Is the price of Dominions II a deterrent?

PvK · #1 October 31st, 2003, 10:55 PM

Shrapnel does offer download sales of some other games.

There was a post from Shapnel saying they weren't including a digital manual with the demo to make it harder for pirates...

... it was also mentioned that buying Doms II gets you a manual, and someone mentioned full-color item catalog...

... so since we're just wildly conjecturing here, lemme suggest that part of the reason for the $45 price and lack of download is the physical manual. Just an idea.

On the other hand, SE4 Gold is still priced at $39.95. It comes with a pretty good manual, but I expect not as good as the Doms II manual. Dungeon Odyssey is available for $29.95 download... or $29.95 via CD (printable manual only).

I dunno. Personally, I think Doms II is a great deal at $45 if you like the game. It offer huge amounts of fun play time. If you like the game, but don't buy it because the price is $15 higher than you'd like to pay, it seems to me you're just talking yourself out of a lot of fun. There isn't really any similar game available... except Doms I - you can get that for $30, and it's quite good.

PvK

PvK · #2 October 31st, 2003, 11:16 PM

Actually, Tim Brooks just made a nice post on this topic HERE.

(No color manual, as I conjectured in the Last post. However from other Posts by Psi it sounds like it will be a treasure trove of game mechanics and stats info, which is much better.)

PvK

Richard · #3 October 31st, 2003, 11:26 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by mpace:

quote:
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.

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.

Jasper · #4 November 1st, 2003, 12:35 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Richard:
Actuallt that's exactly the reason. It isn't just a question of traffic, it's also a question of burst traffic.
[further elaboration snipped]

Have you ever considered using Bit Torrent to smooth out your download spikes?

Richard · #5 November 1st, 2003, 12:57 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Jasper:

quote:
Originally posted by Richard:
Actuallt that's exactly the reason. It isn't just a question of traffic, it's also a question of burst traffic.
[further elaboration snipped]

Have you ever considered using Bit Torrent to smooth out your download spikes?

Um isn't that a file sharing program? I would have a serious problem giving out our final code (since we don't do shareware) to folks to distribute across the internet.

We haven't had the best experience with games that are downloadable. Magazines won't review them because they see them as shareware. We did the games we have done mainly at the request of our customers and we have not seen dramatic level of sales for our downloadable games compared to physical Version.

Also we would have to make a manual available as a pdf, which would make the game an easy target for pirates.

On the server end you also have to worry about long held download sessions, many of our customers are still on dialup.

And the customer service issues with having to turn back on failed downloads, etc.

So far the download experiment has not been a success for us.

Chris Byler · #6 November 1st, 2003, 01:41 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Jasper:

quote:
Originally posted by Richard:
Actuallt that's exactly the reason. It isn't just a question of traffic, it's also a question of burst traffic.
[further elaboration snipped]

Have you ever considered using Bit Torrent to smooth out your download spikes?

That might work for the 70MB demos, but wouldn't work very well for a buy-and-download model; BitTorrent isn't designed to accommodate that sort of restriction on who can download from it.

Watchdog · #7 November 3rd, 2003, 07:25 AM

Well, if downloading hasn't been successful then I guess you should just lower the price and take the hit

Seriously though, your volume would inrease a lot and that will more than make up for it. Drop the price to atleast and you'll get my $$.

That's how much I paid for aow2SM and I'm not paying more than that for this game.