Its a bit sad to see someone who is a public face to this forum not support the game devs. Dont forget that these guys update and are active to this game. Versus other games where they release take the money and move on. 10 bucks is cheap. But to the guys who make it, it pays there bills and keeps them in a job to make the game better for us.
Alternate Ways to Support Developers (and Additional Strategies Developers Can Use to Increase Sales)
I go around to other discussion forums, both gaming community forums and general forums, and promote Sins whenever someone asks for an RTS recommendation or whenver I see it on sale somewhere. Thus, I encourage new people to buy the game. Also, by being an avid player and poster I contribute to the online player counts and to discussion here on the forums. Additionally, I have designed and released some custom maps for the game, which essentially adds content to the game (increasing the value of the Sins property to the developers) for free. Does that count?
Thus, there are other ways to help support a developer than just purchasing their latest expansion, such as, in essence, encouraging new people to buy the game in various ways.
I'll be happy to purchase a Sins expansion or a Sins-2 if it is of interest to me and if it is something that I would want to play. I'm not sure that a developer could reasonably ask for much more than that. I bought Entrenchment because my online friends liked it and the community of regular online players moved to Entrenchment and said that it was worthwhile. If the same thing happens with Diplomacy then I will probably purchase Diplomacy. That has not happened yet.
I also think that developers might consider other ways to increase their sales than just pumping out expansions. I do think that producing good expansions is a good idea because it generates fresh publicity and in the case of Trinity, puts the physical boxes back up on store shelves, but I also think that there are other ways to increase sales. I think that one way to do that is to meticulously support the product and to improve the product and to support and encourage online multiplayer, such as perhaps organizing leagues or tournaments or figuring out ways to generate new publicity for a game. I also think that having a large, vibrant, and involved online multiplayer community can really help a game because people who play it online will invite their friends to come try it online with them and if a game develops a reputation for having abundant online multiplayer activity and for being a good experience, people will become interested in it, including people who only play single player. It would also help to build a reputation for producing and supporting high-quality, polished games.
Thus, improving the online multiplayer user interface, stamping out minidumps and desyncs, adding built-in voice comm and passworded voice chat rooms, and adding an auto-download functionality for custom maps. Encouraging custom maps and making it easier for people to play them allows the marketplace of players to determine which maps are the most fun and which ones make the game better, which very well might be non-standard user-made maps, which means that there is an untapped and unexplored potential for the game to be better than what it is now.
Anyway, I think that there are ways to support the developers other than just purchasing an unwanted expansion, and I think that there are things developers can do to encourage sales besides trying to sell expansions. Maybe now that they have completed the expansion they can work on some of those other aspects or a first-rate, perfectly polished Sins-2.
Personal Example: I purchased sins in March 2008 and paid the full $40 price because some friends of mine from another online game had pirated it and were playing it online and I wanted to play with them but I'm not a pirate. (Amazingly, piracy helped sell a copy of the game to a non-pirate!) Had they not been interested I probably never would have gotten Sins since I had never played an RTS before nor knew anything about Stardock or Ironclad. This sale came about because of buzz and interest in the community. Two of those people went on to legitimately purchase Sins and they played for a while but lost interest in the game a couple months after its release. Perhaps if the online multiplayer aspects had been better--no hosting problems (a problem back then), fewer minidumps, built-in voice comm, auto-download for custom maps, more and better features, etc., they would still be playing and helping to promote it to other people in our gaming circle. I would also be more successful in encouraging other people to get the game or to get Entrenchment if more people overall were playing the game and if it thus had a higher profile amongst online gamers; I think it would have higher sales if it were known as being excellent for online multiplayer having a large and virbrant community.
