Re: So no Dominions 4?
 

1) 1 game at $60 makes them a lot more than 3 at $15. Your logic makes no sense.

2) Dominions will never have the wide appeal and thus sales that the big titles have. It takes too much thinking to play it. This means they have to charge more.

As for playing with your roomies, do it hotseat. One copy is fine.

Re: So no Dominions 4?
 

So you admit at least that it's a good game?

And if we dropped the price to a $1 we could sell SIXTY TIMES MORE COPIES, right? Oh wait, 60x1 isn't very helpful. But at least more people would be playing, right?

Why $45? Why not $50? Why not $40? Why not $43.82? So we drop it to $45 then someone comes along and goes, "You're fleecing your customers! If you dropped the price to $30 you'd sell a lot more. 5x30 is more than 3x45."

Why am I getting a sense of deja vu with this conversation?)

To all the folks playing MP games on this board has everyone shot their wad with their "short burst of interest"? Or are you still playing?

Hey, who leaked our business plan?

So, you think it's a good game but don't like what we charge for it...that sums it up, right? That's fine, to each his own.

Re: So no Dominions 4?
 

Youre comparing a theatre, which purchases a movie then rents out space for viewings, and they pay different amounts for different movies, the way they "charge more" for 150 million dollar movie as opposed to a 30 million dollar movie is to put it on more screens, it stands to reason Independence Day is going to draw a larger crowd than Sense and Sensibility. So S&S that AMC only paid a million to put on at its numerous locations, will only appear on 1 maybe 2 screens where as ID4 that cost them maybe 5 million to put on at their locations, will get 4 to maybe even 8 screens.

Your example is actually proof of what im saying. If you charge 8 dollars for something, people are more inclined to pay for it than if you charge 60 for it. While it might work to charge 60 dollars for a ticket to ID4 and put it on at just as many screens as S&S, something tells me alot of people wouldnt see a movie that costs considerably more than other movies of the same or BETTER quality.

Bottom line, the price keeps people from buying it. This isnt the first time this has come up over the years, and it wont be the last.

The price hurts the community. Every month, someone shelfs this game. If there arent warm fresh bodies, eventually the community dies, and you end up like Master of Magic. A game people DL for free, a decade later, because the community dried up, where the developers could still be getting checks , and the community could still be actively creating mods and purchasing the game, and hopefully, providing an opportunity for a sequel.

Seriously, if you guys arent going to make a dominions 4, why should i even convince friends of mine to purchase this game? So you can retire to florida? Put gas in your tank? Why should we pay new release price for a old game, when a current version isnt being worked on, wheres the money going? A greedy publisher? Solid gold champagne glasses? For serious....why should you get far more than somethings worth.

Its like buying a beer at a bar. Sure its three times as expensive as a store, but theyre providing an atmosphere, and a promise of many more beers than you could buy at one time on tap. What are you providing for the 15 more dollars your charging over the competition.

Re: So no Dominions 4?
 

I don't quite get your viewpoint Kraftwerk..

Are you saying that $60 is too much because you and/or your friends think its not worth that much, or that Shrapnel/Illwinter are pricing stupidly and would make more money at lower cost?

If the latter, presumably Shrapnel understand the demand elasticity of their game pretty well and have their price point for a reason? They, afterall, would have the best information to make that judgement. Personally I can't imagine a drop of $15 would have a massive impact on sales. I certainly don't see the depreciation argument - does a book depreciate? Games only really devalue when they are superseded by something better, and I'm not aware of any comparable game that does it better than Dom 3. As was mentioned, only if Dom 4 came out would there be reason to drop the price on its predecessor.

If you personally think its too expensive, why did you buy it? If your friends won't pay for it, either you haven't sold it to them well enough or its not really their thing. No point trying to sell Dom 3 to the average gamer, its a niche interest. No-one I've spoken to about the game considers the price an issue, although only one paid convert so far! Either way, no need to get upset over it, its their prerogative to sell at whatever price suits them.

