Are we paying more for less?

[Endoperez]

I don't work for Shrapnel Games, and I'm very much a fan of the Dominions series. In addition, I was in the beta, so I got to play the game for free. With that said, I want to defend Shrapnel Games' decisions. I can't speak for them, but I can direct you to these blog entries written over a year ago.

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/blo...mes-Dont-Work/

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/blo...mes-Dont-Work/

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/blo...-Niche-Retail/

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/blo...mes-Dont-Work/

[Sindai]

Talleyrand said:
poor production values

What do you really mean by "production values"? Graphics? If they matter that much more than gameplay to you then Dominions just isn't the game for you.

Unfortuntely that's actually a pretty common sentiment, but there's not much IW can do about it when they only have two or three people. If they actually profit from the game this way then they're way ahead of most of the game industry anyway and there's absolutely no reason for them to change things.

Although it would be pretty awesome if they distributed over Steam like Introversion software instead. Spurning electronic distribution because of piracy is silly; it's not like there aren't easily-accessible copies of Dominions 2 floating around the internet.

[Nerfix]

I think Dominions 2 is far harder to pirate than a lot of other games.

[Endoperez]

Sindai said:

What do you really mean by "production values"? Graphics? If they matter that much more than gameplay to you then Dominions just isn't the game for you.

Unfortuntely that's actually a pretty common sentiment, but there's not much IW can do about it when they only have two or three people. If they actually profit from the game this way then they're way ahead of most of the game industry anyway and there's absolutely no reason for them to change things.

Although it would be pretty awesome if they distributed over Steam like Introversion software instead. Spurning electornic distribution because of piracy is silly; there are sites where you can download the full version of Dominions 2 to this day.

I thought that by "poor production values" he meant that there aren't that many people working in the creation of this game, finishing and polishing and squashing tiny bugs. Or that thing I boldened from your reply.

I agree that for fans of the series the game is well worth it. For sometimes-gamers, sunday-afternoon-gods, this mightn't be true. Dominions 3 isn't a cheap game, and that means that some thought must go into buying it. Theonlystd isn't arguing that we who enjoy the game immensely won't buy it at full price; he is saying that many others might buy the game if it was cheaper.

[Caduceus]

Let's try his tactic. How many "discount" games do you buy a year? How many of those are you still playing three years after its release?

If you put $5 in a jar each month instead of buying a $20 disposable title-of-the-month and then dropped the $55 on Dominions 3 in a year, you'd have $185. You can tweak these numbers any way you want, of course. But, I think most of us are tired of getting burned with flash-in-the-pan games.

[NTJedi]

Caduceus said:
But, I think most of us are tired of getting burned with flash-in-the-pan games.

I completely agree... within the last 2 years so many games blazingly advertise their great graphics yet when playing the game or the demo it becomes clear the game has very little content, replay value, artificial intelligence and/or stability(bugs). Just taking a glance at screenshots from gamespot.com so many games just advertise their graphics... so pathetic.
The dominions series may not look fancy on the outside but under the hood it's got power.

[Talleyrand]

I am not saying this is a bad series. If I thought it was I wouldn't be here right now, nor would I have wasted my time checking the Shrapnel store over and over again waiting for the Dominions 2 price to drop. Endoperez understood what I was trying to get at perfectly. Production values are simply the costs put in to make a game and with Illwinter being an exceptionally small studio with not many people in its employ, I find it difficult to pay premium prices for their products, as good as those products might be. Graphics are just one component that go into a game and are only a fraction of the total production values that I'm talking about. The fact is, if you bought a Dominions game you paid premium prices for it (and by that I mean higher-than-industry average). Not only have they charged premium prices for their games upon initial release but they have also refused to lower the price of those games even years after first shipping. Niche is no excuse, people expect game prices to fall.

This thread is just a plea to Shrapnel to be more reasonable in their pricing policies. I won't advertise for other companies on a message board of a rival publisher, but suffice to say Shrapnel isn't the only publisher devoted to producing quality strategy titles, and those other publishers are much more consistent with keeping their prices at a minimal for their customers. I think their growing success shows that business model works best. Is Dominions anymore of a niche game than say Europa Universalis, or Supreme Ruler 2010? In my opinion, no, and if you have played those games you would agree. Shrapnel is more of a niche because it has less market share. But maybe that's more because they have no presence in retail stores and because people are only aware of Shrapnel and Dominions through word-of-mouth, a good addition to traditional marketing but not a substitute for it. And of course the high price point we've been discussing doesn't help matters.

