OT = How Does Shrapnel Stay In Business

[Quikngruvn]

quote:

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Originally posted by LCC:
4) I will not post any more of my crackpot opinions.
5) I sincerely apologize to Shrapnel and all its customers for the inconvenience my uninhibited remarks posted at this site may have caused.
6) I will post only when I have something of value to the other SE IV gamers to contribute.

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LCC, I see no need to apologize. The Last time I checked, you're free to post whatever the heck you want, within reason, and so far you've been within reason. Heck, I've been reading this thread with curiosity and bemusement, and though much of the programming stuff is over my head ("Dammit Jim, I'm a troubleshooter, not a programmer!"), most everyone's Posts (yours included) have been interesting and informative.

Not having owned or worked on an Amiga, I cannot comment on it. I only know and work on Windows because it is the dominant OS on the market, not because of any love or respect for MS or Mr. Bill.

Now, everybody back to their neutral corners before I start with the firehose!

Quikngruvn

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Stay alert. Trust no one. Keep your laser handy.
--from the RPG Paranoia, now my PBW mantra

[geoschmo]

LCC,

By all means, you are free to say anything you wish. That's all part of the free exchange of ideas in an unmoderated forum like we have here. As long as we don't go over the bounds that Shrapnel considers acceptable, and I don't think we have. (Well, maybe we came close a couple times. )

Cap'n, I am familier with Amiga, but no I've never owned one. I am not a programmer. I can understand why a person coming from a programming perspective would prefer a more open OS.

My point was never that Microsoft was better than Amiga. I was simply trying to point out that the growth of computer hardware over the Last 15-20 years is in large part due to the widespread acceptance of MS as a standard in the industry.

Of course now that computers are firmly intrenched in the fabric of our soceity, there is more of a market for alternate OS's like Amiga to gain a foothold and support themselves. That's a good thing.

Twenty years ago a few percent of the market was too few Users for an OS to survive. Today that same percentage could mean millions of Users. Quite a differance.

I guess to the old saying that you should never talk about religion and politics, we'll have to add operating systems.

Geo

Edit:for spelling. grrrr.

Btw Richard, if switching from NT to Amiga for the Shrapnel server means we can get a spell checker on the forum, I'm all for it.

[This message has been edited by geoschmo (edited 05 August 2001).]

[capnq]

quote:

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I guess to the old saying that you should never talk about religion and politics, we'll have to add operating systems.

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Operating systems are religion.

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Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

[Tim Brooks]

quote:

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Maybe Richard would care to post Shrapnel's guidelines for customer relations?

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Hope you don't mind hearing from the President of Shrapnel Games

We believe the customer comes first. As the publisher, we have two customers really. The end user, that's you guys, and the developers, that's Aaron and all the rest. Without the developers we wouldn't have end Users and without the end Users we wouldn't have the developers. From a publishing point of view, that's a tough one - balancing the needs of the developers with the needs of the end Users. (BTW, I think we are unique in thinking of the developer as a customer, the big boy publishers think of the developer as an expendable resource - they use them up and then throw them away).

The key is listening. Taking to heart the concerns of not only the end Users, but the developers as well. We are committed to custoemr service (both developer and end user) and every decision we makes takes on the focus of how it will effect our customers. It's the first question we ask ourselves.

Being a small fish in a big pond, the only advantage we really have is making our cusotmers as happy as possible. This means listening to the end Users and trying to make our products better - giving them what they want. By doing so we insure faithful, happy customers.

For the developers it means trying to increase sales and then return as much of the profits to the developers as possible (this is opposed by the big boy publishers mentality of trying to return as little as possible to the developers). By doing so, we allow the developers to continue their work (which hopefully means more games for us to publish), and hopefully be able to turn their dreams into realities (I think most would like to be doing games full time).

Now as part of our customer relations, we put a strong emphasis on customer service. We know how frustrating it is to spend your hard earned moeny on something and then have problems - whether they be shipping (it's been a week and I still haven't seen my games!) or product problems (the music plays, but the screen is blank!). We spend alot of maney that we could othewise put in the bank, to try to make every cusotmer's experience with Shrapnel Games a happy and fulfilling experience. (On a side note, don't write mean letters to the customer service folks, they didn't do it! Whatever the problem, it was probably more my fault than theirs...)

I hope I haven't rambled on too long and maybe I enlightened this discussion a little.




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Tim Brooks
Shrapnel Games

[Tim Brooks]

Going back to the first Posts of this thread...

quote:

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May I ask you how many pieces of SE4 Shrapnel has sold? Or is this number a secret?

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(and many other similar)

The numbers are only a secret because of the average menatality out there in the games industry. Everyone hears of the 2 million copies of Kung Fu King Barbie Designer that were sold (the numbers are highly inflated by the way) and they see these numbers as benchmarks for successful games. Well, these are retail numbers and we don't and can't compete with those numbers. So if we were to publish our numbers, people might subconscously, think less of our games. Even though, in reality, when you take out the top 20 selling products, our games compare quite well with the retail market (Horse and Musket, for instance, would be in the top fifty game solds on the monthly lists.)

