A simple thank you

[Tim Brooks]

Murph:

I thought the real problem with Shrapnel was not their distribution - which keeps their costs down and lets them pay devs more, but their marketing.

We actually do alot of marketing - the PC Gamer Demo was how you heard about us right? The problem is we are dealing in niche markets, and there is no good way to reach the niches. You either have to pay alot of money through magazine ads to reach a small percentage of potential customers, or rely on reviews to do this for you. PCG or CGW wants close to $20,000 for a full page ad, and we reach mainly people that aren't even interested in our type of products. It just doesn't make sense to do this.

The hardest thing we do is try to find avenues to reach our niche customer base that is cost effective. The best ways we have found to do this is through paid search engine listings. Truth be told, the fans themselves (word of mouth) equates to more sales than anything we do marketing wise.

[PDF]

This thread became interesting again... Thanks Shrapnel !

I'm an advocate of downloadable products, but that may be because
1/ I'm not in the US so have difficulty finding some of *my niche* games
2/ I've a good DSL bw and I'm savvy enough with tech things to manage that without too much problems
3/ I don't fear buying Online (much less than carrying banknotes in my wallet in fact )
4/ I'm not convinced that piracy would make a sensible hit to games like Shrapnel's ones - the guys pirating that woul anyway never have bought the game whatsoever, at 99%...

But I agree that the tech infrastructure isn't quite ready, and requires too much investment for a company like Shrapnel when compared to possible profit.
Some people (Stardock-type) will have offer other companies secure and efficient d/l platforms to make this profitable to small publishers- and big ones will surely be scared to death by piracy issue for some years more !

BTW Tim if you want a full page in PC4War, the French mag which has proudly edited more than 20 pages on Dom2 in 3 issues , sure it's less than 20K $ !!

[Alneyan]

I must concur with PDF about the usefulness of downloadable products, though Shrapnel games can actually be bought outside the US without having to put a mortgage on your house (the format of the games do help to cut down on shipping rates, and some countries have their own stores to avoid annoying things such as duty taxes and the like).

On the other hand, I recall one independent adventure game sold for 30 euros (pretty cheap), and where the shipping cost was also of 30 euros, plus various banking fees and the usual duty taxes. Am I the only one who finds this to be a tad bit expensive? Oops, it looks like I am starting a rant about my main pet peevee.

[Chazar]

About the book as a copy protection and why I bought Dom2:

I am severely annoyed by the incompleteness of the Dom2-Manual and I am craving for a merge with Liga's excellent manual addenda (BTW: Thanks to Liga!)- but there wont be any, since on the one hand the manual is not available electronically and on the other hand selling a cheap revised manual would disable its copy-protecting function. This is very sad. Any solution here?

Maybe Shrapnel could sell cheap revised paper manuals to owners sending in their CD-Key as legitimisation, but the bureaucratic overhead would make that probably more expensive than the game itself. Printed manuals are also bad since they tend not to keep up with the patches as well.

Conclusion: I like printed manuals and I think I have bought games just because of printed manuals before, but this would have not been the case with Dom2 if I had learned about the game from a friend who would have had the manual: I hardly use the Dom2 manual, but I definitely rely on Zen's freely available MagicItem/SummonMonster documents above anything else, since they give an digestible overview over all the possibilites - especially to know these facts in advance before researching/empowering and exploring manually! Without those, I couldnt play! BTW: Thanks to Zen!!!


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So to give a complete feedback about a humble customers perception of why I bought Dom2, here is my view. I bought Dom2 because:

• Its a pretty good game. (BTW: Thanks to Illwinter!!!)
• I think it is a must to support smaller enterprises. My father once had a small scale craftsman's enterprise before retirement. Hence I still avoid big super-stores in favour of small shops on almost any kind of good. I also buy Audio CDs from non-mainstream bands much faster.
• Word of mouth. Someone recommended it in the Warlords4 forum. Aftewards I spread the game among all my friends vigorously. I also saw a good review in a major german IT-magazine, but that was already too late - I had already purchased the game.
• The demo. Paying for something I cannot test has given me bad surprises (eg. Warlords4 - as mentioned by someone else above I thought "4 is good (or at least as good as 3)". It wasnt, but that in turn made we aware of Dom2!). So either a demo or a 'friend's copy' are a must for me to buy a game now. However, I also gave away my CDKey to a few trusted friends in order to get them hooked on the game and/or to set up a server which I cannot. Some of them bought Dom2 now, some dont play at all. Somehow people always prefer the 'real thing', although I do not understand it myself since the liberal Dom2-Demo allows quite extensive testing (but does not solve the problem of letting a non-player setting up a server ).
• CD-Key-check introduced with the patch helped me to convince some friends to buy their own copy in the end. Sad but true. The downside here is that only few fellows thus delayed others buying it - either all buy it together or no one at all. Still the CD-Key-check is a perfectly acceptable thing for me, as it doesnt prohibit me to play at home on my desktop and while travelling on my latop. This is important! And I dont even need to remember to carry the CD with me. Well-done in my opinion!

The way of distribution is not a factor for me:
Either I want to buy it or I dont. Once I've made this decision, I take a look at that aspect of distribution. Usually I like to go to the game shop next door to order a specific game. I dont play that many games, so I do not browse for games in shops. For Dom2, I needed to order it from a german web-seller recommended here in this forum a while ago. This was unconvenient because of the german law which requires complex age-verification, but it wouldnt have changed my mind. A download is nice, but I dont like it for the fear of conncetion-breakdown. In the end, the german web-seller was even cheaper than buying directly from Shrapnel (taking post&packing, PayPal US/EUR conVersion and Shrapnels irregular appearing 10% discount offers into account).