My turn to rant after reading ShrapnelBlog

[Neophyte]

I just read the blog entry regarding the demise of the gaming store due to internet shopping. After reading the whole article, I realize that the article was about non-puter gaming stores, but the headline made me think about the state of the puter gaming industry.

It seems like the market is flooded with RTS and FPS games, which, if you like those games, could be a good thing. However, for those of us who yearn for the good old days of turn-based strategy like The Operational Art of War (blast Microsoft for not making XP compatible with this classic) or RPG's such as Fallout (does anyone know if that recent Fallout clone was any good?) and Arcanum where power advancement of the character was nice, but you really kept playing to find out the story of the game, this glut of RTS and FPS is not a good thing.

An exception is KotR (and 2) - the real time graphics and soundtrack was so well done that one could sit back and just enjoy the lightsaber combat that one setup in the pausable order issuing phase. But for the most part I don't buy games from the physical store anymore simply because most packages don't even bother to say whether they are RTS or turn-based, etc., and most manufacturers seem to think that Diablo style games are RPG's - I almost want to purchase games labelled action-RPG for their Diablo style game just to support the naming convention.

Having said this, I'm thankful for independant game distributors such as Shrapnel. One thing I would like to see is purchase by download - when I ordered Dominions II I wanted to play turn 41 right away, not wait the three days it took to get here.

Anyway, I just wanted to vent a little, and since I said so in my subject, I don't feel the need to apologize.

Lastly, a big thank you is in order for Shrapnel and associated mfr's for making games for us people not in the mainstream and for providing this server space for my thoughts to be shared.

I hope everyone has a good holiday season, whether it starts now or in a few weeks.

[Joe 98]

Neophyte said:
for those of us who yearn for the good old days of turn-based strategy like The Operational Art of War

The good news is, the independant publisher Matrix Games has teamed up with Talonsoft, to do an update of TOAW.

Go here: www.matrixgames.com

But, even better than TAOW, are the games developed by SSG. They tioo are found on that same site.

Neophyte said:
One thing I would like to see is purchase by download -

That too is the policy of Matrix. Typical wargames do not have a lot of graphics and therefore digital download works fine. Much better than the snail mail!

Mainstream games have lots of graphics and digital download is not yet practicle.


From me too, a big thank you is in order for Shrapnel and Matrix for publishing games for us people not in the mainstream.

[Annette]

Neophyte said:
Having said this, I'm thankful for independant game distributors such as Shrapnel. One thing I would like to see is purchase by download - when I ordered Dominions II I wanted to play turn 41 right away, not wait the three days it took to get here.

Thank you for sharing your opinions with us. We are always interested in hearing what our customers have on their minds. While offering games via download is not industry standard, it is something we first tested in 1999 with the release of BCT.

We later tested the concept by offering the choice of download or game on CD with a few specific titles. We found that sales of the physical product far outweighed sales of downloads. But it's been a while, and we will soon be testing the concept again as we realize the market is ever-changing. Currently, we offer three titles (and all of our expansions) as downloadable purchases.

There are some games, admittedly, we don't foresee ever offering as download. Selling games as downloads is great for some niche games that don't have the market potential to make publishing profitable. This is probably why you don't see Microsoft or EA offering their games as downloads. With downloadable games, we also lose our valuable reseller market, which is very important to us - particularly in our international sales.

I hope this sheds some light on why we do what we do. Our priority is to bring great games to great customers in a way that makes our developers some money so they can afford to continue making games we love.

[Neophyte]

Maybe a third option (similar to Matrix) could be the download now and receive physical shipment when it gets there. Have the download only be a little cheaper - to represent shipping, packaging, etc. savings.

Also, a big thank you offering demo versions of so many of your games - I've gotten to the point where I don't buy games without a demo. I'm also darned close to the point where you (Shrapnel) and Matrix will be the only recipients of my gaming moneys. The reasons I purchased Dominions 2 were the demo and Linux availability. All I need now is to figure out how to program one macro in OpenOffice and I can think about becoming completely Microsoft free!

Lastly, I hope my initial post wasn't too cranky - I get fired up about the glut of me too games in a genre (RTS / FPS) that holds no appeal to me, which has effectively strangled the mainstream market for my prefence of turn based games.

Maybe you could convince someone to make an RPG similar to Fallout or Arcanum with an interesting world and a great story.

Again, thank's for listening, it is appreciated.