[stevebert]

I'm somewhat confused. Is this an upgrade with new features or just a repackaging with Intel support? I bought the boxed CoD Deluxe Edition several years ago. Although it's only PPC code, it runs just fine on my MBP 15" w/Radeon X1600 graphics under Rosetta. Does this new release have anything added besides Intel?

[Kelmon]

"System requirements call for Mac OS X 10.4.11 or Mac OS X 10.5.7, G5 or Intel 1.6GHz or faster, 256MB RAM, 2.5GB hard disk space, ATI Radeon 9800 or Nvidia GeForce 5200 or better 3D graphics (Intel integrated video chipsets not supported)."
Odd - this makes it sound as though you need a fairly high-end Mac (well, a few years ago) but yet I bought CoD and completed it a few times on a 1GHz PowerBook G4 Titanium, on which it ran fine. Have they confused the system requirements for CoD with CoD2?

[agordona]

The game of Chess is about 1400 years old (sic).

[artistry]

Peter Cohen said:

I hope you'll forgive me, but it strikes me as profoundly ignorant and arrogant to tell them how they should run their business.

Isn't that what many of the reviews on Macworld seek to do? I bet it wouldn't take me long to find a review here that suggests publishers and manufacturers add this or that feature, or lower the price.

From a marketing perspective - and as the iPhone has proved - the point that lowering the price point might increase impulse sales is actually quite a sensible one, neither arrogant nor ignorant. If COD were only $10 and sold three times as many copies, the publisher would make as much money.

Presumably, though, someone's done the maths and decided that $30 is the "sweet spot" between growing sales and reducing profit. But given that selling COD for $10 might attract people to stump up more for the follow-ups on other platforms, it would make sense for this game to be seen as what marketers call a "loss leader", like milk, eggs and bread are in supermarkets - yeah you make a loss on sales of those items but that's what brings to customers in, then they start to buy other stuff and you make your money back on that...

[Peter Cohen]

artistry said:

Isn't that what many of the reviews on Macworld seek to do? I bet it wouldn't take me long to find a review here that suggests publishers and manufacturers add this or that feature, or lower the price.

There's a gulf between that and telling the developer to release their software for free or donate the proceeds to charity.

Quote

From a marketing perspective - and as the iPhone has proved - the point that lowering the price point might increase impulse sales is actually quite a sensible one, neither arrogant nor ignorant. If COD were only $10 and sold three times as many copies, the publisher would make as much money.

No, what the App Store has proven at this point is that in the case of the iPhone and iPod touch, people are only willing to spend a certain amount for applications in any great quantity. And one recent study suggest that the vast majority of App Store applications don't sell in large quantities at all -- that the vast majority of apps have a thousand users or less.

Quote

Presumably, though, someone's done the maths and decided that $30 is the "sweet spot" between growing sales and reducing profit.

As I said elsewhere in this thread, Mac game publishers like Aspyr, which license titles from their original PC or console publishers, don't have final say on how they can price their software. Often times those licensors can put restrictions on how much they can sell their products for, lest they harm the brand.

[artistry]

Peter Cohen said:

Quote

No, what the App Store has proven at this point is that in the case of the iPhone and iPod touch, people are only willing to spend a certain amount for applications in any great quantity. And one recent study suggest that the vast majority of App Store applications don't sell in large quantities at all -- that the vast majority of apps have a thousand users or less.

You're missing my point - I wasn't saying this should be released as an iPhone game, merely that there is a price point where people will sample things. It's cheap enough to think "I'll give that a go". Retailers do this all the time and there are precedents in software, especially on the XBox 360 where games are released in chapters - each chapter seems reasonably priced but collect them all and you've ended up paying more than you might have done.

As for damaging the brand - that's certainly an issue and as we've seen in software there's a tendency for a lot of people to expect things for free or dirt cheap which causes an issue for other publishers and makers of software. That's not new - I experienced the same thing as a graphic designer when people with cheap/knocked off software began to offer "design" for next to nothing.

But go back to my point - I was making a perfectly sound marketing point based on experience that leading someone in to sampling your product or service by sacrificing profits on one part of your operation is a sound sales strategy (you can read more in my sections of the book "More Than A Name: An Introduction to Branding"). If COD were sold at, say, $10 as a prelude to further "chapters", that would not damage the COD brand, nor the publisher's brand. If anything it would increase its value because people who otherwise would not have tried the game out would now have experienced gameplay that makes them think more highly or differently about the company/franchise.

This is how Apple's switcher campaign worked - "give it a go" - and how the iPod and more recently iPhone helped - "if you liked this, you'll love our more expensive product..." So no, offering something more cheaply doesn't necessarily damage the brand unless the thing you're offering is somehow crippled.

But as others here have pointed out, this is an old game and selling it for $30 suggests it's got the latest graphics and effects, which it hasn't. I'd argue that selling it so expensively is a greater risk of damaging the brand if people who buy it think that's the best the franchise or publisher has to offer.

[Ziggler]

I'm pretty excited about this myself. Now if only I wasn't so poor!