Erik Rutins
Posts: 37503
Joined: 3/28/2000 From: Vermont, USA Status: offline
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I don't know that there's anything else I could say about pricing that hasn't been said, but I'll give it one more try. Every bit of data we have tells us that the previous pricing policy was _not_ helping AGEOD and that the new one will. The new pricing policy consists of simply matching the AGEOD store price rather than the special lower prices offered by other distributors. We are not intent on removing the games from all distributors, but we are intent on making sure AGEOD gets a fair price for each game sold. I absolutely agree that we should have known all the places where the game was being sold and what price it was being sold for. Unfortunately, we did not - when AGEOD left Paradox and joined us, some of that information was simply unknown or not available. The main thing that a clearer understanding of just how widely this game was discounted and sold would have changed was how we communicated what we were doing in the initial announcement and before the release. We did not intend to increase the price. Our store currently calculates the price in pounds based on the price in dollars. It does not add to that price in order to punish our UK customers or customers anywhere else in the world. This topic has come up many times before and we've explained in detail how it works. We set a price in dollars, the store then figures out the price in other currencies dynamically based on the currency conversion rate that we have access to through our online store partner. This does not match exactly the rate you see in the newspaper because we are charged for the currency conversion by the folks that do it and that is passed along to us and thus to you in a slightly worse conversion rate (by about 2% or so, if I recall correctly). At the end of the day, the money that we and the developer gets is the same whether you purchase in US dollars or UK pounds or any other currency. We're not getting more from UK customers than from US customers. I know that in the past when we put AGEOD games up on our store, our non-US prices also did not match theirs because they used a different method of calculating the non-US prices. This is not new to this release, but it is how every game in our store is priced. As far as future releases, we are in the process of adding all the other releases, including a new version of Rise of Prussia and all the extra DLCs for all AGEOD games to the Matrix and Slitherine stores. There's a lot of work going on behind the scenes. We are doing our best to help AGEOD based on our knowledge of this market, not hurt them. We're following the same strategy that has worked for Matrix and Slitherine and our other developers. I freely acknowledge this strategy does not make sense for the wider market of non-wargames but at the same time the wider market wisdom does not work as well for wargames as a lot the posters here may assume. We (Matrix, Slitherine and AGEOD) are already all together funding development on future AGEOD titles and we believe based on our data that all of this together will mean that we can all enjoy the outstanding and creative wargames AGEOD makes for years to come. That, ultimately, is our goal. We entered a partnership with AGEOD because we like their games, like them and want them to succeed. Regards, - Erik
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