The makers of The Longest Journey and Dreamfall have thrown in the towel on conventional adventure games:

Funcom, the developer behind the adventure game classics The Longest Journey and Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, have announced their decision to stop producing traditional, offline PC games.

It’s in keeping with the trend Raph Koster mentioned, and I think it’s kind of a no-brainer at this point.  The more you can integrate online, the more you cut down on piracy, and you can improve your game at the same time.  Heck, PC games have been moving this way for a while, with frequent patches, bonus content, user-created mods and guides– there’s tons of stuff online to improve your gaming experience.  You don’t have to make a multiplayer game to take advantage of the fact that most of your audience is online most of the time.

Console gaming is clearly moving in this direction as well, with XBox Live as the best next-gen model.  Nintendo missed the boat this generation, but always-online, social gaming is going to be the norm quite soon.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Game Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.