warspite1
Posts: 41353
Joined: 2/2/2008 From: England Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Alchenar quote:
ORIGINAL: warspite1 Aurelian I think we’ve been here before… The same old arguments just go round and round in circles. The one about “it’s a fact that if you reduce prices you get more customers” sums up the pointlessness of the thread. If life was that simple why doesn’t every company do that? Hey great, no retailer ever goes out of business!! Right……. Matrix is a private company, no doubt with investors, shareholders (maybe the bank) all of whom they have to keep happy. They are NOT a charity. They also live in the free world and we have a free market. This means they have to balance price with consumer demand, competition, the size of the market place etc. If they get it wrong there may be no Matrix in future, if they get it right, they will hopefully be around for some time yet. But it’s the right of the people who invest their cash and hold the risk to set the price. Our investment is limited to what we pay for games. If we don’t like it, then we shouldn't invest. True, but even if we drop the price argument completely there's things like 'you need a demo', 'get some free advertising by getting some mainstream reviews', 'use the massive customer base that Steam opens up for you' which would not be substantial costs but which would probably be successful to some degree. But instead we just get an insistence that even that effort would be wasted. The thing is that if a company refuses to let me demo a product and also hides their product from the industry journalists, that sets off pretty big alarm bells in my head that something is very wrong under the covers and they want to hide it until it's too late for me to back out of a purchase. If you trust Matrix absolutely then their pricing strategy is fine. I have a demand for wargames and the supply is very limited. But if you get burned just once with a game that turns out to be far more expensive than it's entertainment value justified then it becomes very difficult to be a returning customer. And that's a problem. warspite1 But that's where our choice as consumers comes into the equation. If we are not happy with price and/or demo and/or quality then we can choose to walk. If enough people do that then Matrix, like any company, has to react - or die. I don't say I trust Matrix absolutely. I neither trust nor distrust them - they are a company that (thankfully) provides me with an opportunity to wargame, but I take each game now as it comes - I would not buy or not buy just because it's from Matrix. Instead I will look at the comments on the forum and make my decision. No doubt sometimes I will ignore my own advice and just go straight for it on day one. But if I do and it's a bad decision, then I have only myself to blame. I have had good and bad experiences with their product. I got burned with Empires in Arms, but I blame myself. If I had waited a bit longer I would have known the extent of the issues and not purchased - but I did not wait. I personally think the forums are just as good as a demo. Provided the forum rules are abided by, Matrix allows people to say what they want about a game - good and bad. This feedback is from fellow forumites that many of us know and trust - I would prefer to hear what they have to say than some reviewer who I have never heard of.
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England expects that every man will do his duty. Horatio Nelson October 1805
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