hmmm.... people think $9 is a lot.... it wasn't THAT long ago i was completely dependant on birthdays and holidays for income.

what about a compromise? for those of us who want and can afford the art ASAP, we pay $9. our serial for the purchase (or something) will give us a $5 discount on the expansion, which will also contain the art. if there is an expansion.

now here comes the barrage of people who want the full $9 back. would you like some cheese with that whine?

i think the game is a bargain. i've seen my brother dump hundreds of dollars into everquest.

oh yeah, i thought of another idea i had the other night. so i'm tangenting. i just played a game and made some ship designs i really liked, but not until relatively late in the game. i won't be able to use them again in a new game until i've reached that tech level again. see my point? it'd be nice if there was some way to access the complete list of ship designs for the race you're playing and, almost like an upgrade, 'import' a ship design stipped of its functional components. that would rock my socks.

$9 * 12,000 people (a much more realistic number) = $108,000. Not hard to figure that one out.

so? 100k is a lot less than you think when you're talking about a business. my company's facility lease alone has got to be at least a million a month.

consider that a good chunk of that is taxed. not only do they have to pay for the art, they have to pay for quite a bit. it's not a flat commission for art-- they're probably salaried staff artists. i make CRAP, and 100k wouldn't cover a month's work of 5 people at my pay when you consider all the things we need to do our jobs. there's the costs of our IT infrastructure, and the people who needed to be paid to put that in place and keep it functioning. besides that, think about how many forum posts there are for download support. even if most game companies don't have much in the way of support, that's still a customer service function. in other words, someone needs to get paid for doing it. and for the bandwidth through which we'll download it.

seriously, if $9 is a problem, i suggest:
check the cracks in your sofa;
open a lemonade stand;
see a penny, pick it up;
babysitting.

don't give up, you'll be there in no time!

I was not replying to you dystopic. Sorry for the confusion. I was replying to the fellow who seemed to think a profit could be made off of a $1 ship pack IF 100,000 people purchased it. My point was, you could improve on his gross if only 12% of his original number purchased at the suggested $9. But thank you for helping to make my point. At least two of us agree.

i realized that was likely after i posted. even if i wasn't trying, glad i could get yer back

I'd buy a ship pack for $9

I'd buy a ship pack assuming it will have new hulls for the races, new starbase graphics, and lots of jewelry. But to be honest, I'm a pretty decent modeler myself and can do that if I really wanted to. Instead, what I really want is new options on how to use those graphics. Things like reworking the shipyard so that you can quickly select the modules that you want (too much scrolling right now), methods for making all races unique graphically, and working animated jewelry. If that was in, and you throw in some "official" graphics, I'd definitely buy it.

The 2 dollar thing for a tiny bit of content is currently really annoying me in Oblivion, so please don't do that. (or if you do, at least offer content that lasts longer than 15 minutes.)

A ship pack for under a tenner I would probably buy, IF you vary the models of the ships drastically from the game offers now. I like the ships, don't get me wrong, but it all looks the same. Yes, I know I can modify it myself, but the BASE models are very, very similar.

If you get at least five completely new ship lines in there (ie, from tiny hull to huge hull) that look very different from the five we already have, absolutely. Sign me up.

As for your forums, my biggest problem with them is that most of them are full of stickies so the first page only shows like five posts. I'd also like a main forum page with links to all the subforums. The board you use seems to be fine, I'm kinda partial to vBulletin Board, but meh. Whatever.
But your forums can definitely use more transparancy. Makes it easier to find threads you were following etc.

Creston

I would prefer a shippack be included in the first expansion rather than as a seperate item. I'm not too keen on the recent industry trend of dribbling out content piecemeal.

Keep that ship pack idea for the expansion. Selling bits of art for your game leads people to think you just want to get money from them. Plus, since the game, according to you, is so easily moddable, we will soon see very very good mods, that will perhaps be as good as your ship packs ; people will start to think that you consider them as milk cows, like every other game editor out there. (This is what is happening for Bethesda : most mods are better than the ones they are releasing... Heck, modders even patch the game, while the developers are occupied developing stupid horse armor to get one more dollar from their favorite milk cows). I was so upset when i saw Bethesda selling a horse armor for 2$... When i buy a game i buy a full product, and i shouldnt have to invest money in it after my initial purchase... What is next? Purchasable patches? AI packs for 5$? Really, i hate this ship pack idea... You should include it in the expansion, or distribitute it for free on SDC. Or dont do it. Gal Civ 2 sold very well, every customer trusted you ; dont ruin this trust.

