CMSF for $7.67 ?

[Clavicula_Nox]

Gunning down enemy infantry as they charged across the front was great. Swooping from the skies on helpless observer planes was the stuff of legend. My god..I've never played another flight sim like it.

[Battlefront.com]

So, if the market is so stacked against you guys, how do you breakout?

Go direct to the customer via the Internet That's what we did, even though everybody said we were idiots for ignoring retail. They were wrong about the idiot part, however we did find that from our advantageous position retail had something to offer. It's amazing how much better the offers become when you can say "no" and really mean it.

As was said earlier, the fact that retail is not the way it should be, we do want to be in it as much as we can because (as others have said in this thread) it does increase exposure. That's a good thing for our hobby. So to the extent we can be in retail without it doing more harm than good, we will be.

Steve

[Childress]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

So the more mass market the industry has become, the more us "deep games" have been pushed out. We're almost irrelevant from the industry's perspective.

Steve

Don't get discouraged. Sooner or later the market will assert itself. Slotting fees, 'vendor alowances'- and their equivalents in the gaming industry- skew wholesale purchasing decisions because those purchases are driven by bribes, not by consumer demand for the products. They distort the information flow like top down socialism. In retail grocery, the Big 3 (Kroger, Safeway and Albertsons) are addicted to them like crack. And they're carrying heavy debt loads.

But WalMart and Whole Foods have eschewed them and flourished.

It's curious that we're seeing increased consolidation in certain sectors and, at the same time, the number of people self-classifying as self-employed has never been higher.

[salwon]

The Battlefront crowd and the Penny Arcade crowd probably don't intersect too much, but I at least like them both, so here it goes anyway.

They recently teamed up with an indie developer to create an adventure game. Nothing serious or hardcore, just a fun little romp that'll be fun for the people who read the comic. Anyway, they decided to go the Battlefront route and opened their own distribution house for internet sales of the game. When they talked to *INSERT LARGE VIDEO GAME RETAILER* about releasing the game in the store in a few months, they said they would do it...but only if they got a cut of the internet sales.

The internet sales that they had absolutely nothing to do with. Somehow they felt like they deserved a cut of that. I don't even know how that's supposed to work.

With places like Battlefront and Matrix Games, who needs retail? Of course, getting people to go to a web site is a little harder than getting them to go to a mall, but still