Is the price of Dominions II a deterrent?

[Richard]

Originally posted by mpace:

quote:

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Originally posted by Mephisto:
The problem with downloads is the bandwith you have to provide and to handle all the cases of corrupted and aborted downloads. It's mainly a technical problem for Shrapnel.

I find this hard to believe, since the demo is being download as we speak. You'll have to come up with a better excuse than that.

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Actuallt that's exactly the reason. It isn't just a question of traffic, it's also a question of burst traffic. If you get a lot of people downloading at once you have to find a way to manage that since your connection will be cut off by your ISP if you go over so much traffic per second. Also it requires extra servers to support the extra bandwidth per second that would saturate your network card on a single server. The demo is 71 MB, but a a full game is anywhere from 250-450 M in size. You have to deal with re-connections, and garbled downloads. If your dealing with folks with crappy connections you'll have multiple long connections to your server that tie up resources.

It would require more money than it we would make, so it isn't worth it.

On every game we have sold as a download, it sold poorly, until we offered a CD based alternative. Then it sold like hotcakes.

This is from practical experience.