There will be no retail releases for any announced Stardock games (this includes Elemental: Fallen Enchantress). It's not cost effective.
Well, retail give only 30% to Stardock and Steam give 70%... but in the case of sins of solar empire, they have say that retail was where they have sell the most... after all, a few million time 30% is better that a few hundred thounsand time 70%...
As usual, it is not really for a financial reason but more about scale... for make a boxed version worldwide, they will need to hire plenty of business guy who will negociate contract with the various shop or regional distributor... more work that it is worth...
@Sandman97976 :
There will not be a retail version for Europe... maybe it is best because the previous one, with Kalypso was a failure... we pay more money for a French/German/whatever localization to Kalypso but it is broken at the next patch because Kalypso don't translate the patch... we end up with a babel version where the same faction speak more that one language...
Maybe it is a good idea to use these topic for push Stardock to use the localization features from Steam... i don't like Steam but when there is localization for a game, it have always work good, patch/update included... Stardock need to realize that by using Steam, they will greatly increase their foreign customer base... until now, i have not yet see a game who was "us only" like on some other digital distribution platform...
I think that Spanish ( second language used worldwide, before english ) can be a priority... as for Europe, German is a good idea since they was the majority of customer in europe... French will be great ( i am a French speaking guy ) but i am not sure that it is worthy the work since the French sins community is only a drop in the bucket...