I wasn't keen on the idea of the Horse Armour mod either when it was announced, however the two situations are slightly different:

Bethesda were already being criticised for several reasons before they announced the Horse Armour mod. They had been silent on the forum for a long time and had not bothered responding to fans' and players' concerns over aspects of their game. Now that the game is released, they are only releasing bug fixes for free, not extra features.

Stardock has a good reputation for dealing with its customers, and always explain the reasons they take various design decisions. As well as bug fixes, they are releasing extra features for the game for free. The dev explained in his post, that it will cost them a lot of money to develop the extra hull pieces.

The Horse Armour mod caused so much anger, because many customers already felt ignored (and perhaps even a bit cheated). They waited for a response from the devs, but all they got was an advertisement so they could spend more money, lol.

If Stardock choose to release extra packs that you can pay for, it won't damage my image of them at all, providing the content is optional, and not required to run the game. I'm wondering how this will affect the chances of a multiplayer expansion. What happens if one player has the extra hulls and another doesn't?

At the end of the day, its down to personal choice whether you buy it or not, and the success of that release will help to determine if the prices go up or down over time. I think cars are too expensive, which is why I don't have one - it doesn't mean I expect companies and the government to make them cheaper to run for me.

Nobody really needs to buy extra hulls to play the game, so its not harming players if its released. IMO, asking a company not to release optional content because you personally find it distasteful, is harming other gamers who would be willing to pay for it.

For crying out loud, it's $9 and you can use the extra hulls forever after you buy them! How much money do you people spend on beer every week? Once you've drunk it its gone, right? And, believe it or not, beer is NOT a neccesity.

When my sisters were little, the elder of the pair popped a balloon, which the other had brought home from a friend's birthday party. Her reasoning was: "If I can't have one, why should she have one?". I've no idea why I just remembered that...

Yep. That's precisely what we'd do. It would be stuff for every race. And it would be quite a bit. . . . We're talking dozens of components here. Something roughly like an additional hull for each size for each ship style plus a bunch of new jewelry. So we're talking about a lot of stuff.

I would buy that.

I know that it isn't ship art but I would also like to get .raw-map-files for all the other nine races homeworlds in an update/expansion or something. Only Terrans have one at the moment.

As opposed to several people who are clamoring for some sort of in game ability or out of game discount..

A simple ship art pack that is high extensive (multiple ship hulls as proposed) Perhaps even new ship design paramaters so there is less overlap. Jewelry that has different connection points etc..

Bethesda's fault is that they made Horse Armor pack that is essential for protecting your horse, so for a real die-hard fan it's not truly optional.

If it's just graphics updates (which I would buy) then it would be more palletable, though perhaps sell less well.

I'd buy it, so long as its worth the price - and im sure if you guys make one it will be

seriously, if $9 is a problem, i suggest: check the cracks in your sofa; open a lemonade stand; see a penny, pick it up; babysitting. don't give up, you'll be there in no time!

You can buy it for me then rich man. For some It is a lot of $$ especially when you dropped $40 for a game that was advertised as having modding ability and a company reputation of great service and updating games a lot. Nowhere was it advertised that you yould have to pay extra for the full enjoyment of the game on top of the $40 and the price of an expansion pack,

I would be very willing to spend $10 for the Ship Pack. I see it two fold. First, I am supporting Stardocks efforts and longevity of the product. Secondly, I am receiving a worthwhile value for my money in my opinion. I say in my opinion since I am sure some may find paying for extra content is not something that they are interested in. I think overall though, Stardock should see a LARGE portion of its customer base participate in the Ship Pack.

Companies already release expansion packs that you have to pay for, this is nothing new. Here, we're talking about releasing something smaller, which costs less than an ordinary expansion pack. If you think about it, this is good for the consumer.

I can pick and choose which add ons I want, instead of buying the whole bundle. I bought the Civ 3 expansions and never used any of the multiplayer features. If they released a smaller pack containing only the new civs and units, then I would have been much happier (and better off financially).