BTW, the earnings on SEIV, are comparable to a retail product selling around 400,000 copies, if that helps at all.



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Tim Brooks
Shrapnel Games

[dogscoff]

Dragging the thread back off topic again (Sorry) but I had to challenge what I call the BIG NUMBER mindset.

QUOTE:
My point was never that Microsoft was better than Amiga. I was simply trying to point out that the growth of computer hardware over the Last 15-20 years is in large part due to the widespread acceptance of MS as a standard in the industry.
/QUOTE

I think your so called "hardware growth" is over rated. It's an artificial growth driven by the people selling hardware, not the people using it. A little conditioning and a lot of human nature has led to the unquestioning belief that BIG NUMBER=BETTER. It doesn't. Or at least, it does to a certain point, and then it doesn't.

Take soundcards for example. The human ear's capacity to differentiate between differing quality sounds stops at around 12-14 bit. Therefore a 16 bit soundcard is better than an 8 bit soundcard. A 32 bit soundcard, though, offers no useful upgrade. It would be better for the user if soundcards were to evolve in a different direction instead - offering new functions or improvements in cost/efficiency or something. However, it takes less effort and imagination to just go down the BIG NUMBER path, so they make them and people who were perfectly happy with their 16bit soundcards all have to get 128bit or whatever the hell is available now. If they're upgrading from a 16 bit soundcard, they're being ripped off.

The drive towards ever faster processors
is the same. Apart from games (which are a special case), what can a 1.6ghz machine do for your average computer user that a P90 / Amiga1200:040 / comparable mac can't? Not much. A few whizzy graphical bells and whistles, and you now meet the requirements to run the other pointlessly inflated bits of hardware and bloatware, and that's it.

Driving forward "hardware growth" at an artificially accelerated rate has done more harm than good:
-It has caused needless obscelesence (ie ppl forced to spend their hard- earned money on upgrades they don't need)

-Think of the waste: How many millions of tons of perfectly good 486s, Pentium Is, Amigas, Macs and so on are currenly rotting in landfill sites? How many of them were replaced with 1.5 ghz PCs even though their owners only want to run a word processor and an internet connection?

-Ignorance and techno-fear: by the time you learn how something works, it's obselete. Easier to stay ignorant, feed the premium rate helplines and upgrade every 2 years hoping for an improvement.

-lazy programming: why take time to make it efficient when you can just up the hardware spec? I was unable to run a simple 2D desktop character (the kind of thing that ran smoothly on my 7.14mhz Amiga with 5 other tasks on the go) because the minimum spec was quoted as P200MMX or something. Should I dump my P133 and buy a 1.6ghz machine? If SE4 was that badly programmed, I'd have to.

-Bloatware: If everyone were to realise that the computers they have on their desks are actually 10 times more powerful than they could ever need, the entire industry would disappear up it's own arsehole. Therefore programs have to expand to fill up the capacity of the computer's hardware. They fill up hundreds of megs of data so you have to buy a new hard drive. They burn off CPU cycles with gimmicks and lazy coding so you'll long for a new procssor.

Of course I'm not saying that hardware should stay still. There's nothing wrong with having faster processors and quicker 3D game cards and everything else, but I would like to see these advances driven by the needs of the Users, not the shareholders of the manufacturers. It would mean a more stable market, a longer useful life for computers and probably more creative and useful advances than the simple BIG NUMBER increments we see now.

</0.02>

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"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"I think so Brain but, if you replace the P with an O, my name would be Oinky, wouldn't it?"

[geoschmo]

quote:

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I think your so called "hardware growth" is over rated. It's an artificial growth driven by the people selling hardware, not the people using it.

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I can't disagree with this statement, or just about anything else in your post. However your compraisons are only valid if you are comparing the Last five years or so. Yes a 90Mhz processor is just fine if you aren't trying to create the next "Final Fantasy" movie. For most end Users it's probably more than sufficent. But we weren't using 90Mhz processors when Winblows hit the scene. We were using 4Mhz pc's.

No I don't think for a minute that some smart guy wouldn't have been able to come up with a processor faster than 4Mz if "the Bill" hadn't come on the scene. But if nobody was buying computers, which they weren't in significant numbers before winblows came along, the economic incentive wouldn't have been there to get it done, and the number produced would be so low that they would be out of the reach of the ordinary consumer.

It all gets back to supply and demand. Winblows created the demand. Not that something else couldn't have, but nothing else did. That's probably going to be hard if not impossible for most of you guys to accept, because you love and live computers for the most part. But the ordinary joe-six pack and jane soccer-mom that exsist in large numbers and support the computer industry today don't. They need something on there level or they aren't going to fork over the cash.

Geo

P.S. Besides, I only brought that whole thing up as a response to the Posts early on where the guy was going on about how much he could do with today's hardware if he didn't have to put up with the bloat. My point was that if you didn't have the bloat, you wouldn't have today's harware to play with. I never intended to say, and I don't think I ever did say, that BIGGER=BETTER.

[This message has been edited by geoschmo (edited 06 August 2001).]