Conquest of Elysium 3 dev log

[Gandalf Parker]

Well the discussions of Steam wont happen here. Of course players who use steam would want it. More interesting are the discussions by developers. Particularly those on the Stardock forums after Stardock decided to start using Steam considering the background with Brad.

As for exposure, the distribute/publicity business model is pretty good for indie developers as it involves no debt of funds.

Personally I wouldnt be too bothered if it was off Shrapnel. That would mean that I can market it as I could not Dom3. I will be making my own recommendations to Illwinter. And I promise any suggestions made here will be brought to their attention also.

[nordlys]

Originally Posted by Edi

A sequential 3 phase combat with spellcaster, missile and melee phases would probably only alter combat sequence mechanics (basically the order in which who does what they already do now) and I don't have any objection if the current system is changed to something like that.

However, anything like adding an initiative system would require some or all of the following:

That's understandable, if attack speeds weren't written into the system to begin with, retrofitting them in would be a royal pain in the ***.

However, how about some plain old random factor affecting the order of units within a phase? That shouldn't be any big deal to implement. The way I imagine it, all units about to participate in a given phase are enumerated, sorted randomly and act in that order. The defending units could get some bonus in order to keep some of that "defenders go first" advantage (which *is* reasonable when not taken to such extremes as in COE2), like all shifting a couple of positions up the sorted list.

[Edi]

I see a lot of praise for Steam. Personally, I detest that particular model of distribution for one simple reason: If I buy a game, I should be able to run it without needing a massive system resource hog third party application on my machine, which additionally requires registration and all that sort of thing.

There are other distribution channels even online which don't have such onerous handicaps associated with them, the most famous probably being Good Old Games. Sure, they require registration, but you don't need a massive software infrastructure associated with it.

However, as Gandalf said, the publishing discussion won't be happening here.

[Thilock_Dominus]

That's one of the reason I suggest Desura (the other reason is it's also available for Linux). With Desura you don't need Desura client to run the game you purchased.

[elmokki]

Steam DOES NOT require you to have your game use it in any way for non-Steam distribution. Steamworks API is rather simple and you should very easily be able to make the Steam version for Steam and a non-Steam version for whatever other ways you distribute it with. Of course it is extra work, but seeing Steam's market share it's financially probably easily worth it in nearly all cases.

There are many games that can be bought from Steam or can be bought from elsewhere and played without Steam.

[Soyweiser]

I think steam even supports different pricing schemes. So you can put a game on steam for 5 bucks, and sell it at your personal website for 10.

[Soyweiser]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

As for exposure, the distribute/publicity business model is pretty good for indie developers as it involves no debt of funds.

Well, recently there have been more successful models for indie development. They way minecraft did it for example. Or the way a lot of other indie developers do it, by interacting with all your fans. (Examples to numerous to count). Dungeons of dredmor for example had regular blog posts what they where doing.

[JonBrave]

Originally Posted by elmokki

Dominions 3 scene is small and slowly dying. If the game was a 5 euro/dollar sale game in Steam for the holiday seasons, you can bet there would be many new people trying it out. Right now the price is so ludicrously high and there's absolutely no visibility for the game that influx of new players is far lower than what it could be.

Even if it were $5 instead of $50 (and we pretended that was profit), do you think there would actually be 10x sales? And, would there be ten times as many content Dom players? I doubt it.

[Corinthian]

Well, If we look at other indy game makers like say, Fractal Games; They probably had immense benefit from selling their games on steam.

The first games they made were the Penumbra series witch was sold as boxed copies and (probably) as digital copies from their homepage. (They are now) It was published by Paradox Games.

There are no numbers what I can find of how many copies they sold of Penumbra + expansions, but when they were making their new game, Amnesia, they expected to sell some 20-40k copies.

Amnesia was a similar game and should have sold a similar number of units. But they did things different this time around. They put Amnesia up for sale on Steam. And well, in the first year Amnesia sold 400K copies!

Although probably not all of those extra sales are due to steam. Well, it still paint a pretty convincing picture.

Amnesia was priced to 15 euros/dollars but 75% of the copies were sold during sales so the price was marked down. It was still worth it in their opinion because the sales generated 50% of their revenue.

Eh, you people can read more about it here: http://frictionalgames.blogspot.com/...l#comment-form

[Soyweiser]

Originally Posted by JonBrave

Even if it were $5 instead of $50 (and we pretended that was profit), do you think there would actually be 10x sales? And, would there be ten times as many content Dom players? I doubt it.

On steam, yes. Steam is odd, it is the amazon of selling games. (What works, only works for them, and it works great. But copying their business model will fail, and if you compete with them you will always have to deal with them).

So if dom3 was on sale on steam it would sell like a ... thing that sells. Because steam has a huge impulse buying community. Sadly shrapnel doesn't have this.