In the penultimate chapter of our postmortem article about The Path, we take a closer look at the reception of our birthday baby in the first year of its life. How did the press respond? How did the fans? How well did the Path sell? And where? All this and more in the fourth chapter of The Path postmortem.
“…if you’re going to judge the flavor of a dish, you need to chew and swallow. Even if it makes you sick.”
I hope you don’t mind if I start using that quote.
And, I have to say: even though I haven’t been playing for long, The Endless Forest strikes me as more than just a multiplayer screensaver. I mean, I personally define screensavers as sort of throwaway apps that people only utilize when they’re not at their keyboard. They don’t really count as “entertainment.” Which is what TEF seems like it was intended to be.
Unless, of course, that was a sarcastic jab at… something. Possibly grenade-wielding goons?
It wasn’t intended to be sarcastic. Maybe we appreciate screensavers more than you do. 😉 We like them because they are things that the computer does on its own. They make us more aware of the autonomy that a computer can have. The Endless Forest can really be installed as a screensaver. So technically it simply is a screensaver. The reason for releasing it like this was that we consider the game to be a window. When you stop using your computer, it turns into a window onto a virtual world. And then you can decide to reach through that window and participate. But I admit that we underestimated the current enthusiasm and level of activity in the Forest. So by now, it’s probably become inappropriate to think of The Endless Forest as a screensaver.
Something that strikes me about your Mac sales figures is that they actually seem high to me. When I first discovered The Path, I held off purchasing it for a while because the system requirements listed were basically a (Mac) laptop no more than about a year old by the time The Path was released, and I was (rightly) worried that it wouldn’t run well. (I plan to replay it once I upgrade this year, of course.
I work at an Apple Specialist, and we do see a lot of people coming in still using pre-Intel machines. While this obviously isn’t everyone, I think that the budgetary limit on your ability to make The Path run more smoothly on older hardware might have contributed to the faltering sales (not, of course, that there is much to be done about it, because I know the integrated graphics chips are truly awful). Within the PC gamer community this probably is a non-issue, or at least less of one, since that high-end market tends to keep their hardware in tip-top “bleeding edge” form.