Re: IF archive on CD-ROM


25 Oct 1995 23:13:24 GMT

Jun Akiyama (akiy@mother.cdrom.com) wrote:
: Hi Jason (and everyone else),

: Jason Compton (jcompton@flood.xnet.com) wrote:
: : On a CD targeted in the $30-$45 range, we'd not see a ton of royalties
: : per CD (less than $10 per copy.)

: From my experiences here, if the author(s) of a CDROM were to get a
: $10 royalty PER DISC for a disc that sells for $40 (let's say), they
: were getting an *extremely* good deal and they should run with the
: deal *immediately*. I certainly would.

I know that. I was just telling everyone else that.

: 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.

Yes, I know that too and I'm not holding it against anybody.

: 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.

Well, I stopped visiting your FTP site when you yanked Aminet, but that's
another story. :)

: 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.)

I didn't notice any negative response at all.

: "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...

There was a theory. It's worth a phone call, after all. I would imagine
Planetfall might be easy to license, they put it on EVERY CD as it is...

--
Jason Compton                                  jcompton@xnet.com
Editor-in-Chief, Amiga Report Magazine         (708) 741-0689 FAX
The warming sun...                             ...the cooling rain.
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