You can buy it for me then rich man. For some It is a lot of $$ especially when you dropped $40 for a game that was advertised as having modding ability and a company reputation of great service and updating games a lot. Nowhere was it advertised that you yould have to pay extra for the full enjoyment of the game on top of the $40 and the price of an expansion pack,

Who said you have to buy the ship pack to better enjoy the game? I fail to see your logic. Really, if you can't afford or save the money to evenually be able to purchase the $9 ship pack, then maybe you should not be wasting your time playing video games....not you personally of course, this is for anyone who feels they can't shell out $9. In any case, just don't buy it and guess what...you will still enjoy the game.

Hmm, let's see here. Ten races in the original game, with five ship 'styles'. Generally about three different hulls per size. Since we're apparently talking about adding five more ship 'styles' (to fill out the rest of the races), and adding one more hull per size, we're going from fifteen to forty hulls per size, so an increase of 166% in hulls. No numbers on the increase in jewelry, but overall, it sounds like we're talking about roughly doubling the graphics assets of the game. That sounds like it'd be worth $9 to me.

However, I definitely am not a fan of paying for the same content twice. If the new graphics assets are also going to be in the (presumed) expansion, I'd like to see some assurance from Stardock that those of us buying the ship pack would receive some discount on the expansion... This is one of the big ugly points of what BethSoft is doing - I have the niggling suspicion that BethSoft will bundle their twenty or thirty (eventually) content downloads, together with some new stuff, and call it an expansion - leaving those who bought the content downloads holding the bag.

I've been following this discussion about the mini-expansion and there seems to be a couple of large "elephants in the room" that no one seems to be aware of:

1) Alot of people seem to think that they are the average galciv2 player. Trust me. You aren't. If you are posting on the galactic civilization web site, then you are probably in the top 1% of dedicated players. Think about how many copies have sold, and then look at how many people have answered the poll question on the left.

The majority of GC2 buyers don't spend the majority of their time looking at these websites. They don't know the difference between Bethesda and Stardock. They don't use stardock central and update to the newest beta within an hour of it being released. They buy games from retail stores and rarely use a credit card in person.

I'm not sure how well a mini-expansion would sell. But I am absolutely certain that I am not the average GC2 gamer, and that i shouldn't base my opinions on how games sell based on my behaviour. If that was true, games like this would have sales in the tens of millions!

2) Stop calling people cheap. It is the least productive (and inaccurate) argument to make. A mini-expanision is not a pizza. Although some people might balk at 9$... most buyers don't really care about the difference between 5-10 bucks. What they do care about is value. If you tried to sell me a rock for 10$, I would be offended, because I perceive its value to be less than 10$. Same thing with your horse armor example. No one really has a problem with paying 2 bucks for horse armor. Its simply that they feel its value is not equivalent to 2$ (and it should have been in the full version).

We bought a game for 40$ (give or take). That, price becomes our set value for a good stardock game. If Stardock sells us a mini expansion for 10$, theoretically, using our prior understanding of stardock value, the mini expansion should be 1/4 of a good stardock game. If its less than that, we feel we aren't getting our money's worth.

This is why people are balking at the cost of some cosmetic enhancements. Its not that they are cheap or poor or both. Its simply that they don't see the VALUE in spending the money on it.

3) This point may be the uniquest (not a word, i know). Think about all the expansion packs, now think about all the reviews you've read on expansion packs. What is the recurring thread in mediocre reviews? "Not enought content for the price", "Some improvements, but mostly cosmetic", etc...

Again, the majority of expansion packs will be sold in retail stores. A large number of buyers read reviews or ask store employees what they've heard about the expansion pack. If the review says something like "The expansion pack offers tons of new ship models and components, but these are already available on their website as a separate download for 9$" thats gonna hurt the score because its not new content. Every drop in the score will definately hurt retail sales . Again, this is going to the perceived value of the product. If 25% of the expansion pack has been available separately for the past 6 months, i'm going to perceive it as smaller.

4) This point is just in advance for the inevitable "If you don't want it, don't buy it" post that is sure to come along in the next hour... I probably will buy the mini-expansion because I really like this game. I just don't think it makes the best business strategy for Stardock.

