Dominions II - Low Budget and Overpriced? I think not.
There has been a lot of complaining about the "high price" of Dominions, which is "overpriced" for a "low budget" game. And feel free to complain - perhaps there is a valid point behind it that has not yet been stated. But maybe it has been stated, and I don't understand it because it is based on a superficial and illogical perception of economics and reality.
To people who say Dominions 2 is overpriced for a low-budget game...
What do you mean by low budget? Less than $100 million? Less than $1 million? Less than $10,000? How do you quantify a budget for something done without a budget? The Pyramids of Egypt were low budget, because money had not been invented. The Mona Lisa was low budget. Beethoven's 5th Symphony was low budget. War and Peace was low budget. So? They're all priceless to vast numbers of people.
Why does spending millions of dollars on a game justify a higher price? Final Fantasy 3 (6) and Chrono Trigger were cheaper to produce than Final Fantasy 7, 8, 9, and FFX, and better. Should I pay more for an inferior game because the producer decided to blow vast sums of money on irrelevant video clips, instead of basing the game on gameplay?
What is important is whether the enjoyment is worth the money. Would you shun a good, inexpensively produced movie like "El Mariachi" or "Greek Wedding" in favor of the multimillion dollar pieces of trash "Gigli", "Battlefield Earth", or "FF: Spirits Within", simply because the latter cost more to make? Do you base your music-buying decisions on how much the producers are paying themselves (the majority of music production costs)? For the same selling price, would you rather buy a book written by a corporation (or organization) rather than by an individual, because it cost more to produce?
The development costs of Dominions are not known, can never be calculated, and are irrelevant to the price of the game. The primary factor in the price of Dominions is the per-unit production and distribution price, which is much higher than the per-unit price for major corporate game releases, due to efficiencies of scale... and while those numbers are not public, they can only support a higher, not lower, selling price. And the only factor relevant to whether or not a person purchases Dominions for a given price is the enjoyment received per dollar spent, relative to other uses of that money.
So. Can anyone tell me why they continually bring up the "low budget" status of Dominions as a relevant factor to its pricing? I'd love to hear a coherent, rational explanation. Dollar figures on what you imagine Dominions II’s budget to be, and what it should have been to justify its sales price, would be also be interesting… though ultimately worthless without a known link between the “budget” and sales price.
-Cherry
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