Hi All:
Dryton raises some issues that I believe should be addressed by Shrapnel here. Hope you don't mind me barging in on your discussion.
As most of you know, we don't supply our games through the normal retailer network, as this is a sure way to make sure our developers make absolutely nothing on their games. Therefore, we don't sell tens of thousands of copies of our games. This alone, the economy of printing, makes our games a higher price point than most of what you find in the market place.
We have titles that have been in the market for 4 years that now, on reprints, cost as much as 25% more than they did when Shrapnel Games started. This due to the fact that printers and cd duplicators raise their pricing on an annual basis. We have never raised our pricing. In fact, we are considering moving our pricing higher in the coming month. Not because we want to, but because we
need to.
The manual for Dominions II is our largest to date, weighing in at 146 pages. It is however,
not in color as someone else posted. Wish we could have done it in color, but for a manual this size, the price of printing in color would have been over $30.00 per unit. Still, the manual is huge and includes a reference of all magic items and spells.
As the Shrapnel faithful also knows, we support our products relentlessly through patches, demo downloads, these forums and a customer service department second to none in this industry. All of these things cost alot of money. We run two dedicated servers - soon to be three - just to handle the traffic.
While I'm thinking of it, someone mentioned in another post that maybe we would sell more copies if we lowered the price. We have experimented with this through sales and special offers and have found this not to be the case for Shrapnel. Our special pricing events do nothing (less than 5%) to increase sales. People buy our games not on price, but because they like the type of game we are known for. Even long term price changes, we have had a few, do nothing to increase our sales.
Which brings me to Dryton's comment about this not being an "A-list" game. Dryton, this is an "A-list"
GAME , as all of our titles are. What it is not, is an "A-list" piece of fluff. We don't publish fluff -- gameplay is what games should be about, and Dominions II has more game and replay value than any major publishers product that I know of.
Now alot of the Dominions crowd is new to Shrapnel Games and probably doesn't understand our philosophy as is stated in the above paragraph. We are all about making quality games, and very little about making the next generation graphics engine that has no gaming value. We couldn't sell these types of games the way we do. We would have to put them into retail just to get the "oh wow, look at the graphics" impulse buy. Does that mean we don't want our games to look nice? Not at all. And I thnk all of our games do look nice. They just aren't all state of the art. If that offends you, I'm sure you have an e-retailer just down the street that has shelves full of graphics marvels.
Okay, on to the tutorial. We are considering doing something with the demos. With each new developer, we get a new crowd. When I sat down with the game I spent about an hour playing it and realized the depth and the intangibles of this title. This game is something special and if presales are any indication, alot of others think so too. This game can be almost anything you want in a gaming experience and we thought limiting it with alot of pre-setup would not be a good thing. We may have been wrong. We know this partially because a group of people are unhappy with the AI. I say to them, you haven't set it up for a hard game, if you think the AI is that easy. So, we will keep you informed of what we decide to do with the demos.
I have gotten off on a rant, which was not my intention. Sorry. I hope this helped explain Shrapnel's position some.
Happy Gaming!
Re: Concerns about lack of Tutorial and Price of Game
Heroes_IV removed monsters and poor quality AI ! 
Hybrid Mode
