what about the future?

[thejeff]

Really? The vast majority of Dominions3 consumers prefer "graphics, the UI, the sound" over the "idea, concept, depth, content and whatever else makes for a high replay value"?

What the hell are they doing here then?

I'll grant you, you'd get more customers if you prioritized the first over the second. That's what the mainstream games do. But the result wouldn't be Dominions. And I probably wouldn't be playing it.

[Tim Brooks]

Let me ask one question. If you were starting a business and you were told that you could either:

1) sell 100,000 units of your product at $10.00 each (Gross $1,000,000) but you would have to hire 50 people to support that effort or

2) you could sell 1 unit of your product at $1,000,000 and you wouldn't have to hire anyone, you could do all the work yourself,

which would you do?

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by Tim Brooks

Let me ask one question. If you were starting a business and you were told that you could either:

1) sell 100,000 units of your product at $10.00 each (Gross $1,000,000) but you would have to hire 50 people to support that effort or

2) you could sell 1 unit of your product at $1,000,000 and you wouldn't have to hire anyone, you could do all the work yourself,

which would you do?

This is a totally false dichotomy for so many reasons, and that fact should be patently obvious. Such as

-the nature of things that sell for $10 is totally different than the nature of things that sell for $1mil. Assuming you were starting a business with a product in mind (ie, you're sensible), you don't have a choice.

-There's no way it takes 50 people to sell 100,000 of anything digital. The top watched youtube video has 253 million views. Now, granted, it took a production team to make it (but that's your 1 unit you're making in the other case too - people needed to make it are set before you start moving product), but it only took a single person to upload it to youtube.

Now, i grant its not a sold product, but it only takes one person to make a webpage and write a little code to e-mail a game key automatically with game purchase, or whatever code you feel like writing to handle digital distribution of a game. It probably took more people than that to create the game. Heck, that code already exists.

So, necessary costs to selling a game in this day and age of digital distribution:
-game development
-bandwidth
-advertising

Where are these 50 people getting involved in any way that's germain to your question and this topic? The actual process of selling the game? Requires like an hour or two of one person's time to write the necessary code, assuming you want to do so from scratch.

I could go on, but its obvious the question is pointless. Hypotheticals that will never occur aren't relevant.

------------
Regarding depth vs. graphics. I don't see why there can't be both. I mean, a dom4 that was simply code-cleaning and graphics overhaul would be worthwhile. And I don't even care about graphics personally, but I do think there would be a positive impact on the size of the community because lots of people do.

[Tim Brooks]

Originally Posted by Tim Brooks

Let me ask one question. If you were starting a business and you were told that you could either:

1) sell 100,000 units of your product at $10.00 each (Gross $1,000,000) but you would have to hire 50 people to support that effort or

2) you could sell 1 unit of your product at $1,000,000 and you wouldn't have to hire anyone, you could do all the work yourself,

which would you do?

This is a hypthetical. It is actually a question asked on one of my business course tests in college.

According to the professor, the correct answer is: You do not have enough information to answer this question.

My point: These conversations about what price we should charge, how many more sales we would get, how successful the game would be if we did x, y, or z, are not relevant. You don't have the information to make the call. They may be fun for you and go ahead, have the conversation, but what do you actually know about our business? What was our bestselling game of all time? What was its price point? How many units did we sell? How much profit did we earn? In what year did we earn the most income? How much income? What was our most profitable year? Did we sell more units of Dominions 3 last year than we did the year before? Are we on track to sell more this year than last year? How many games have we dropped the price on? What did that do to our sales for that game? How many people bought the game at the new price point that never would have at its original price? How large is the TBS game market? Is it growing or shrinking? By what percentage did it shrink/grow last year? What is the cost to us of finding out that information? What is the average cost of a customer support ticket? How many support tickets do we process in a year, month, day? What is the cost of maintaining these forums? How many spammers do we get to these forums each day? What is the cost of keeping those spammers out of here? What is the cost of keeping a database driven server up and running? How many times a day do we get crash warnings on our servers? How many hours do we spend keeping the servers running in a year?

I have the answers to all of those questions and many, many more. I also have the answer to questions you haven't even considered when it comes to pricing and what that can ultimately do to your image... and your costs. At what price point does the general public, not the niche gamer, buy your product(s), hate them, and then go around the internet bad mouthing your game(s)? How many more support requests do you get as the price of the game drops (because you now sell games to people who really don't get it)? What is the cost of these extra support requests?

So go ahead tell us how terrible we are. We're pretty used to it. But pardon me if I don't take the conversation all that seriously.

[Eximius Sus]

Originally Posted by Tim Brooks

So go ahead tell us how terrible we are. We're pretty used to it. But pardon me if I don't take the conversation all that seriously.

You replied. You generally don't react to most of the drivel posted on this forum. Clearly you care. I'd say you take this quite seriously. I mean let's face facts. Sales is your life blood. If you don't sell you die. Simple enough.