Is the price of Dominions II a deterrent?

[Kristoffer O]

Originally posted by DominionsFAN:
Bahahhaa, I am very young, so my father will buy the game. 30 or 50 I don't care!

[PhilD]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
Other options that I would have been happy to see would be built-in allowance for home lan as some games have allowing you legally to play an MP game at home with one disc, or bulk discounts, or a cheaper Online method for buying just a CD key which is possible because it involves no production and shipping.

Both of these requests seem reasonable.

We've been told that the manual itself costs a lot to print, so it would make sense to offer a "pure CD key" option for a significantly lower price.

And then, all I'd have to do would be convince my girlfriend to play. I'll start with the easy lobbying option, and convince Shrapnel to offer us a BIG discount

[Watchdog]

They use CDkeys too?! Oh my god... I don't patronize bioware or blizzard because of their attack on home lan environments. Guess I'm adding shrapnel to my list of unfriendly money grubbing company's.

Look. I'm not a company making huge profits. I'm not a university paying for everything with grants or a government organization paying with taxes. I'm a guy who works for a living. You people just don't have the right to expect home Users to pay for multiple licenses of software. You just don't, period. Sooner or later that tactic is going to run you guys out of business and I'll be happy to see it happen.

Great game or not, your business practices stink.

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by Watchdog:
They use CDkeys too?! Oh my god... I don't patronize bioware or blizzard because of their attack on home lan environments. Guess I'm adding shrapnel to my list of unfriendly money grubbing company's.

In this case Im not sure there is a choice. The only real protection that Dom1 had was that the host would insult and badly treat players that showed up with the same CD-key. That wasnt a really all-encompasing protection. I dont see an easy way to ignore it for lan and still have it work for internet. (take into account proxies, ram drives, the different ways that lans can be created, etc)

[johan osterman]

Originally posted by Watchdog:
They use CDkeys too?! Oh my god... I don't patronize bioware or blizzard because of their attack on home lan environments. Guess I'm adding shrapnel to my list of unfriendly money grubbing company's.

Look. I'm not a company making huge profits. I'm not a university paying for everything with grants or a government organization paying with taxes. I'm a guy who works for a living. You people just don't have the right to expect home Users to pay for multiple licenses of software. You just don't, period. Sooner or later that tactic is going to run you guys out of business and I'll be happy to see it happen.

Great game or not, your business practices stink.

If ever shrapnelgames forces you to buy and pay 45 USD for a game, I'll be right there besides you, brandishing a sign, sporting a bandana, shouting slogans, climbing barricades and establishing a revolutionary court. Until then I fail to see what your grievance is. If you for various reasons find the game unreasonably priced, don't buy it.

[licker]

Originally posted by Watchdog:
I would definitely "deny" myself this game for 10 or 15 bucks. Basically I don't have a lot of money to spend on video games. When a company is charging more than almost any other game out there for it's product I want to know why.

All I can see for why is

1. People will pay for it. They have a core group of rabid fans who will pay any price for their products.

2. They have some distrobution issues they are unable to resolve.

Neither of these reasons warrants such a high price in my opinion. The cost/benefits comes off a bit in the negative by about 5 to 10 bucks.

Somebody asked if the price was a deterrant and so don't flame me for answering that question because for me, YES the price is a deterrant.

This reasoning is a bit strange to me. How do you arrive at how much a game is worth to you? Do you take the projected hours of entertainment and divide by the cost? Or do you simply decide that no game over $35 is worth the money? Are there other issues involved?

Don't take that as a flame, its not, I'm just curious about the mind set of people who don't think Dom2 is worth $45. Again, we're not talking about how much profit Shrap and Illwinter will make, we're not talking about how much of a margin is 'fair' for them to tack on. We're talking about how much Dom2 is worth to *you*.

Many people have said its worth more than $50, and I assume they base that at least in part on what other games go for in retal ($50+ for new releases), I'm sure that even if everyone did an accurate analysis of what their time/price point is for Dom2 and it came out to $1 and hour they would be loathe to spend $100 on the game while assuming they were going to get 100+ hours out of it.

I dunno, alot of opinions in this thread seem so completely arbitrary to me that they have essentially no value at all.

And what is this bit about companies not having the right to market and sell their games on their terms? Of course they have the right to sell the product however they damn well want to, just as you have the right to not buy the product. You may dislike how CD-Keys affect your Lan parties, but the game maker probably dislikes how they lose customers because not everyone needs to buy the product in the first place to enjoy it. I'm not saying which side I agree with, just that to invoke the 'R' word is seriously misguided.

[blackwulf]

licker,

I couldn’t agree with you more.

The problem seems to me that if you own a business you are automatically labeled a money grubbing capitalist pig. It does not matter if you are Microsoft or run a small business out of your home.

-blackwulf