Personally, I think Dom 3 has saved me a lot of money. For $60 it has taken away hours and hours of time I would have had to find other things to do in, which all-in-all would have cost me a lot more! Doesn't take many videos, books, or drinks out to cover $60, given the hundreds of hours I expect to play on this game before I have enough. The only downside is lost sleep http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: So no Dominions 4?
 

Seriously. My roommate buys new games constantly. Most of them he plays for a day or two, declares them to be the "worst (insert genre or adjective) game ever!", and then throws them at me. Me, I am a gaming gourmand. If it will run on my computer and has a sword or a gun somewhere, I'll probably play it beginning to end. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

But Dom3 requires refined taste to truly appreciate. And, it will require a very special effort to surpass.

Is Dom3 a niche game? Yes it is. Will it ALWAYS be a niche game? Of course it will. Until someone, anyone (I mean ANYONE, Galactic Civ comes the closest in recent times) produces an AI that can grasp a game well enough to give a thouthful player a run for their money - then there will absolutely be a "turn based PBEM strategy game" niche. While many people continue to play Dom3 SP, and find ways to keep it interesting and enjoyable, the niche that it is most catering to, is the PBEM crowd (which I was not part of until I joined this forum). Now, since the PBEM has always been and always will be a small segment of the game, what is the incentive to cut price.


Net effect - lowering price would mostly only serve to massively increase the number of low-brow twitch gamers who accidentally buy a "bargain bin" title, and then spam other forums and review sites with their complaints about the "terrible graphics", the "lack of tactical battles", and how they think it's "still too expensive, and they wished they had only wasted $10".

Now, that being the probable outcome of this issue, the result for Shrapnel/IW is - one time jump in sales, equating to very minor increase in profit due to slashing of margins, followed my irreversible sales slump caused by the glut of negative reviews covering up the glowing reviews posted by the intended purchaser of the game.

Now shush, that's 3 times I have won this argument. The first stage of insanity is denial. Move on to anger or something. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Re: So no Dominions 4?
 

You get more playtime out of Dominions than out of games that only last for 30 hours or so, and those are considered long. The difference in this case is like watching a decent movie and buying a DVD collection with several movies, or rather, several seasons of a TV series. If you like the genre, you will probably want the DVD collection, even if it costs more, both to show that you think it's worth the price and to enjoy actually watching the series.

Interestingly, while this has come up several times there has always been a community to discuss in these threads. It won't last, of course. We lose people all the time, and they don't always come back. There are very few games that last a decade. I can only think of StarCraft as a game that's actively played and created content for, and frankly, I don't expect a team of two people to do as good job as Blizzard did for one of their most successful games ever.


Illwinter is working on a new project. It isn't Dominions 4 because the old codebase is a mess. Most of the things that can be done, have been, and the rest are either minor or very hard to implement, or both.

In addition for developing something else, Illwinter is also improving the current version. See here:
http://ulm.illwinter.com/dom3/dom3progress.html

Shrapnel Games often holds sales for various holidays. I don't remember how much they take off the price, but I haven't noticed a heap of new registered members appearing after all those sales, so it seems there weren't substantially more sales even with the reduced price.

There's even a distinct feeling in these forums that could be compared to the friendly atmosphere found in a bar, and the manual is very useful, even though it's value has been lowered when new patches have kept changing and adding content.


I do agree that some people won't buy the game because they find it too expensive. People play the demo of Dom3, DomII and even Dom:PPP!!! Why would they play the first version, with horrible user-interface even compared to the current ones, even worse in the balance department, with ugly maps and no mods that could be used even if they did have the full version?

Because it doesn't have a turn limit, and they have 14 nations to choose from.