Peace

2) Stop calling people cheap. It is the least productive (and inaccurate) argument to make. A mini-expanision is not a pizza. Although some people might balk at 9$... most buyers don't really care about the difference between 5-10 bucks. What they do care about is value. If you tried to sell me a rock for 10$, I would be offended, because I perceive its value to be less than 10$. Same thing with your horse armor example. No one really has a problem with paying 2 bucks for horse armor. Its simply that they feel its value is not equivalent to 2$ (and it should have been in the full version).

I disagree. Most people are claiming $9 is too much because they can't afford it...not because of some perceived value association. Many people want something for nothing and that is what i am seeing here. Oh well, enough about people's willingness to pay for work done...I think it is a good idea.

Art is expensive, no doubt about that. To create proper commercial art is skilled labour. The artist must have a high level of training, and that never comes cheap. The media and applications required to make computer art are often quite expensive as well. Finally, a competent staff artist's wages can be costly -- a good staff artist won't waste computer cycles goofing off or making rookie mistakes, which are things that a lesser artist would do.

I am an artist myself, and I fully support the concept of paying for art. Art for free or for less than its true value is PIRACY. We all know how Stardock feels about lousy stinking pirates.

Art for free or for less than its true value is PIRACY.

You know, THAT didn't made any sense at all.


Call to arms! Close the bunkers, open the armory, all battleships in formation, the Drengin, the dark Yor and the Snathi have allied with the free-art pirates. We're dooooomed.


---------

@ PieBrain

Well written. Have to agree with you.

Art is expensive, no doubt about that. To create proper commercial art is skilled labour. The artist must have a high level of training, and that never comes cheap. The media and applications required to make computer art are often quite expensive as well. Finally, a competent staff artist's wages can be costly -- a good staff artist won't waste computer cycles goofing off or making rookie mistakes, which are things that a lesser artist would do.

You can replace "artist"/"art" with "software developer"/"software" in the above and it is probably even more true. And yet Stardock is able to provide free software patches and support. I'm not adamant against the ship pack (as I've already posted above), but I'm curious why you think art is so different and expensive that it couldn't be provided as a free bonus the way the software itself has been fixed and enhanced?

I am an artist myself, and I fully support the concept of paying for art. Art for free or for less than its true value is PIRACY. We all know how Stardock feels about lousy stinking pirates.

I am a software developer myself, and I fully support the concept of paying for software. Software for free or less than its true value is PIRACY. We all know how Stardock feels about lousy stinking pirates.

- So stop downloading all those free software patches, you lousy stinking PIRATE!

But of course this is silly. There's tons of awesome free software available such as the Linux operating system and even an organization called the "Free Software Foundation" dedicated to free software.

You can replace "artist"/"art" with "software developer"/"software" in the above and it is probably even more true. And yet Stardock is able to provide free software patches and support. I'm not adamant against the ship pack (as I've already posted above), but I'm curious why you think art is so different and expensive that it couldn't be provided as a free bonus the way the software itself has been fixed and enhanced?

Apparently they must pay their art department more or some such, being a passionate and very good artist myself, i have to say what a great idea. The kind of art there referring to is probably very different to what i like to do however.

Besides people expect a certain number of under the hood trype patch fixes after initial title release, and thats planned for in a games budget beforehand to cope with (normally) any bugs that havnt been squashed by release. Add every now and then a bit of added content that didnt make it into the final build (X3's later patches) or just a bit of free content from the bottom of the hearts etc etc. But also because people arent very likely to spend money for an expansion pack or an add on which soley caters for more subtle under the hood changes, that most players could blink and miss. They need something they can see, get to grips with, interact with and manipulate, and generally get all misty eyed about.

Not sure how anyone can say they didnt get thier monies worth from GC2. it's practialy two programs in one. One, a turn based stratagy game. Two an extremly cool program that lets you build your own ships to play said game.

I have spent literally over 3 hours just building a single ship. The average piece of crap Hollywood puts out now doesnt even last that long and cost alot more then $9.00 to go see.

I paid $40.00 (plus tax) for GC2. I now have WAY over 100 hours in it, and see no end to when I'll quit playing. Wish I could go see a movie for fifty cents per hour.

Absolutly nothing wrong with 9 or 10 bucks for a ship building pack. I'm sure SD would load it up with goodies for us. Charging a dollar or two here and there for one or two items, yes that would suck and I'd prob get ticked and not buy anything more. But I seriously doubt thats what they have in mind. They said "pack" and even pointed out they didnt want to do several smaller releases.

Again, I'd buy.