I love Sierra games growing up, but I've come to understand that they were not great games and often quite user hostile, but benefited more from being early movers in an underserved market. They rightfully deserved all of the success they had at the time, but as the market shifted, they eventually just fell to those changes as most privately funded companies do. Not enough capital to pivot, and not enough capital to improve their core technologies through sufficient R&D.
Ken Williams tried to innovate into new underserved markets (e.g. dial-up gaming services pre-Internet), and "buy R&D" by acquiring other companies, which worked for a while. But his core founding game designers had been surpassed in the industry, and their location made it very hard to recruit new talent. The shift to higher resolutions and 3D obsoleted their core technology and the technical talent they had just couldn't keep up. (source: there's a few very good long-form interviews with Ken Williams on these business realities).
Sierra was not going to make it as a software house, the writing was on the wall for a while. They tried to switch to using their established sales channels and turned to distributing and did really well for a few titles like Half-Life and Homeworld, but then those companies went elsewhere with the market. By the "end" Sierra itself was mostly making card games, and then blowing most of their budget on buggy, late to market, and underperforming 3D versions of their main series.
Selling the company was really the only alternative for them, but once you do that you give up vision and control.
It's sad how they ended up, and I'm thankful for the memories, but things move on.
I love Sierra games growing up, but I've
come to understand that they were not great
games and often quite user hostile, but
benefited more from being early movers in an
underserved market.
Harsh, but so true.
(And I'm somebody who was absolutely enthralled by about a half dozen of their adventure games back in the day)
Even if Ken and Roberta hadn't lost control of the company, I'm not sure what Sierra would have offered the world creatively at that point.
They were eclipsed by LuscasArts in the world of point-and-click adventures, and it's not really clear they had another core competency on the game development side of things. If Phantasmagoria was any indication, they seemed to want to go in the direction of "Digiwood" games with FMV but that whole genre of games turned out to be a massive dead-end for the industry and is not particularly fondly remembered.
I still celebrate Sierra, though. They absolutely moved the industry forward, and were at the pinnacle of the industry for a decade or more. Few have achieved as much, or entertained as many! Roberta in particular is a bit of a hero of mine and on a personal note I love that her and Ken are still together after all these years.
I think there is truth to what you said but you also have to be careful not to judge 1980s games by 2020s standards.
All the games were user hostile back then. You could play a sierra game with hostile user input parsing and really nice graphics for the day. Or you could play another game that was even more hostile but had no graphics or vastly worse graphics, and often with next to no story. Often you had to be a huge nerd to even get the games to run at all. You probably needed to learn a lot about DOS config or how to write .bat files to get sound to work or your graphics to work right. A typical non-nerd consumer would probably never have figured out how to get it to run unless maybe Tech Support was excellent back then. My Dad was an engineer.. no way we'd have ever gotten them to run without his knowledge.
A lot of the negative stuff happened at the very end before they were acquired and then after they were acquired. But even in the early 1990s they had some mega hits.. they just weren't in the original lineup of adventure games. IMO the adventure games never really worked once they started using the mouse. They were less hostile but just seemed dumb. In the early 1990s the Dynamix games Sierra published were great though, those were/are some of my most favorite games from my childhood. What was hostile about those was getting them functioning in Dos though. I remember Metal Tech Earthsiege being a real huge effort with config.sys and autoexec.bat to get the whole game to function.
I wanted to play a lot of these games bad enough to learn more about the computer worked, the hostility probably contributed to me going down the path of studying CS.
I think the point about hostility was not necessarily the operating environment as much as the game dynamics, which were based on frustration and repeating an action many, many times until stumbling on the solution.
Ken Williams tried to innovate into new underserved markets (e.g. dial-up gaming services pre-Internet), and "buy R&D" by acquiring other companies, which worked for a while. But his core founding game designers had been surpassed in the industry, and their location made it very hard to recruit new talent. The shift to higher resolutions and 3D obsoleted their core technology and the technical talent they had just couldn't keep up. (source: there's a few very good long-form interviews with Ken Williams on these business realities).
Sierra was not going to make it as a software house, the writing was on the wall for a while. They tried to switch to using their established sales channels and turned to distributing and did really well for a few titles like Half-Life and Homeworld, but then those companies went elsewhere with the market. By the "end" Sierra itself was mostly making card games, and then blowing most of their budget on buggy, late to market, and underperforming 3D versions of their main series.
Selling the company was really the only alternative for them, but once you do that you give up vision and control.
It's sad how they ended up, and I'm thankful for the memories, but things move on.