I would love to see this happen (though I just bought an extra copy of NWN Diamond to hedge my bets), and I would really love to see the premium modules made available.
And, it always seems to gamers like a downloadable release (or even a re-release of the DVD version) would be an easy business decision: I.e. if the company has the rights to a game that's still pretty popular, then why not drop a few grand on an e-commerce server (and maybe a little advertising) and just let the money roll in? However, there is a bit more that a company must consider before this is becomes a serious possibility. Mostly that is due to support. Whenever a company is actively offering a piece of software, it has an obligation to offer technical support for some period of time. To people who have made it to these forums, it may not seem like such a big deal because there are nice stickies on resolving the common issues (graphics cards, Windows Vista/7, etc.) and friendly forumers who help out in hopes of seeing new players enjoying the game.
But most players (and software users in general) expect to install the game,
maybe download a patch, and be good to go without experiencing any serious or annoying/recurring glitches. I think it's safe to say that a large fraction of people installing the game today must jump through a hoop or two to get it to run well. The average user will complain about things like running as admin or switching compatibility modes and they would scream bloody murder if things like Windows context-switching (using Alt-Tab to go to and from the game) were buggy (as it often is). There would be cries of "How could Atari release a game that they
know doesn't run under a current OS?", "This is a ripoff because I had to download a 300 MB patch and the movies still won't play!", and so on. To a company that doesn't expect huge sales from a re-release anyway (and they would have to be hoping for something on the order of one hundred thousand downloads before this seems worth the effort), those issues and dealing with the fallout from them (adding staff to customer support, handling online refunds, and so forth) could easily put them off of this.
Anyway, once again, I would love to see NWN available in downloadable form, but I don't think it's as easy a call to make for the businesses involved as it is for us.
Modifié par MrZork, 02 octobre 2010 - 05:44 .