Quote:
Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker
But no I think that the cost of outsourcing limited pressings has the cost of Dom3 fairly frozen.
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.... what?
Cost of the disc: <10 cents. Ok, its probably ~1 cent (a disc is a disc, they can buy in bulk and use them for multiple different titles) but we might assume they don't order enough discs total to get quite that good a price. But *I* can buy writeable discs for <10 cents, so a game publisher certainly can.
Which leaves the manual, which honestly, they could just put the pdf on the disc and reduce their materials cost/unit to the cost of the disc. However, the manual itself can't cost them more than a few bucks to print.
Most of a cost for a game is to account for development time. After a while (usually a year or less for computer games) the price starts dropping because the publisher understands that if more units move, then they'll see more total income and thus more profits, since the development cost/unit is not a fixed amount. (Rather, its a total that needs to be made up by all sales). Basic economics teaches us that reducing price increases sales.
That dom3's price hasn't moved is pure stupidity on Shrapnel's part.
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Re: "Dom 4". Now, IANAL, but, at least in the US, game mechanics aren't copyrightable or patentable. The description of the mechanics (in the manual or game help) is copyrightable, but not the mechanics themselves. So if someone wanted to make a Dominions 3 clone, they very well could. Of course, the creative content that is original to Dom3 is all copyrightable, so that couldn't be reproduced, but since much of the source material is mythological, factions derived from the same source material are perfectly permissible.
Of course, you wouldn't even want to use Dom3's exact mechanics, since that's where a lot of the problems are. So what you end up with is a game that's inspired by Dom3. What you lose is the factions that have the most creative work put into them - Abysia and Agartha (not the names, but the nature of the factions) for example. Other factions are pretty much straight up conversions of myth to faction, so while there would be changes, a Vanir inspired faction would still be recognizably Vanheim for example. And various gradations in-between.
The magic system's divisions are, for the most part, stolen straight from D+D (1st/2nd ed. AD+D specifically), so that's not a problem. The gem spending mechanic seems to be derivative of MoM in form (which would be the only arguably 'creative' aspect - function being the mechanic itself which is not copyrightable). The actual spells would need changing in many cases (although 'fireball' is certainly not intellectual property, some of them certainly are).
Not that Dom3 is without legal problems of its own... (Illithids and Aboleths are WotC's intellectual property, and used without permission afaict.)
Now, obviously it couldn't be *called* dom4...