As much as I want to support Illwinter and Shrapnel, I can't bring myself to pay a premium for their products, and in that I think we both lose. Am I in the minority? Well that is the million dollar question, isn't it?

[DominionsFan]

Actually I've seen many people arguing about the price.
My opinion is this:

- Dominions 2 was the best turn based strategy, what was ever created. This is not just a subjective opinion. Everyone who took a look at the game was like "wow! fantastic gameplay!" I remember, that when I introduced this game to my mates here, they were like "Eh? What is this? Look at this graphics!" Then I invited them to take a look at the game on my comp. They loved it. After that point they didn't care about graphics. The gameplay and the complexity of the game sucked them in. There are so many different strategies available, that the game never became boring for us.
Dominions 3. will have many new additions. Also don't forget that the developer support is excellent. Basically they try to add everything what is possible. They care what the fans are saying.

- The price might be high. Now this is a bit subjective thing if you ask me. 60$...seriously this is nothing for a game like this. I was paying many hundreds of dollars for paint programs. Dominions is a special game for hardcore strategy fans. If you don't want to pay 60$ for the best turn based strategy game..what can I say? It's a big fault.
I can understand that some people or families don't have too much money [I think B0rsuk mentioned that he earns 330$/month for example, and that is really like nothing], but somehow everyone can spare 60$ I guess, to buy this awesome game.
What can you buy for 60$? You can't even buy a mediocre quality bottle of whiskey.

[johan osterman]

Ultimately it is shrapnel that sets the price. Obviously they are intrested in making as much money as possibly from the sales, they wouldn't price Dominions in the range they do if they didn't figure it would earrn them more than it would for them to sell it at, say, 40. Remember that there is a bit of overhead on this, so a 15 dollar price increase might very well mean that shrapnel can take a 50% drop in sales. At 25 dollars they might conceivable have to sell several times the amount they do at 55, which is unlikely even with that price drop, considering that the complexity and lack of glitz means that dominions will remain a niche game whatever the pricing.

[Leif_-]

Talleyrand said:
I was torn by the desire to support an independent developer and publisher making good strategy games, but also not feeling the parties were justified in charging so much for their product: a product with such poor production values.

In the realm of information-based products (books, movies, music, computer games) as opposed to products that are primarily physical (cars, refrigerators, danish pastries), there is hardly ever any connection between production values and price. You don't pay less to see "The Blair Witch Project" than you do "Star Wars Episode III", even though the first movie had almost no budget or special effects. Production value in these fields are used to attract a greater number of customers, rather than to excuse a higher price.

So I would check in every couple of months or so just to see if Shrapnel had lowered the price, so I could finally purchase it. Did they ever lower it? No, and now Dominions 2 has disappeared from their online store, to be replaced by the even more expensive Dominions 3.

I genuinely want to understand this. Practical business says that you charge what the market will bear for your product. Demand is higher upon initial release so you are justified in charging a higher price, but after some time you try to cater to those customers who were on the fence and will only purchase the product when the price comes down.

There are two reasons why normal games are sold at a refund after a while. The first is that their perceived value in the market has gone down, because newer and, in theory, improved games have entered the market at their old games. Who'd buy a one year old copy of Generic FPS for $50 when they instead can by the recently released Quarter Life II for the same price?

Dominions, however, is a niche game and only competes with other games in the niche, so this effect is pretty much non-existant. The number of out-of-niche games that's been released since the first publishing of Dominions II doesn't affect its perceived value at all, and the number of in-nice-games that's been released over the last three years is quite small and not really significant.

The second reason why normal games are sold at a discount after a while is because they're sold primarily through brick-and-mortar shops who need to shift stock and maximise the use of their shelf space. After a while a store will sell a game for no gain, or even at a loss, just to free up stock space for newer, more profitable games.

Shrapnel, being an exclusive web-shop, doesn't have to worry about that. They don't need to get Dominions II out of the building to make room for Horse and Musket, so they have no reason to settle for a low or even negative profit per sale.

I as a perspective customer am stuck with the dilemna of wanting to play a strategy game with lots of depth and choices, but not feeling the production values warrant a $55 price tag. Am I alone?

No, of course not. A lot of people will feel that the game doesn't warrant its price tag. But that's always the case. The optimal price in a supply/demand graph will always leave some fraction of people feeling it's too expensive. For some products it will even leave the majority feeling it's too expensive.

The question isn't so much whether there are people who feel the price is excessive, as whether this is the price that maximises the total profit. It might not be; Shrapnel might have made a mistake with their pricing, but I don't think there's any reason to suspect that's the case.