Looks like your standard shovel-ware really, the first clue is that the developer is some no-name company (does ASCARON even still exist?), and the low pricing.

Low pricing? It's $40 for the US, €45 for EU.
And no, Ascaron doesn't exist anymore; they went belly up quite some time ago.
Anyway, I don't think it's shovelware, Kalypso isn't really known for doing that. No, what I'm afraid of is that they killed most of the complexity of the genre to appeal to beginners. Hopefully, I'll be proven wrong.
EDIT: About Gaming minds: while they're indeed not well known, they developed Patrician 4, which, IMO, was a good game, but with some serious design flaws, so I'm cautiously optimistic about PR3.

Well I didn't buy P4, and I would be even more reticent to buy this game, because I didn't even really like Royale 2, most of the game was pretty much the same as the first, but that swashbuckling minigame honestly just made me quit out of rage and uninstall. Just too ridiculous for words.

I think I'll stick to Patrician for a more mature trading sim.

Um, yes they are, that's one of the first things that people tend to think of when they think of Kalypso.

Not that the games they publish are bad or anything, but when they're released they're usually buggy and unplayable.

Nice necro :)

Necroing a two years old thread to bash Kalypso? Wow.... and there I thought I had issues. :p

Heh, its funny that the search method on this website is often criticized but then you wonder how threads like this get found and resurrected after 2 years.

AFAIK there is no way to sort the search results so I'm not really surprised...