Hi all. I've been following this thread and thought you should hear the official Shrapnel position with regards to Dominions 3. I will attempt to do this while answering some of what has been said in this thread. I also have a few questions.
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A good concept served by the bare minimum acceptable services.
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Interesting comment. kasnavada, what would make our services more than the minimum acceptable?
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Even forgetting digital distribution (which space empire does), the distribution services doesn't even offer to use "fast" delivery services like UPS or DHL.
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Do you really want to get into Space Empires, a game that less than 9 months after release was selling for $10? There's a model we don't care to emulate.
We used to use UPS and Fedex. 1 in every 7 international orders had to be reshipped. That is why we don't use them anymore. Now, on average, we have to reship about 6 packages a year.
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However, an option for a faster delivery service than 7 days (or more...) is really needed...
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Most packages are delivered within 3-7 days. Any longer is a function of the shipment being held in customs. The same thing happened with both UPS and Fedex.
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The cost per copy is higher, but it sells more copies.
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This goes to the whole digital distribution model. We have researched this and we use it with a number of our games so we know what is what. The assumption is false when it comes to niche games. A game like Dominions will not sell noticeably more copies. It will just shift a percentage of sales from physical product to digital. And for publishers in niche markets looking to minimize costs this is unacceptable since you will print less physical product and therefore increase costs. Also, distributing a manual in electronic format for a game where the manual is almost a necessity just plays into the pirates hands. Want to know the most searched on term that leads people to Shrapnel Games? 'Dominions 3 Manual'. This accounts for almost one third of all searches that come to our site. We are sort of happy that the pirates have a hard time with the game. Actually that's not true, we are
very, very happy that the pirates have a hard time with the game.
Based on the above the only answer would be to go to a totally electronic distribution model. I would love to do this. No inventory hassles, no printers to deal with, fewer employees... the list goes on and on. And one day we may do this, but right now we just don't see it as an option for a game as popular and as niche as Dominions 3. To limit piracy, we would have to go to a system like Steam uses and I personally refuse to do this. I don't think that the person buying the game should be the one penalized for spending their hard earned money in support of our developers.
A thought: Wonder why Steam doesn't sell physical products? I mean, your arguments are we would sell more if we had digital distribution. Wouldn't Steam sell more if they had physical products too? Funny how the digital distribution argument is never turned around.
Want some other interesting facts? We get about 1 support request for every 100 (approximate number) physical games sold. For every download product, we get about 17 support requests for every 100 games sold. Talk about costs. Know what the most expensive single component to a game is? Support. That is why so many of our competitors have such lousy support. So lets do something that increases that cost. In this thread people have talked about getting Dominions cheaper if we had digital distribution. Actually the opposite is true. Digital distributed products cost us more than physically distributed games.
I really want to write more, but have to leave for a meeting now, so I will leave this here and try to get back to it later.