Erik Rutins
Posts: 37503
Joined: 3/28/2000 From: Vermont, USA Status: offline
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No personal attacks please, let's keep it civil. Rich, where we disagree is on the point that $35 is an outrageous price. I've expressed my thoughts on this earlier in this thread, but fundamentally, whenever you bought the existing games you will benefit from 3-4 years of additional development post-release provided in the form of free updates that included not only fixes but new features. Through the print-friendly manuals upload, you also have free access to the updated manuals, which were months of work. The package itself with the upgrade coupon offers both games, updated and with continued support for less than half of the previous combined price. I respect that none of us are floating in cash now, it's not a fun economy. I respect that you may decide this new release is not worth your while. It will not be on sale this year, but it will likely be on sale in next year's holiday sale. With all that said, this does not mean that it's cool for you to cast us as money-grubbing or screwing over our existing customers when the industry standard is to provide much less support than we have and to provide no upgrade coupon whatsoever. That's not how we do things - we serve a niche market and we do our best to keep free updates coming as long as we can and to offer a discounted upgrade path when that's no longer possible since customer satisfaction and loyalty mean a lot to us. Whether you agree that the release is worth it for you or not, please extend us the benefit of the doubt that making these games does cost money and that maintaining them does also cost money, which means that free updates cannot continue indefinitely. You do not have our balance sheets, so you will have to take my word for that. The customer does have a voice in our company and keeping the customer's interests in mind is always a part of our internal decision-making, but we also can't pay our own bills by giving away everything for free. Regards, - Erik
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