[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by Soyweiser

I think professional discs are a bit more expensive. Iirc you need to make a master disc, and make professional copies from that one. For both you need specialized equipment. Which tend to be expensive. Sure the costs of one disc is cheap. But the whole setup tends to have large costs up front. Sure, after a certain amound of games sold you get the expense back. But still.

I'll note that large capital investments like that are tax deductible for corporations.

Also, Dom3 is not the only game Shrapnel produces, and should not be expected to make up the cost of said equipment on its own. Realistically, the cost of said equipment per disc sold across all their games is probably less than a dollar, but I can't swear to that one.

Its certainly not a material cost for the game. Its a capital investment, and is accounted differently.

(And lets not forget that when buying a game you normally not only pay for the physical disk, you also pay for development, tech support, shipping, housing, websites, shrapnel also wants to eat, etc). People tend to forget these costs, which usually amount to a lot.

I believe that shipping is paid for separately from that price tag =p

They shouldn't need to do that much warehousing just for Dom3, so storage costs are presumably low, especially on a per unit basis.

They run a single website which accomodates all their games. Like capital investments, its not dom3's job to pay for that on its own, and the actual cost per disc shipped is probably under a dollar.

Actually, most of these things are kind of like capital investments in that its not dom3's job to pay for all of it. (Except development, which I already talked about at length, and that should have been paid off already). I agree these are legitimate expenses. Selling an old game at $50 does not help pay for these things. No sale is no money made at all.

And while I personally think 50$ is still a bit much. I doubt more sales would be made if the price is lower. (I think the specials do improve sales, but that has to do with buyers psychology). Dom3 isn't a real impulse buy kind of game. It is a niche game, those tend to be more expensive. (And tend to draw a more 'select' crowd).

I might argue that dominions3 is such a niche game because the price is so high. I mean, dom3 has a lot of boardgame and wargame type appeal. There are (at least) millions of boardgamers and hundreds of thousands of wargamers out there. The niche doesn't have to be as small as it is. Part of this is probably a failure of advertising (or lack thereof). But part of this is almost certainly the large price tag on an old game - why pay $50 for dom3 when you could pay about the same for something brand new with killer graphics? At $20/unit you still see something like $18 gross profits (price - material cost) which can go towards salaries, paying off capital investments, etc... And you'll probably move a lot more units. For every person who buys it at $50, there's probably 10 who would try it at $15-20. And since the only real cost per unit is the materials cost, well, you do the math.