what about the future?

[fantasma]

Zeldor, I think they could lower the price but lack the incentive to do so because lowering would not increase sales to any significant amount. That is my guess, and, as far as I can tell, theirs as well.

I think there are two completely different aspects about dom3, games in general, let's leave out the chairs, please:

1. the idea, concept, depth, content and whatever else makes for a high replay value. Dominions is top in this category, IMHO, there are few others, sure, but few. And this does not change or lose value over time.

2. The other thing is graphics, the UI, the sound, all that can be summed up as technology and markup, and here dom3 is getting old, I agree, it was so even when it was released. This is the part of the game that gets obsolete, that demands a discount because it is far behind the standard.

That said, my opinion is that I bite the bullet of mediocre usability and arts for a high replay value, and that comes from depth and content. And if others hadn't made pledges for improvements I for sure would have. I own this game for two years at least and have maybe played have the nations beyond expansion.

Sure, I want a better graphics and especially better interface to handle micro, but I also understand why a two man developer team has better things to do than keep a running game updated, I mean in a big way, they still do minor tweaks, anyways. And I can very much understand that they have bad feelings about giving away their code to others to work on.

I forgot what the original point of the thread was, but I doubt reducing price will increase sales significantly and I tried to argue why. I wonder how much in total went to Illwinter over the years, I doubt it has accumulated to a decent wage considering the effort and knowledge put into the game. And then it is a top seller for an indy project, no?

[13lackGu4rd]

Soyweiser, while all of you're examples were indeed made by the private sector, you're missing the main point. those are actually technological improvements, not radical innovations. radical innovations were the steps prior to the actual products, in the case of the transistor for example, the radical innovation was the whole concept of semiconductors. Transistors were 1 of the first technological usages of the radical innovation called semi conductors. sure, the transistor was an entirely new product and the begining of the major field called consumer electronics today. however it is also a technological improvement to what was available before it, for example, the previously available larger radios instead of pocket/mobile radios available with the transistor. same deal goes for personal computers and all your other examples. while they were major breakthroughs they were still technological implementations of radical innovations, not the radical innovations themselves.

radical innovations have nothing to do with products, at least not at their first phase. radical innovations that prove to be useful and profitable tend to become the begining of entire product lines if not entire product fields, however not all radical innovations prove to be useful to the private sector, and remain in the theory field or in the research institutions in which they were founded.


fantasma, you're problem is that you're only taking your own opinion into your equation. however you're in a vast minority here, the majority of the Dominions3 consumers are very much different from yourself. so basing an argument on a very limited minority, or even worst, your own personal experience alone, is just plain wrong.

[Soyweiser]

Originally Posted by 13lackGu4rd

radical innovations have nothing to do with products, at least not at their first phase.

Nevermind that semiconductors where around 50 years before transistors where developed. But whatever, just ignore the definitions about radical innovations made by the textbooks, and the definitions made by the universities. I'm sorry but you are wrong. Personal computers are a radical innovation. Ivory tower research is not the only source of radical innovations. Both private and public sector R&D can provide both types of innovations.

You include the lack of products in your definition. Which is simply not true. But don't believe me, just get a innovation textbook. (Might I suggest one, Managing Innovation, by Joe Tidd et all).

--
The first part of this thread is also pretty interesting btw. Strange that a lot of development for the new IW project is done in secret. (Creating blogs, and regular updates is a great way to start buzz and pr).

Edit2:
A dom3 roguelike? Interesting, how is that supposed to work?

[Annette]

We've insulted you, Zeldor? In this thread alone you have said this about us:

[If Shrapnel says they cannot lower it much [but Amazon can still sell it for $50 and free shipping] it just means their business model sucks and their costs are way too high.

Dominions is an old niche game with ugly graphics. You can try convincing someone to it, but price tag is just stupid. Especially for digital copy.

50 bucks is because of Shrapnel, they are morons and know **** about doing business.

Seriously, how can coming to our forums appeal to you when you hate us this much?

[Fantomen]

Originally Posted by Annette

Seriously, how can coming to our forums appeal to you when you hate us this much?

I may not agree with Zeldor all the way, but this question is easy to answer.

The Dom3 community and Shrapnel are separate things. That's it.

Edit: Whenever you discuss things in the dom3 fora, you also have to remember that the community has been split and severely hurt by the debacle around sombres ban. There has been a very noticable decrease of new games started, and having to monitor and post game threads in two forums is a hassle. Newbies get confused by this and get less help than they used to. Key contributors got bitter and more or less stopped posting. The community is all in all in pretty bad shape. You simply have to accept that there is a lot of bitterness against Shrapnel over this, and I think this damage is more or less permanent. That is why threads like this one are so hostile, large portions of the community simply wish you'd stay away. Sad but true.

[Tim Brooks]

Originally Posted by Fantomen

You simply have to accept that there is a lot of bitterness against Shrapnel over this, and I think this damage is more or less permanent. That is why threads like this one are so hostile, large portions of the community simply wish you'd stay away. Sad but true.

Yes. We are aware of this and we try to be understanding. But this is our home. We don't mind criticism or even discussion of our business practices. What we can't tolerate are the attacks against us.

You know, I thought the whole sombre side was starting their own forums. Whatever happened to that? Just go over there and attack us. Or choose one of the other popular Dominions 3 forums - there are several.

Is it unreasonable to ask for people to act with a little restraint in our own home?

[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.