Posted January 27, 2010
high rated
Just a small addition to this topic from our company side.
Pricing + package content in case of TW: EE worked for us very well. And in fact is still working. Game despite its age is selling constantly well (although not everywhere full EE is still available). We get very warm response from gamers from all over the world which translated into (among the others) extremely high ratio of sold boxes to voluntarily registered users.
So it was worthy, there is no doubt about it. Same as investing additional 1mln usd in creation of the EE and also giving it for free for registered users of the original release.
This philosophy is taken directly from our Polish market. Here, when we started company in 1994, there was 95% of piracy, caused by imported from ex Russian countries industrial pirated copies (done in normal pressing plants with a use of the same production methods as original games). So the situation was that original games cost let say 50usd, and pirated cost 7. There was no effective help form government, police and any other authorities, and the pirated copies were freely available in many places.
This made us to develop certain strategy. We started competing with pirates as they would be just other business entities, just next normal competitors:-) Surely we couldn't go as low as 7 usd per game. But we decreased prices of new releases to reasonable 30 usd (more or less PC games still cost that amount in Poland, which is now, still the lowest price point among western countries for PC games) and we raised a packaging and content quality to the level absolutely not reachable by pirates. In fact, we started adding things you could find in TW:EE, years ago. That happened first time with the release of BG1 and we follow this till today. We also started budget ranges below pirates price point (around 6 usd let say roughly) and superb collectors editions. Today we don’t have such a freedom and everything is more difficult cause western publishers observe Polish market after joining EU very carefully and any exceptions from global policies are not so much welcomed (but thanks to things like gog.com or TW we can still find good places to express our philosophy;)
The most important conclusion is that, there is a way to fight with illegal market – which those days means torrents and all other internet downloads. From our perspective, and I believe that it is universal rule, the solution is to find good balance between price and quality, to ensure that final customers are happy, or even better, very happy.
That is a basic truth. Unfortunately often not understood by bigger, corporate companies (with exceptions of course, fortunately). The bigger company is, the more often top guys forget that their fat salaries comes not from mysterious funds, investors, etc, but simply bit by bit from everyone who buys their products. Unfortunately popular way of thinking is to concentrate on how to please shareholders (and analytics, investors and others) and at the same time forgetting that this primarily should come as an outcome of pleasing company final customers. And they, thank to the fact that they are happy, buy more, and become more and more loyal. There is no other way around in long run. You can try to please shareholders and analytics, and investors without solid foundations just to a certain point after which big losses suddenly appears (EA?;) ..same with marketing, you can try to make people buy a new product by spending millions on the campaign (remember Matrix by Atari;) but even if many people buy it and the quality won't be delivered, franchise is dead or at least in big troubles (NFS;)
I know that someday everyone will need to adopt to those or similar rules. But this will take years and may require some changes on the bigger scale, which is separate, more philosophical topic;)
Coming back on Earth;) ..it was very difficult to convince publishers to make EE same rich edition around the globe (with small exception in Russia). But with W2 we hope that we will have better position to negotiate similar things (we are not first time devs anymore;) So please expect the same policy.
..and if some day we will be able shape this kind of things from very beginning to the very final end completely according to our vision, you may expect something more, a lot more;-) We already have some cool ideas;) but for that, right time has to come. And some day will come;-)
Pricing + package content in case of TW: EE worked for us very well. And in fact is still working. Game despite its age is selling constantly well (although not everywhere full EE is still available). We get very warm response from gamers from all over the world which translated into (among the others) extremely high ratio of sold boxes to voluntarily registered users.
So it was worthy, there is no doubt about it. Same as investing additional 1mln usd in creation of the EE and also giving it for free for registered users of the original release.
This philosophy is taken directly from our Polish market. Here, when we started company in 1994, there was 95% of piracy, caused by imported from ex Russian countries industrial pirated copies (done in normal pressing plants with a use of the same production methods as original games). So the situation was that original games cost let say 50usd, and pirated cost 7. There was no effective help form government, police and any other authorities, and the pirated copies were freely available in many places.
This made us to develop certain strategy. We started competing with pirates as they would be just other business entities, just next normal competitors:-) Surely we couldn't go as low as 7 usd per game. But we decreased prices of new releases to reasonable 30 usd (more or less PC games still cost that amount in Poland, which is now, still the lowest price point among western countries for PC games) and we raised a packaging and content quality to the level absolutely not reachable by pirates. In fact, we started adding things you could find in TW:EE, years ago. That happened first time with the release of BG1 and we follow this till today. We also started budget ranges below pirates price point (around 6 usd let say roughly) and superb collectors editions. Today we don’t have such a freedom and everything is more difficult cause western publishers observe Polish market after joining EU very carefully and any exceptions from global policies are not so much welcomed (but thanks to things like gog.com or TW we can still find good places to express our philosophy;)
The most important conclusion is that, there is a way to fight with illegal market – which those days means torrents and all other internet downloads. From our perspective, and I believe that it is universal rule, the solution is to find good balance between price and quality, to ensure that final customers are happy, or even better, very happy.
That is a basic truth. Unfortunately often not understood by bigger, corporate companies (with exceptions of course, fortunately). The bigger company is, the more often top guys forget that their fat salaries comes not from mysterious funds, investors, etc, but simply bit by bit from everyone who buys their products. Unfortunately popular way of thinking is to concentrate on how to please shareholders (and analytics, investors and others) and at the same time forgetting that this primarily should come as an outcome of pleasing company final customers. And they, thank to the fact that they are happy, buy more, and become more and more loyal. There is no other way around in long run. You can try to please shareholders and analytics, and investors without solid foundations just to a certain point after which big losses suddenly appears (EA?;) ..same with marketing, you can try to make people buy a new product by spending millions on the campaign (remember Matrix by Atari;) but even if many people buy it and the quality won't be delivered, franchise is dead or at least in big troubles (NFS;)
I know that someday everyone will need to adopt to those or similar rules. But this will take years and may require some changes on the bigger scale, which is separate, more philosophical topic;)
Coming back on Earth;) ..it was very difficult to convince publishers to make EE same rich edition around the globe (with small exception in Russia). But with W2 we hope that we will have better position to negotiate similar things (we are not first time devs anymore;) So please expect the same policy.
..and if some day we will be able shape this kind of things from very beginning to the very final end completely according to our vision, you may expect something more, a lot more;-) We already have some cool ideas;) but for that, right time has to come. And some day will come;-)
Post edited January 27, 2010 by Mikee