Alot of people want to look at screenshots to decide if they even want to try the trial. I know they make a big difference in my decision.
That's "old technology", for those accustomed to the old way of selling stuff, which is luring people with professionally made screenshots with graphic quality settings that nobody will ever be able to use in real life, only to have them disappointed because, after one buys the scenery, he'll discover that, to have something comparable to what was shown on screenshots, settings should be boosted so high the scenery will be basically unusable.
If a scenery developer *knows* about the limitations of his product ( looking good on screenshots, not so good and not very usable in real life ), he'll probably put tons of screenshots, but no Trial version.
We know this way of selling stuff works, in the short term, because many people makes impulse purchases, based on screenshots.
We beg to differ: we'd rather lose some sales on the short term, because we KNOW many people downloading the Trial will not buy the product. This is also costs money, because we consume WAY MORE bandwidth compared to someone that doesn't offer a Trial. Some are even charging again for downloading the installer more than once, citing "bandwidth costs" as an excuse...
But we think this is the correct way of doing things, in the long term. Since we are quite sure a good percentage of users had a look at the Trial, it means ( if they bought it ) they did it with confidence, which in turn means a satisfied user, one that is more likely to buy other stuff from us in the future.
However, this doesn't mean we are *against* screenshots. In fact, we DO have screenshots for the FSDT products. But we intentionally made them not so well presented, because we WANT you to use the Trial.
A screenshot might say how the scenery looks like, and there's also "Screenshot" area in the forum, with screenshots posted by users, but it will never said the most important thing, which is how the scenery WORKS, only the Trial can do it.
In any case, this was about Cloud9 products, and we didn't put any screenshots, because those are products that were released years ago, the most recent one is Bergen, which was released in early 2007, we thought they should very well known by now. And, some of them are airplanes, and I think that it's just not possible to judge an airplane with screenshots only. A scenery, maybe, but an airplane, for example the F104, were the most important feature it's the feeling of the flight model, HAS to be tried first.
There are some Cloud9 products, instead, which I agree might be better presented with screenshots, and it's the X-Class series, because they don't have a Trial version so, screenshots are needed.
