Quote:
Neophyte said:
Having said this, I'm thankful for independant game distributors such as Shrapnel. One thing I would like to see is purchase by download - when I ordered Dominions II I wanted to play turn 41 right away, not wait the three days it took to get here.
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Thank you for sharing your opinions with us. We are always interested in hearing what our customers have on their minds. While offering games via download is not industry standard, it is something we first tested in 1999 with the release of BCT.
We later tested the concept by offering the choice of download or game on CD with a few specific titles. We found that sales of the physical product far outweighed sales of downloads. But it's been a while, and we will soon be testing the concept again as we realize the market is ever-changing. Currently, we offer three titles (and all of our expansions) as downloadable purchases.
There are some games, admittedly, we don't foresee ever offering as download. Selling games as downloads is great for some niche games that don't have the market potential to make publishing profitable. This is probably why you don't see Microsoft or EA offering their games as downloads. With downloadable games, we also lose our valuable reseller market, which is very important to us - particularly in our international sales.
I hope this sheds some light on why we do what we do. Our priority is to bring great games to great customers in a way that makes our developers some money so they can afford to continue making games we love.
