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If you ask me, Schafer nailed the big problem with PnC adventures: When you're stuck on a puzzle, everything stops. With other (more popular) game genres, you never "stop". There's always something more to do, or to try again and get better at. Also, another selling point has become diminished by triple A titles: Once upon a time SOMI and its ilk were considered "cinematic". Now adventure games are some of the least cinematic games you're going to play.

The stopping certainly hurts more casual audiences, who are in the market in this quantity now because of the low barrier of entry. Back in the day of adventure games though, the personality, mindset and circumstance it took to enjoy a PnC was not far from that needed to bother with the machine that plays them in the first place. Both required patience, curiosity, frustration tolerance and time. Not to mention games were expensive and to have a game that you got stuck on and were able to continue to play in your head while the PC was off, was awesome. Console players and phone players entered the market without needing these things, so the games they enjoy reflect that. PnCs in their classic form cater to a very specific audience who is as small now as it was back then. The market around that audience grew an absurd amount. It's good that a lot more people can find entertainment in video games today. But it makes a lot of sense that these people wouldn't have the same taste as the pioneers in that market, or they would have been there from the start.

My thought on this has always been: don't create a game that includes references to popular games, instead create a game that other games will reference in the future.