Why Not Digitial Distribution?

[Innocence]

Edi said:Tim Brooks has already given several answers that address the issue and why things are done the way they are and I for one do not see any holes in his logic.

The hole in part of the logic is the lack of trust in the Dom3 copy protection, which is excellent. And when you don't have to worry about piracy, the rest of the why-not-to arguments are invalid, since they ultimately build on the first dogma that releasing the manual in digital form will make piracy ruin this game (which might be true if it wasn't for the protection build in by Illwinter).

The Dominions 3 manual is not and is never going to be available in a downloadable PDF format nor is the game going to be distributed in digital download format

And "640Kb of RAM is enough for everyone" I've read those statements before, repeating them wont make them any more right.

But I agree that trying to argue with logic here seems futile - it probably is, as you say, "end of story" . Clearly, if other small/one man companies do this successfully it's obvious that this will never work for ShrapnelGames [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/icon02.gif[/img]

Even in our small "group", half the people interrested say they "wont buy it right now" (which pretty much means they'll never get their act together and order it) because of how difficult the game is to come by. And if your friends wont play the game, there goes the chance for a nice relaxed multiplayer experience, meaning you'll feel tempted to skip the game yourself. I recon the picture is much the same in the rest of the world.

For what it's worth though, yes I'll likely end up biting the bullet and buy the game on mail-order just like most people here - but under protest, futile as it may be [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/VikingHelm.gif[/img]

On an ironic sidenote: Illwinter is a Swedish Development team. "Sweden" as in "Europe", "Sweden" as in "two hours of ferry transport from where I live"