Are we paying more for less?

[Agrajag]

With the ~65$ the game will cost me (atleast, once I finally order it) I could buy:
28 Decent meals. OR
6 Meals at a fancy restaurant. OR
An ~80GB HD. OR
Almost 6 copies Heroes 3 Complete. OR
Almost 6 copies of the whole Baldur's Gate series. OR
Almost 6 copies of the whole IceWind Dale series. OR
A Pair of Jeans and a shirt. OR
559 Bubblegums.

Anyway, the cost of manufacturing Dominions3 is probably more than twice what manufacturing any other computer game costs. Atleast considering that making a disc costs barely 50 cents...

[DominionsFan]

Agrajag said:

Anyway, the cost of manufacturing Dominions3 is probably more than twice what manufacturing any other computer game costs. Atleast considering that making a disc costs barely 50 cents...

Don't forget about the excellent Dominions 3. manual.

[DominionsFan]

Anyways, I dont understand the title of the topic at all.

"Are we paying more for less?"
Dominions 3. will have lot of new features.
Seriously I don't understand this topic title.

[Unwise]

I feel bad answering what is almost certainly a troll post, but I will anyway because I am bored.

Economics 101: suppliers do not set the price of a game, customers do. Oh, sit down and listen. Dom 3 is the most pre-ordered game in Shrapnel's reasonably long history. It will probably go on to become their best-selling game period. This means that either (a) they have priced the game to roughly what it is worth to the buyers or (b, and more likely), they underpriced the game.

So obviously from an economic point of view, the price is more than right when you take the target audience (older gamers who value depth and strategy over "production values").

Also, for the folks who will enjoy the game, the cost of the box is trivial. I will explain:

You will pay a certain amount of money to enhance your leisure time. The amount depends on your personal situation and personality. I for instance am not willing to pay $60 to watch a Will Farrel movie at the theater with my wife ($15 tickets, $15 food, $30 babysitter); that comes out to $30 per hour and it's beyond my comfort level. I am, however, willing to rent that movie for $4 in a few months... $2/hour for entertainment is within my comfort zone.

Likewise, I was willing to pay $20 for Half Life Episode 1, which ran around 6 hours long if your only play through it once... a bit more than $3 per hour, and I'm fine with that. Now look at Dom 2: in the past two years, I have played 20 multi-player games and God only knows how many single-player games. If you take only the multi-player games and assume that I spent a half-hour on each game every day for the past two years (a REALLY low estimate), that comes out to a handy 365 hours for the cost of $50... so 13 cents per hour.

I assume that I will get similar play out of Dom 3, and 13 cents an hour is so deep in my comfort zone that it is not even worth talking about.

Like I said, trivial.

[Meglobob]

DominionsFan said:

Don't forget about the excellent Dominions 3. manual.

I have never, repeat never had a 300 page manual with any game ever and I have probably had tens of thousands of computer games in my time.

Don't u just hate them cheap dvd cases computer games come in nowadays? Urgh...

[Morkilus]

As weird as this may sound, this thread or any of the dozen threads exactly like it should be stickied. It seems like every week there is someone that complains about the price and never posts again. If there was a single thread containing all the reasons why the fans bought the game and why Shrapnel does business the way they do, that should be enough, and we won't feel obligated to write about it every time.

[Thilock_Dominus]

Well, I don't mind paying $55 for Dom3 for two reasons:
1. Games like Dom series is rare and I havn't seen something equally to them. (Master of Magic comes close).
2. Not many commercial games are made to work natively on linux, so I rarely get new games. If it don't work natively on linux I don't buy simple is that.

[Gandalf Parker]

Agrajag said:
Anyway, the cost of manufacturing Dominions3 is probably more than twice what manufacturing any other computer game costs. Atleast considering that making a disc costs barely 50 cents...

That is why in some cases independent developers find it better to do it themselves, or to go to a PoD site where they can upload a CD image and sell the CD online thru a shop for very little.

Of course, there are drawbacks to that and benefits to using a publisher like Shrapnel to do more than just make the CD.

[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]

Talleyrand, can you please take a look at this reply of mine:

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...d&sb=5&o=&vc=1

..and give me a proper answer? I smell a troll btw.