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Arryn said:
That article pretty well slams SF for not paying Stardock for GalCiv's retail sales, it also mentions that they intend to release their next game by both download and retail (via Ubisoft as a publisher). So Stardock, in spite of its bad experience with SF apparently still believes that retail has some merit, else why would they give it a third try?
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Thats half of it (Brads half). Anything along the line of what Strategy First offered creates a time frame to pay off expenses before there is a profit. SF tried some things to boost sales which didnt happen and has now filed for bankruptcy.
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Perhaps the retail sales figures showed them that they *would* have gotten a decent amount of money were it not for the exception of making a mistake in choosing their publisher? I can only hope that Ubisoft treats them better than SF did (they can hardly do worse).
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Developers tend to feel that their game never sells as well as it would have if its not seen by every gamer. To an extent thats true but the charges for getting games into retail can kill the profit margin. At this point Brad is making obvious moves to increase his "name brand" status. We will see if he is going to shoot for the same retail level as Shrapnel does, or something more mainstream. For his own games he is willing to gamble abit more than for developers who are talking to him, which only makes good sense.
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The article also conclusively states that Stardock (1.) doesn't have a significant problem with piracy from digital downloads, and (2.) is showing a healthy profit (or at least paying all their bills) by going that route.
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but that is thru the stardock software.
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Basically, it's the developers/publishers releasing shoddy, half-finished games (knowing that they can finish it after release by providing patches) that he says is killing the PC market.
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That may have been part of why developers like Brad and Tim create their own publishing companies like StarDock and Shrapnel.
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His concluding paragraph bears repeating:
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Make it a no-brainer for someone to purchase games electronically by keeping costs reasonable and make using the games they've purchased easy and convenient. After all, it's their pizza, deliver it to them as they want and they'll support you with future orders.
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I dont think anyone is arguing the obvius advantages of Digital Downloads. Just that its not available yet unless you want to create the system from scratch which is a heavy gamble. There are plenty of publishers willing to offer the higher-priced gambles and there are plenty of them being ranted against right now by their developers or becoming headlines with their firing, dropping projects, or bankruptcy.