltale
And yeah, as Doug said, we make the Sam & Max 100%, and we sell it ourselves online. JoWood/The Adventure Company distributed our game in retail stores internationally. They didn't actually work on the games themselves.
Well fancy that. Over here in good olde England JoWooD publishes under JoWooD and The Adventure Company is a side product of DreamCatcher (the guys who made Painkiller) so I for one am happy that JoWooD & The Adventure Company published it.
Don't worry, Telltale gets the same cut from sales of the retail version no matter where they come from. The point of partnering up with a publisher like The Adventure Company / JoWooD is to get the game into channels we couldn't otherwise get into. Moving the game into retail stores -- both brick & mortar stores like Best Buy and online stores like Amazon -- is exactly what the publisher is supposed to be doing.
As I understand it, JoWooD bought Dreamcatcher (The Adventure Company's parent company) about a year ago. They kept the Dreamcatcher and Adventure Company names for North America, but it's all the same company now.
I changed the title of this thread because I really don't want people to glance at it and think The Adventure Company's product is subpar or that we have a bad relationship with them. We are very happy to be working with them and the retail version is selling well.
good to hear.. I havent found the retail version here in australia yet even though its supposed to be released..stores actually have hit the road and not season 1! crazy
:eek:Imagine buying Sam n Max season one as a child or receiving it as a gift for x-mass and the Disc Does Not Work. Adventure company didnt think that through did they. My thought on selling your game through best buy or other stores is that i believe telltale may only get 15 dollars out of the 35 dollars it retails for or less. after Adventure company makes n ships the game then Bestbuy gets a good bit of money to sell the game. so Buy your games online from telltale. Check the current OXM magazine to verify my point on "where the money goes" in games. Official Xbox Magazine.
I made the comment since i was looking for distributors (of comics but thought it was kind of the same for games) and all distributors in the US requested a 65-75% rebate on the end price and since im foreign i have to pay 30% US taxes as well, then in my own country i have to pay another 30% taxes + 15% exchange commission... so its reaaaaly degrading. I really thought telltale was in a similar dilemma with distribution.
-Glen-
If you made that number up, it's probably wrong. Your concern is very nice and appreciated, but don't worry yourself! While I don't actually have anything to do with Telltale's businessey-type stuff, I know enough to say that we generally don't make deals that we're not happy with. Being in a position like ours, where we'd already made all six episodes, it's easier for everyone involved to reach a deal that everyone's happy with. Since we developed the games before even going to talk to The Adventure Company about retail, the issue of funding the actual creation of the games never entered the picture, so there was less mucking around with who has to pay who back to cover the cost of making the games (usually the biggest financial issue in a developer/publisher relationship). The Adventure Company/JoWood were happy to distribute the game, and of course they get a big enough percentage of each sale that makes them happy (otherwise why would they sell it?!), but the games are still ours - we didn't sign over any of the actual rights to the games themselves like many developers do in a traditional publishing deal. As Emily said, things are selling well and people are happy. Woo! Video games!
I can think of at least four times when this exact thing happened to me as a kid. Technical difficulties have been around since the dawn of computers. TAC worked diligently to find the problem and are now sending replacement discs to people who experienced it... can't really ask for more than that.
People need to learn the difference between the Devs' and the Publish/Distro
Yes adventure company has published many low budget titles that dont appeal to most but this is a great things for up and coming companies or ones not large enough to leave EUR or wherever they happen to be
Personally I buy every game on it just because it says adventure company. I know im getting an advent game.. and most time its quite well done. Lately they seem to be slipping but again its not them its the devs :P
Take the nancy drew series in example.. Ive followed this series since before it was called nancy drew aka McKenzie and Co
Now.. this game is published by advent company aka dreamcatcher but is developed by HER interactive. So my advice is dont knock the people who didnt make the game. According to my records advent company has only ever developed 2 games (mobygames)
Long story short people.. when you buy a product.. just because you see a label on it doesnt mean thats who made it :P dig deeper..if you care to know!
And as for buyin their stuff on amazon.. HELLO.. most of their stuff is OLD.. think they just want a warehouse of old games? I mean sure I do but.. not them :P
Been outta town and this thread got me a lil peeved haha. Glad things settled before I got here :P
What the heck is that apostrophe doing there? :eek:
Thats all i needed to hear... The adventure company has published many low budget titles.
And this proves?
I don't think the average person on the street could care any less about who publishes a game. I read a games page on teletext and a few weeks ago they had a 'Hot Topic' asking people to write in saying whether they think about who published or made a game when they buy it, and very few did.
Baring in mind this was a page dedicated to games, the main readership will be people who are genuinely interested in games rather than casual gamers. The chances are that the majority of people wouldn't give the publisher a second or even a first glance.
and I never said low budget were all bad :P I did also say I buy every advent company game out..(now dreamcatcher so its iffy and hard to explain) I love advents and even play nancy drew.. the new one is awesome :P and thats HER interactive under dreamcatcher/advent company
I can think of many high budget titles that arent in my opinion as good as such lower budget titles. I mean in the scheme of things Id even call sam & max low budget same with bone.. its not like BOTTOM rung in terms of "costs nothing and was made in moms basement" I know it cost :P trust me, but compare it to huge titles like crysis or even bioshock and the cost is almost in equatable.
So my advice again is dont not like advent company just cause they push some lower end titles. Without em I wouldnt see alot of great games!
here is hoping the new simon makes its way to english translation :P PLEASE
BTW
Luigi... I always put the ' after words I shorten.. ere'= here ey'=hey dev' comp'=computer its an old bbs habit .. kinda short hand for typing but not leet speak almost cockney if you will.(sry' gov'!)
You wish!
The max profit of any game developer is 1/3 of retail. and businessey-type stuff is not a word. This will be my last thread posting EVER because each time i look at this thread someone has either moved my opinion to a new thread or erases it completely. View a thread, Nevermore!!!:(
For example, you completely invented this number.
Look at The Official Xbox Magazine isue #77, December 07, pages 84-86. Where does your $60 go? A $60 game that sells over 1 million copies gets broken down as follows...
$12-Retailer cut
$12-Manufacturing and Licensing
$7 - Marketing
$9 -Development cost
$20-Profit, Publisher Overhead
Total of $60
20/60 = 1/3
If anyone has a difficult time looking at the 1 million vs. the 500,000 copies sold, look in the article in the third colum on page 86. Please note that only 12 xbox 360 titles have sold over 1 million copies which is also stated in the same article.:D
I don't think anyone posting in these forums (including me) know or care about the nitty gritty of the business agreements leading to the game being sold at retail, but it's very fair to state that that Xbox Magazine breakdown is an average, and is also based on a traditional developer/publisher relationship, where the publisher has a larger take because they funded the creation of the game.
The Adventure Company/JoWood distributed Sam & Max, and spent some money marketing their release (especially in Europe - have you seen the pictures of their Leipzig Games Convention booth? They're amazing!), but they did not pay to develop the game, so I am nearly certain that the pie chart of "where does your $60 go" (or, in the case of Season One, $29.99, as it's a PC adventure game, and not Halo 3) would break down pretty differently in our case. Again, I don't really know for sure because I've never had the chance (or desire) to peruse the deal we have with those guys. All I know is that both parties are happy and the game is doing fine in retail.
I don't entirely know why you're trying to perpetually argue with and slap down the people who are telling you not to worry. You know how there's that second season of Sam & Max in the works right now? I don't know what could be more reassuring that things are fine than that. I don't understand why the insistent posting that someone is wrong or that something is horribly amiss is required.
Hopefully that's more than enough to allay whatever it is that you've got going on. Closing this thread!