(Shocking) News!!!!!

[Desert Fox]

I think Aaron would be better off seeking out Stardock and its TotalGaming.net subscription service to distribute the game. Strategy First is not very stable at all. This company that publishes SEIV and other titles is not very good at all. Never sold in stores or downloadable makes it very costly for anyone to get it in other countries. A South Africa mate of mine has to pay 65.00 to get SEIV.

This bashing Galciv is silly, two entirely different games at least on how they look and play. I LOVE both games and I find any negative comments toward Galciv or the GREAT Company who produced it is damn right stupid. Both games are outstanding. Sharpnel Games is not a very good company at all as many of their games are not, well popular. No offense to this fine site..

[Richard]

Desert Fox said:
I think Aaron would be better off seeking out Stardock and its TotalGaming.net subscription service to distribute the game. Strategy First is not very stable at all. This company that publishes SEIV and other titles is not very good at all. Never sold in stores or downloadable makes it very costly for anyone to get it in other countries. A South Africa mate of mine has to pay 65.00 to get SEIV.

This bashing Galciv is silly, two entirely different games at least on how they look and play. I LOVE both games and I find any negative comments toward Galciv or the GREAT Company who produced it is damn right stupid. Both games are outstanding. Sharpnel Games is not a very good company at all as many of their games are not, well popular. No offense to this fine site..

Well your entitled to your opinion, most of our games our multi award winning games in the industry and sell very well.

As far as the pricing issue, we did have some issues with pricing overseas when SE:IV first came out but those have long since been resolved. You can get it shipped in 3-7 days for 4.80 in shipping costs. We also have retail and mail order alternatives for many countries. In fact we have the largest non traditional retail distribution network of any online publisher.

Just wanted to set the record straight on that.

[tesco samoa]

you just need to start selling the game in canadian dollars

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Apart from SEIV/Shrapnel sites, I have seen NO marketing AT ALL for the game. No ads, banners, whatever.

OK, so I may be wrong, but at least SE has received less makretingn than MOO, and MOO is more of a mainstream game.

[Richard]

StrategiaInUltima said:
Apart from SEIV/Shrapnel sites, I have seen NO marketing AT ALL for the game. No ads, banners, whatever.

OK, so I may be wrong, but at least SE has received less makretingn than MOO, and MOO is more of a mainstream game.

We have done a ton of marketing for SE:IV but over time you spend less marketing effort on a 4+ year old game. Just because folks spend a lot of money on advertising doesn't mean it's smart. We have run ads in the major gaming magazines before but have found them to have little impac on sales. We ran banners for SE:IV for years on most of the major gaming sites, that is until the ROI on banner ads went through the floor.

We have also used a lot of non traditional methods to market SE:IV and all of our games. I won't go into all of them because they are trade secrets

[David E. Gervais]

David takes out his 'SFI rumor-mill gossip coin' and flips it,.. "WTH? Tails again! I'm getting tired of seeing only one side of the 'coin'"

I sure wish SFI would spill the beans and let the public know what their side of the story is,.. I find it strange that they go through serious finacial trouble (mainly due to in-house development and 'government contracts' forcing them to 'Create-new-jobs' in order to stay in business), and just when things are looking bright an 'outside developer' (who shall remain nameless in order not to spread bad news or tarnish their reputation) milks SFI for over $800,000 and that consequences of that saw 108 people loose their jobs and a number of 'other' developers saw their royalties seemingly go up in smoke. I understand their frustration, but there is absolutely no evidence that SFI is not trying to 'make-good' on those contracts. There has been no 'bankruptcy' declared or contracts deemed null and void. SFI filed for 'Bankruptcy-protection' which means that they have the chance to do everything in their power to make things right. getting rid of the in-house development (cash monkey) has greatly improved SFI's financial standing, in december they started showing a positive cash flow, it may not be enough to pay off 'ALL' their debts, but it is a step in the right direction.

