I don't know if Dreamfall sold well. But I do know that the first game, The Longest Journey did get sold at a full price at 2 years after it was released. Dreamfall was released in April 2006, I think?. In dec. 2006 or jan. 2007, I saw it in the bargain bins for about 20USD or so. You do the math here.
Either this is a symptom of the times e.g. people buy games, play them, and move on to the next game (they probably didn't do this as much in 1999-2000) or it is a symbol of Dreamfall not selling that well at full price.
Yes, Dreamfall is getting a sequel - in episodic chapters. However, remember that Dreamfall (at least in Europe) had Starforce on it - to prevent -ahem- people from making copies of it. (not a recommendation, though).
My guess is that Ragner and Funcom thinks that by selling off Dreamfall in episodic chapters for say 9.95 USD pr. chapter, they can hinder pirating of the game. And in order to do that, each downloaded chapter probably will follow the same
scheme that Bioshock did. You need to have internet connection to activate the game, but not to play the game.
I'm sorry to say this, but I don't think that this will hinder or prevent people from doing something to pirate (e.g. make illegal copies of the game - still not a recommendation, though) the game. I'm saying this beacuse it doesn't seemed to have the 'bad guys' to pirate Bioshock (not recommendation, though). The only people this activation-online thing annoy and irritate is the
customers who buy the game legit & legally.
What happens then, if Funcom 10 years from now suddenly decided to close its doors and shut downs alle their servers for activating the game? I still play games from 8-10 years ago. Or what happens if Funcom suddenly is bought by say Ubisoft, and Ubisoft shuts down all Funcom's websites - just like Ubisoft did with Microîds and Still-Life?
Imagine to have had to activate Still Life or Post Mortem. And then today, when you wanted to play these games again, you couldn't? Just because the cativations servers were gone. It's not that hard to imagine. NCSoft did exactly this with the servers for Auto Assault. Apparently, this online game did not bring in enough revenue to the people behind NCSoft (or the publishers).
So yes, this can happen. Let's just not hope that Funcom does this - ever
