Direct Download?

[Behemoth]

OK OK, before you start throwing rotten fruit at me could someone tell me if Tacops has ever debated doing this? I just noticed that other BF games are on the Direct2Drive service. I've never tried the service, though I bought Matrix's War in the Pacific through digital river a while back and loved the Idea of saving the S&H on an already 80$ game, it also gave me instant play and no wait. It might widen the appeal and give some people the push to buy w/o the S&H hit. Just a friendly question. Thanks for reading.

-B

[MajorH TacOps Developer]

Nothing is free, somebody has to pay for any system of distribution. Social norms in marketing tend to determine who that somebody is for each possible channel.

Digital delivery for TacOps has been discussed several times over the years. Battlefront does not offer the service internally and my analysis has been that using a digital provider other than Battlefront was not worth to me what that third party wanted to charge for its service. Battlefront's share of the pie for its publishing sevices is very reasonable. Yielding another (likely higher) share to a third party is not currently reasonable for TacOps.

Most game consumers appear to think that digital downloading has no associated costs. However, there is actually a heavy "shipping & handling" chage for third party digital downloading. At present consumer expectations put that cost on the developer/publisher.

Every third party scheme that I have looked at so far was way out of line with the costs of traditional hard copy shiping and handling.

Although hard copy S&H charges really bug some people, most consumers have become conditioned to paying them.

That being said, things change over time so maybe there is yet hope for digital delivery for TacOps.

[ February 03, 2006, 08:43 AM: Message edited by: MajorH TacOps Developer ]