That, alone, is enough for them. The first version of this series looks and plays like it was released at the same time as Master of Magic. Even with research limited to level 4, even if most nations lose their best mages, even if the AI will be unaffected by the limits and will crush them in a prolonged game with superior spells, it's worth playing. I first encountered this on the Dwarf Fortress forums, so it does take a specific kind of people, but I was still shocked that even the demo of the first Dominions game is considered a good game.

I don't know how much they would pay for Dominions 3. I only know that in that bay12games thread, one person bought the full Dom3 version, after speaking about the game for a while.

Re: So no Dominions 4?
 

I like their Dead Man ale. Their Mori Moto pilsener is really good too. As well as their Imperial Stout. All are pricey.

Sorry, I used to live in Oregon, and am a big fan of the Rogue brewery.

Re: So no Dominions 4?
 

Hell with playing it after 2 years, I haven't even been able to play Dom3 for months and I'm still posting to this forum almost every day! How's that for getting my money's worth?

Mind you, I'm all for Dominions 4 http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif I'll shell out 75$ for a pre-order just as soon as they announce it, even if it doesn't come out for 3 years. I'd go as high as $150, but it'd have to wait for my birthday or Christmas or something, because I'm poor like that.

Re: So no Dominions 4?
 

Actually, theatres don't buy movies. The business model is more along the lines of the studio renting screens from the theatre in return for a (rather small) fraction of the ticket price. Then the theatre makes a significant part of its revenue from selling concessions.

That's a little besides the point, though, which is this: for works of art such as movies, music, computer games and similar, the price is not determined by the cost of production. Rather, the price is determined by the consumers and what they percieve the value is, and the budget for production is then determined from this. This makes sense, because -- unlike physical products -- the worth of the product to the individual consumer is not directly linked to the cost of production. It doesn't matter if a game cost hundreds of millions to make: if the game is good it's good, if it's ****e, it's ****e, regardless of cost.

True for widgets and nails. Not true for "soft" areas such as entertainment or fashion. For some types of products (surprisingly many, in fact), lowering the price can be a kiss of death, resulting in fewer sales. There's a reason why pepole buy poor $50 games from the shelf rather than good $15 games from the bargain bin: perceived value.

Sure, the (relative) high price leads to some people deciding not to buy it. That would be the true no matter what the price was, as long as it was over $0. Don't you think Shrapnel knows the basics[1] supply and demand curve, and how to find the optimum price point? Remember, the optimum price point is the point that maximises your profit, and not your units sold.

[1] Not to say simplistic

Carthago delenda est!

Weeds keep coming up repeatedly over the years too. That doesn't make them flowers.

The evidence does not appear to support the statement.

If it's the price that hurts the community, how come the MoM community is still dead, despite people downloading it for free? Simple: It's not the price.

Because it's a good game that's fun to play? Would you be hesitant to recommend a good book or a movie, just because there might not be a sequel? No? Then why does it matter for a game?

If you buy an Elvis CD, where's that money going? Not towards any new Elvis recordings, that for sure. Does that mean your money is wasted? Of course not.

Here's how it works: You pay your money, you get the game, you play the game. If the game is good, you've got your money's worth. If the game isn't good, you haven't. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

See, that's just it. Dominions 3 is worth $55. Yes, it's more than some other games, but then Dominions 3 is better than those other games.

Of course, if you don't like Dominions 3, then the game won't be worth $55 to you. 'course, then it won't be worth $15 either, so that's not an argument. Overall, though, it seems most of the people who're likely to buy a turn based, rough-around-the-edges strategy games do think that Dominions 3 is worth the asking price.

All of this And even more, that they haven't mentioned.

Simply put: they're better than the competition, the provide more than the competition and so they can charge more than the competition. Isn't economics grand?

Re: So no Dominions 4?
 

Heh, heh, heh. And that's a BAD thing? Master of Magic still had active forums and discussion groups 10 years after its release and more. It wasn't selling any more copies, but that's because the publisher had stopped selling it. Not a bad title to emulate.

-Max