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Talleyrand said:
I know, Leif, and I enjoyed reading your replies. I don't think it is unreasonable however to expect Shrapnel to lower the price of a game that has been out for a couple of years, even if there is no direct incentive for them to do that. People expect it to happen, and you in turn garner the sales of those customers who were on the fence and were not willing to pay full price for a game upon initial release. And as I said, I don't believe this game to be that much more a niche than many other notable strategy titles, whose prices have steadily fallen over the years.
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It depends upon the situation. Dealing with a publisher is not the same as dealing with a distributor or a reseller. When dealing with the publisher, their cost of making the game is not going to diminish over time. As a result, the price is going to stay constant.
A distributor or retailer is a completely different animal and they are looking for turns on their inventory dollars. Therefore, after a game has been on the market for so long, they lower the price to recoup some of their initial investment.
Now, sometimes the original publisher will reduce the cost of their game due to inventory issues, but that depends upon the size of the publisher and other factors. Not knowing how much it cost to make Dom 2, I have no basis for why the cost of the game has remained high. I do know that for the past few weeks, it has been backordered, which means they don't have any copies available. Since the release of Dom 3 was imminent, I am not surprised the cost shown remained high.
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Talleyrand said:Johan, I would pay 40 dollars for Dominions 3 at most plus shipping and probably 30 for Dominions 2, although I think 20 would be more reasonable for such an old game.
As a side note, please quit bringing up the manual when toting the price of this game. The manual is nothing more than a manual. Unless it has a strong piece of fiction inside that lays out the history of the world and its main characters that brings me a keen sense of entertainment, it does not impress me one bit how big it is. I do although appreciate the effort involved in its creation. But I don't pay extra for strategy guides (even for a game like Disgaea 2 lol) and I will not pay extra for a bigger manual, which is basically one way a lot of you are justifying the higher price.
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I'm going to give you an example here:
A supermarket buys cans of Super Deluxe Root Beer for $.20 per can. They sell it for $.40 per can. They sell about 100 cans per week. Most Root Beer sells for $.30 per can. A customer comes up and tells the manager of the store that he won't buy the Super Deluxe Root Beer for $.40 per can, but he would at $.35 per can.
At 100 cans of sales per week, the supermarket makes $20 per week off of the Super Deluxe Root Beer. If they sell 101 cans per week at $.35 per can, they will only make $15.15 per week. To gain the one extra customer, they sacrificed $4.85 to the bottom line, not good business.
The reason why many people have brought up the manual is threefold. There were legitimate gripes about the manual for Dom 2, and there were plenty of people (i.e. more than one or two people) that claimed they stayed away from the game because of the manual. Second, the quality of a manual is one of production values that you said the game did not have a lot of (a 300 page reference book/manual for a game of this type is a must have to plan what you are going to do, much easier than searching for everything in game). Third, the cost of the manual has a direct impact on the cost of the final product. If a 300 page manual costs $20 per game (which would not surprise me, depending upon the quality of the graphics, etc.) then the price of the game is going to change accordingly.
I don't know exactly what you want to hear in answer to your post. You have bypassed several direct answers to your concerns or questions, yet you still say the same thing. If you are trying to get the price of the game reduced, it isn't going to happen at this point, and I highly doubt one person is going to make a difference to a price policy for a company (not a well run company at any rate).
I am not trying to be a fanboy or anything else, this is the first game from Shrapnel that I have bought. However, I completely understand how pricing is determined for products as I am the Sales and Marketing Manager for the company I work for, so I understand why many of these decisions are made.