I am considering doing this (partly to avoid piarcy, partly to allow a bigegr file size) and I wondered what the pitfalls are. Does it cost too much to ship the CDs? do users complain about shipping times? do you use a service to make and ship the CDs? is it profitable?
Thanks

Originally posted by cliffski
I am considering doing this (partly to avoid piarcy, partly to allow a bigegr file size) and I wondered what the pitfalls are. Does it cost too much to ship the CDs? do users complain about shipping times? do you use a service to make and ship the CDs? is it profitable?
Thanks

There are certainly a number of people that will ask for a CD or want one for various reasons (like a xmas gift for instance is nicer as a cd) -- We use regsoft for our order processing and until recently used the build in CD offer they have. Basically users could opt to pay an additional 12.95 and get a CD. That's quite a bit extra on a 15 or 20$ game, but many people opted to pay it. To reduce the cost though and I've set up an account with swiftCD but I havent got around to offering cd's again yet. Of course there's the added hassle of maintaining CD install versions and keeping them up to date. If you burn a whole set at once then you have the other side of the coin which is, you may burn some bugs and have to release and maintain patches for CD owners. Some people will also complain and demand a new CD and so on...

Other than storage capacity, the best thing about CDs is the sense of ownership and transferability associated with a material object. I like stamped CDs and printed manuals. I don't like paying for software I have to download, back-up and register.

By the way, I doubt you will be able prevent piracy by shipping games on CD. I mean, is there any CD copy-protection scheme that hasn't been hacked before?

I feel its still better for an indie to distribute the game completely over the internet. As for losing the downloaded file/key, you could operate a "lost your key/download?" (similar to "forgot password") service that would let the customer retrieve the key or let him download the game again if the details match. With PHP/MySQL this is not hard to write.

Although ownership of a physical object is nice, there is additional headache for you to produce the CD, arrange its shipment, deal with customer backlash if its not delivered etc.

However if your game is beyond 10mb (its tolerable even till 20mb), it maybe worth it to distribute it on CDs.

As for piracy, that is going to happen no matter what you do. And it may not affect you as much as you think.