Here's a scenario,.. in 3-4 months when things are going good and SFI manages to 'make-good' on their old contracts will those developers that are currently fueling 'negative press' be able to go back in time and say oops? Nope, and what is worse, never getting paid or being paid late. I think that if SFI was the 'Bad Company' that everyone makes it out to be they could have thrown in the towel long ago (when they were actually showing 'millions' of dollars in profit) and taken the money and ran. the fact that they are doing everything in their power to 'make-good' on their contracts says alot about integrty. The fact that they have also refused to enter the 'character-assination' game and bad mouth the people responsible for their financial woes is another sign of integrity.

Yes they have had extreme financial difficulties, but that was not by design or any mallicious intent. Stardock is as much a victim as SFI, so are many other fine developers. SFI is doing everything in it's power to turn things around and I for one believe they will succeed. One sign that they are succeedign at turning things around is this news..

Silverstar to Aquire SFI

This is not bad news, this is good news, it will help the company by opening up new avenues an in turn make future expansion into new markets available.

Sorry for the rant, but I'm really sick if hearing one side of the coin. and everything I said here is only a tiny part of the 'flip-side' I'm not in a position to know all the details, but what I know goes a long way to explaining why I'm optimistic about the future of SE5.

Nuf said,..

Cheers!

EDIT: this is not in response to Richard's post but to the negative press that has been spilled throughout this thread.

[Psyringe]

Hi David,

hey, I don't think we've seen "just tails" in this thread. Look at my post a while back, I explicitly mentioned the buyout by Silverstar and that that's a good thing for SFI. No one here has an interested to badmouth anyone - it's just that many people are deeply concerned about the future of the Space Empires series, because they love the work of you two. I think, based on SFI's history, these concerns have to be expected. After all, *if* something goes wrong in the end, is a small developer like Malfador really in a position to finance or occupy itself with lengthy lawsuits?

I'd really appreciate if SFI were a little more open about what caused their problems. The explanation that an outside developer milked 800.000$ from them comes as a total surprise to me, and at the moment I don't really see how this could have happened. I just don't see any developer involved who even was in a position to demand that much money from SFI. (SFI didn't have so many successful outside developers besides Stardock, and Stardock didn't do such a thing, they are the ones who didn't get paid). To be honest, to me the explanation that SFI's cash-monkey in-house development used up all this money to produce games that didn't nearly generate enough revenue, sounds much more likely. Also I wonder, if SFI's financial breakdown can be explained so easily by this so far rather mysterious third party, then why weren't the developers who waited (and are still waiting) for their royalties told about it? I'm not saying that it's impossible, but please understand, from my perspective the details as of now don't fit together very well.

Anyway, the decision to go with SFI has been made, and so we can't do anything else but keeping our fingers crossed that things will turn out the way you hope. And that's exactly what I'll do. Fortunately, there's no one making ridiculous announcements like "SFI are eeeevil, I won't buy anything from them", so even if people are skeptical about SFI's trustworthiness, this won't hurt sales.

I certainly will buy SEV, no matter who distributes it. What I heard about the game so far sounds great. I just hope that you and Aaron really get the money you deserve for your outstanding, dedicated work.

[Brad Wardell]

I've heard many excuses from Strategy First why they couldn't pay us at Stardock the hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties, but never have I heard anything about some rogue third party developer screwing them of $800k or whatever.

I do NOT think Strategy First is a dishonest company. I actually like the people who work there. But Strategy First has a LOT of people that they owe money to. Millions of dollars are owed to various people and companies.

With Galactic Civilizations, Stardock developed the game on its own. It did most of the box design. It did most of the marketing. It handled virtually all the support. It made the demo. It distributed the demo onto sites. It created and maintained the website for the game. It handled the distribution of game updates (including paying for all the bandwidth).

In short, Strategy First's contribution to the success of Galactic Civilizations was minimal IMO. They essentially took our game, put it in a box, and turned it over to Encore to distribute into the stores. And then only have paid a fraction of the royalties that they owe. Which we find pretty maddening considering how much of their job we did for them.

