1. the demand curve is not that elastic
2. don't expect too many new players
3. ROF uses the business model King Gillette invented

Yeah, my day one RoF account (western euro release), which was about as expensive as my day one CoD has now been redesignated "lite" (which means it's no less than twice as big as the free demo..) and they are offering me a generous discount of 15$ on the upgrade to "ICE" level, as opposed to an upgrade from the free demo. Thank you very much. I hope the money i initially gave you is invested well, because there won't be any more coming from my direction.

The game itself, while having received some serious technical improvements, now looks like a huge nag-screen where 90% of all options presented are only available upon further payment. The shareware of old has never been as bad. CoD, meanwhile, has already given me the first free plane addon, two if you count the 4/B as a separate model.

Mate you are kidding right???? I have been playing Battlefield 3 the last few days - with its gazillion dollar budget and rating as the biggest selling pc game ever, it still crashes to desktop for me even hour or so - and I'm running a new, highish-end rig.

So even with all the resources in the world the BF3 guys cant get it right straight away. Cliffs is a fantastic engine and is full of potential, I just truly hope the dev's get the budget to keep the development going, and I for one will continue to support them with every release they offer. I have had more fun playing cliffs than any other game of recent times, including BF3 which last night i played for an hour, then put down to go fly 46 with my squad mates.

what?!

I am having a hell of a good time with BF3 currently. This is the most fun ive had playing a pc game in recent memory.

I agree that IL2 is most fun when your flying online campains or structered events when your in a squardron...i figure cod will be the same way. I get bored and lonely just flying around hunting in pub servers...but the cod community needs to be bigger for any of this to happen.

So everyone needs to start recruiting, spread the word on how good COD is (or for some) how good it will be.

Realistically if COD was released today i'd still feel pretty ripped with what it is. It has a long way to go.

Best money I've spent on a game?
 

I have around 250 hours on this sim. Divide that into £30 is 12p per hour so far?
This, for me, is fantastic value from a game.

I fear a future I cannot afford is looming though, micro-payments, monthly payments, payments for planes/trains etc.

Cheers.

You got ripped off. so did I. We both had systems that fell within the min specs but don't perform. I upgraded, spend about a 1000 bucks. Now I'm in dogfight heaven. Best sim ever. Been simming for about 20 years now. Last few days, online, have been some of my best, most realistical sim sessions ever. Flying on the deck following railroad tracks and hedge hopping, sneaking up on a hapless Hurricane, blasting him to pieces at 50 yards. Priceless! Never knew what hit him. Last week, while in a Spit over Calais, had a one hour(!) dogfight with a 109E4, full real. One bloody hour! We went from 15k down to the deck back up to 15k. This guy used his e advantage all the way and I squeezed the turn ablity of the Spit to the max. In the end I got low on gas, had to run back home. Did a split S, reversed it a few times on the way down. Hoped he would lose sight of me. As I leveled out 10 feet over the water he caught up with me. I ran out of juice, options, ate lead and splashed in the Channel. Could not believe that it had been an hour. I payed $45 in all for this game and it's worth every penny. Even in the "sorry ass state" it's in now. Porked QMB, coms, graphic anomalies etc. etc. Even with my upgraded system the game crashes after about 1.5 hours so there is lots of work to be done by the dev's. My advice is this. Upgrade your system or shelve the game untill it's fixed or you have the money to upgrade. Untill then you don't know what you're missing. I still believe they should change the official min specs so people don't get pissed off and disappointed.

Downloading now.

If you dont want retailers to sell your product cheap, you shouldn't supply it cheap in the first place. So, whose fault is it? 1Cs.
I also dont think you can really sell masses of Clod, so this is unlikely too.
Cookie? Cookies usually are never sold below cost, on the other hand selling a key, is not like having a gas station where sell the fuel at cost but expect the customer to pick up other things like drinks and snacks to make up for the missing profit. This does work if you sell hardware online but not if you only sell software. It not like you visit their homepage and go like: "Wow, cool Clod for $12! No I'm here, let's buy a copy of footballmanger 2012 too."

The way I see it there a two options:
A: Some retailer preordered(I don't know this business, others work like that, maybe it's bs) too many and can't return them, looking at the price it must be an east European one. Which leads to the next point: Pricing related to buying power in different countries. Sounds fair, but you'll end up with a mess like this. This is software, not a big mac.
B: Sales collapsed, they are giving a super discount to collect at least a few bucks. Worst scenario, it it was true its the end.

My guess(and hope) is A.