Re: IF archive on CD-ROM


25 Oct 1995 16:42:35 GMT

I'm sure you realize that most of our discs are *not* sold at $40? We
sell the majority of our CDROMs to distributors and resellers. The
fact that they're able to sell our CDROMs for somewhere around $12 and
still make a profit and stay in business should tell you for how much
we're selling the discs to them. In some cases, if we were to give
out a royalty of $10/disc, we would lose money *really* quickly! It's
pretty common knowledge that a CDROM costs a few dollars to physically
manufacture, but this does not take into account the production costs,
the labor costs (of handling the phones and such), and the advertising
costs, etc, etc, etc.

There's a big difference in doing this as an individual and as a
company. We're already pretty well known as a company; our name lends
(some) credibility to our products. Many of you probably receive our
catalog or have seen our advertisements in some major publications.
Most of you have probably visited our FTP site. This lends to more
voluminous sales, of course (almost all of which are through
distributor channels). As an individual, you can operate with less
overhead, but with less volume.

As for contacting the authors and divvying up the "profits" and such,
it's a pretty big project to undertake. As for me and for our
company, with this big public outrising that I'm encountering on this
proposed project, I've pretty much decided to drop the project. (It
was going to be a "side" project in which I had some interest (I love
IF games), but there seems to be too much negative response for such a
project by a "big" company rather than by an individual. Oh well.)

: But the CD would have a potentially huge market-master it in ISO 9660
: Level 1, put all the interpreters you can compile on it, and then
: basically anybody with a CD-ROM drive can use at least SOME of the software.

You should also make it a hybrid disc (9660/HFS) so people with Macs
can access it easily as well...

: Incidentally, my concept also calls for investigating the licensing of a
: few classic Infocom titles, to increase marketability. Any thoughts?

"Good luck"? I don't think Activision will be giving you an easy time
to do this, especially with their new line of Infocom CDROMs...

: Jason Compton jcompton@xnet.com

Regards to everyone,

Jun