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Exciting news about Battlefront and Slitherine


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Battlefront is happy to announce a new commercial sales partnership with Slitherine Publishing.  The new arrangement puts Slitherine’s considerable marketing muscle to work getting Combat Mission into more hands than ever before through its Matrix Games online store and Steam.  Combat Mission Shock Force 2 is the first CM family to make the move to Slitherine with more to follow over time.  Battlefront’s online store will remain unchanged, except that pricing will stay in synch with a coordinated sales strategy.  Yes, that means Battlefront will finally offer periodic sales to its customers!  On the development side of things Battlefront remains fully independent as it has for the past 20+ years.  You can read the official press release here.

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Obligatory question for when this happens:  have you decided whether to issue Steam keys to current customers to let them transition over to that platform?  

In case anyone hasn't used Steam and is wondering why - the quality of life improvement from never having to worry about installer .exes and getting automatic patching is something you'll never want to come back from.  

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Oookay. I almost fell off the couch when I read about this on The Wargamer and had to check out the Steam page to see it wasn't an elaborate prank.

 

Will you guys be giving Steam keys to those who already have the games?

 

And excited to hear about this, I am positive it will be good for your business!

Edited by BletchleyGeek
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57 minutes ago, BFCElvis said:

Battlefront is happy to announce a new commercial sales partnership with Slitherine Publishing.

Hmm... sounds interesting..

 

57 minutes ago, BFCElvis said:

getting Combat Mission into more hands than ever before through its Matrix Games online store and Steam.

What the... ! Checks calendar.. nope, not April 1st...

 

57 minutes ago, BFCElvis said:

Yes, that means Battlefront will finally offer periodic sales to its customers!

🤯

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27 minutes ago, rocketman said:

Slitherine/Matrix usually provide Steam keys for previous purchases when launched on that platform. So I hope this is not an exception.

If the game is purchased on Slitherine store, that's the case. However, if the purchase happened on BFC store, the answer remains unknown.

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Hi all,

To answer the immediate question... existing Battlefront CMSF2 customers will get Steam keys for whichever products are owned.  We're not exactly sure yet how we'll get the keys to you (couple of options), but we'll let you know when we know.  Brand new Slitherine customers will get their Steam access along with their purchase.

Steve

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1 minute ago, Battlefront.com said:

existing Battlefront CMSF2 customers will get Steam keys for whichever products are owned.  We're not exactly sure yet how we'll get the keys to you (couple of options), but we'll let you know when we know.

Excellent, thanks very much Steve :) Now we can write a review.

Edited by BletchleyGeek
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10 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Hi all,

To answer the immediate question... existing Battlefront CMSF2 customers will get Steam keys for whichever products are owned.  We're not exactly sure yet how we'll get the keys to you (couple of options), but we'll let you know when we know.  Brand new Slitherine customers will get their Steam access along with their purchase.

Steve

wonderful,I didnt buy cmsf2 yet.

but I now believe the WW2 title steam key will soon come to me ,when the WW2 title get out on steam😃

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there are no CM player in my city except me😂.

according to the years past,I think there may be only 1000 people ever played CM in china mainland. And It is estimated that there are about 20-100 players offen play CM.

the game rating system of steam may cause problem. 

for exanple,once a player never played such game like CM ,GTMF. He only played the wargame rts such as company of hero etc. First the CM 3D graphic may attract him,but when he play it,the complex system may let him give a “not recommend”. however,I hope this will not happen.

 

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We're pretty excited about the expanded relationship with Slitherine.  We've been talking with them about this for... 4 years?  Something like that.  Commercial possibilities were kicked around in parallel with our military contract agreement discussions, but we wanted to work with them a bit on the military side before committing to commercial stuff.  Anybody that knows us knows we're a bit cautious :)  As we had hoped, everything with the military side has gone exceptionally well right from the start. 

It took a little while to figure out the specifics of how Slitherine and Battlefront could best work together for commercial CM products as the standard publisher/developer relationship didn't fit for either of us.  The thing we like best about Slitherine is they aren't afraid to try something new, which is not our experience with other publishers.

A reminder for some and new info for others, Battlefront has had a few dozen publishing and sales arrangements over the years.  Mostly involving retail, with a few involving online sales.  Two of them deals we made were quite large (CDV with CM1 and Paradox Interactive with CMSF1).  Some worked better than others, but none harmed us.  As stated above, we're cautious about who we do business with and how we structure our agreements.

Our partnership with Slitherine, though, is a little different than we've done before.  Normally we have clearly established territories to avoid competition between Battlefront and the Publisher.  In this case there we both have world wide rights to sell to whomever.  Theoretically this puts us into competition with each other.  In reality, though, we know that Slitherine has a much larger customer base than we do and that even if we lose some sales to them we'll gain more in the end.  And if we gain, so do you all because you know we're just going to plow the money back into CM products.

There's no such thing as a perfect business relationship, and we don't expect this to be an exception.  However, it is possible to have a NEARLY prefect arrangement where everybody, including the customers, comes out ahead.   That is what we believe we have with Slitherine.  You can be assured of that because your 20 years of support has allowed us the luxury to say "no".  The fact that we said "yes" to Slitherine at this time and in this way kinda says it all.

Steve

 

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