I think they have made a good faith attempt to try to pay us what they can. But at Stardock, we don't mess with royalty money owed to others. When we have collected money that is to be paid as a royalty to a third party, it is seperated from our general fund precisely so that we don't get tempted to spend money that should be reserved for third parties. That's what Strategy First should have done in my opinion. But they didn't.

And Stardock isn't the only ones who were hurt by Strategy First's financial short-falls. And there's no reason to think that the same thing won't happen again.

I just hope the author of Space Empires V isn't choosing publishers for the wrong reasons. If he thinks that Galactic Civilizations was successful thanks to Strategy First, he's wrong IMO.

Galactic Civilizations succeeded because:

(a) It's a good game.
(b) It happened to come out right when Master of Orion 3 came out which was not well received by fans.
(c) It had very good word of mouth
(d) It got very good reviews (which, btw, Stardock was the one who sent the game out to most of the reviewers who reviewed the game)
(e) Its developer provided a year+ of FREE updates to the game to keep it fresh and new.
(f) The distributor, Encore, was able to get it into lots of stores adn thus capitalize and A,B,C,D and E.

That isn't to say that Strategy First won't pay the Space Empires V developer. I have no idea. But if he's counting on them to make Space Empires V a "big hit" then past performance should be considered.

-
Brad Wardell
Designer of Galactic Civilizations
http://www.galciv.com

Incidentally, for Galactic Civilizations II we're publishing it ourselves and have had no trouble getting contracts for most of the major retail stores negotiated.

[sachmo]

Richard said:

We have also used a lot of non traditional methods to market SE:IV and all of our games. I won't go into all of them because they are trade secrets

No need to spill the beans.
I have personally sold at least 3 copies of SEIV for you...word of mouth works best!

That, and good reviews from people who care. Like underdogs.org...

[Tim Brooks]

Joint_Chief_StrategiaInUltima said:
Apart from SEIV/Shrapnel sites, I have seen NO marketing AT ALL for the game. No ads, banners, whatever.

Wow! That's amazing, and proves the point doesn't it. If we spent tens of thousands on those things and you didn't see them, then how effective are they?

Mainstream games that do well at retail have to be advertised differently than niche products -- even niche products at retail must be advertised differently. A publisher who pays $18,000 for a full page ad in CGW, to reach (based on CGW's stats) less than 15,000 people who are actally interested in the game, well they are just setting themselves up for bankruptcy, er disappoinment.

The reality is, I would bet that those that read CGW and are interested in a niche game with art budgets in the $ thousands (not $ millions!), difficult interface, and micromanagement features are way less than 15,000 people.

As for banner ads, well, they just don't work anymore. They haven't for over 4 years now. When we first started in 1999, we could advertise by banners, pay $200 - $500 for 300,000 impressions and get a click thru rate of 7.5% (that brought us about 22,000 clicks which turns into about 330 sales). Now the sites worth advertising on want $8,000 for those 300,000 impressions and the click thru rates are under .5% (that brings us less than 1500 clicks which turns into about 23 sales). So yea, lets do that!

We do alot of marketing, in non-tradtional ways, that get us the returns for our investments. How did you hear about SEIV? I know we have run polls before asking this question, and the top answer is word of mouth (a friend told me, I saw it in a forum or user group discussion, my friend at work was playing it, etc.). One of the hardest things we have to contend with regarding developers is to explain that word of mouth just doesn't happen. Someone just didn't wake up one morning and go, "I have a giant urge to go discuss Space Empires IV - I've never heard of it before, don't even know what it is, but hey, I'll just go talk about it." They talk about it because they FOUND out about it. And that just doesn't happen. That is marketing that gets games to that point.

We don't discuss the many ways we market, because our competition isn't there - you won't find SF there - and we don't want then there. Hell, we want our competition paying $18,000 for ads that don't reach their market.