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Price Break for Commonwealth/Market Garden


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you are looking at it all wrong.  It isn't $5 off, it is 7% off!!  Don't you feel a whole lot better? ;)  kidding

 

There is a battlepack coming.  I don't expect to see a CW/MG discount, but one never knows. Those modules have been out, but that doesn't usually mean a BF discount is coming.  I usually look at it this way.  If I were to wait 6 months and get a $15 dollar discount sale, would I wait.  Not likely. That is 6 months of lost playing time.  If it were a game I was really unsure if I'd like, yeah maybe, but CM is a known quantity.  Hell I just assigned an SSD just for my CM games and am just finishing moving them all.

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For some reason they never have a sale either. Matrix and other companies have sales at least 2-3 times per year. It's better to lower your price and break even to get a few people hooked on your product. If it's a good product then the people you've hooked are inclined to buy follow up modules or games etc... Get more followers, especially in a niche market.

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I know there is already a bundle where you save a whopping $5, but I am hoping for a better package price for this bundle.  These add-ons have been out for several years now.  Marketing. 

I have this crazy idea that BF knows a tad bit more about how to properly run their business than you do. ;)

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You're not factoring is inflation. The price stays the same, the value of the dollar falls, so the game is cheaper than before at the same price. The price of the module when it first came out would have been equivalent to a bag of groceries perhaps. Now the same money will get you 2/3rd a bag of groceries. Especially if you buy a lot of beef.  :D By all rights BFC should be adding a couple bucks to the product every couple years to keep up with inflation.

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Price setting is a tricky business. I personally think that BFC not having sales is a good thing. If you put things on sale people wait to buy. If you never do then people buy when they want.

I order books from Blurb (I make photo books for my daughter's dance studio) they offer discounts on and off and i find myself not ordering so i can wait for a sale. I don't think that is a good thing. Unless they are managing thier work load using price in which case perhaps it works for them.

What i know as a customer i feel bad when i pay full price if i think a sale is just around the corner. I never feel that way with BFC.

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You're not factoring is inflation. The price stays the same, the value of the dollar falls, so the game is cheaper than before at the same price. The price of the module when it first came out would have been equivalent to a bag of groceries perhaps. Now the same money will get you 2/3rd a bag of groceries. Especially if you buy a lot of beef.  :D By all rights BFC should be adding a couple bucks to the product every couple years to keep up with inflation.

Well, that would be a valid point if CM were a collector's item such as coin, baseball card, or work of art by a famous artist. But it's not, It's a computer game. And like all other computer games it should decline in value over time. My first computer games that I ever purchased back around 1986 were Infocom's Sorcerer and Origin's Ultima III. I remember that the prices were around $50. Both were great games, especially Ultima III, but if you tried to charge me $50 for it now I'd tell you to stuff it. 

BF does indeed eventually lower their prices, CMBO is only $15. And although CMBN is still $55 it includes the 2.0 and 3.0 upgrades (a $20 discount). The only problem is that to the potential new customer, a 5 year old game @ $55 seems like it's still the original price.

Edited by Pak40
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To look at from another light, compare the price of say CMBN at ($55) £36 of the queens fabulous pounds which includes the afore mentioned upgrades its not a bad price, i would say for the amount of time played over cost its a bargain.  Now lets look at Fifa, not the same type of game obviously but it does have relevance.  Every year Fifa releases a new version and each time it costs on average £50.  However you are not buying a brand new game, you are buying the previous years title with some upgrades and tweaks, thats it and this cycle continues for that graphic engine for an average of 3-4 years, as in there are no major fundamental changes to the game in that time.  In essence, for me anyways, you are paying full price for an upgrade for 4 years.  This years Fifa has seen some dramatic changes and a big change in the graphics engine however the last 4 titles were based off the 2011 base game.  So when u look at it that way CMBN etc are cheap.

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I don't care too much about the price really, it's not that much. I'm willing to pay good money for good quality, and these games have superb gameplay quality.

But I do care about the game developing, both with regards to features, content, graphics, bug-fixing, etc.

I personally don't think the series is progressing enough, at least not where it counts. The new features added over the years are decent, but often seem a bit half baked in their implementation (air support, flame throwers, tank riders..), and while old niggles are sometimes eventually fixed, they are often left festering for ages (people had to resort to mods for years just to be able to turn off the music, before the option was finally included - as part of a 10-dollar upgrade). 

The new Bugle title apparently won't change much in the way the game works either, but will add some new units and artwork, which is nice enough, but not really moving the series fundamentally forward.

I know Battlefront is a small company working on a tight budget etc. and I'm not complaining or blaming them for anything. But that's what's affecting my motivaton to buy, much more than price.

Edited by Bulletpoint
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Problem is the underlying architecture. Without starting completely afresh, in the same vein as they did between CMx1 and CMx2 (so, I guess I'm, talking about a putative "CMx3"), there are limitations as to what can be done. Multicore working, terrain grid penetration within the FoW, that kind of thing. "Incremental" is all they can do, and some of those (fortifications within FoW, for example) will necessarily have some fraction of "assed-ness", less than unity.

Hoping for a CMx3 release is a double-edged dream, since there would probably be very little of the technical assets which have been developed that would convert over, and the content would have to reset (probably back to D-Day, so the yearned-for "early war modules" would be ever further away, and the content is a huge proportion of the man-hours needed to make the game. 

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Hoping for a CMx3 release is a double-edged dream, since there would probably be very little of the technical assets which have been developed that would convert over, and the content would have to reset (probably back to D-Day, so the yearned-for "early war modules" would be ever further away, and the content is a huge proportion of the man-hours needed to make the game. 

Very true, but the same could be said about going from CMx1 to CMx2. And next time, they could choose to start with the early war and progress in time from there. That could also serve as a kind of "open beta", to test and fine tune the new system before moving to the eras that have more mass appeal.

However, I don't think we will ever see a Cmx3 from the same guys. I think they will keep their business going with the current system until they retire, then sell off the brand and assets to some younger folks who grew up with modern programming and hardware.

Edited by Bulletpoint
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Very true, but the same could be said about going from CMx1 to CMx2. And next time, they could choose to start with the early war and progress in time from there. That could also serve as a kind of "open beta", to test and fine tune the new system before moving to the eras that have more mass appeal.

Will early war have enough attraction to both cover the cost of the hiatus between the last x2 and the first x3 and keep the company going until the "profitable" years can be developed? Dunno. Will it have more attraction than SF did? Possibly, though not if it's forced to release in the same state that SF was because of money pressures: the CM "franchise" isn't brand new like it was in CMBO days, and there is going to be a large constituency that would take a very "wait and see" attitude towards the appearance of a whole new game engine paradigm, having seen how long it took SF to turn into the excellent game it finished up as.

However, I don't think we will ever see a Cmx3 from the same guys. I think they will keep their business going with the current system until they retire, then sell off the brand and assets to some younger folks who grew up with modern programming and hardware.

I believe Steve is a couple of decades off retirement, even if he decides to call it a day "early". That's time for a new engine. If he's pursuing his vocation, he might be around another score beyond that. It only took what? 5 years? to transition from CMAK to CMSF.

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Wanting BFC to drop prices on games over a certain age is the same as wanting them to significantly jack up prices at the beginning. One way or another BFC needs to make back its cost of development and make offering the product worth their while financially. So they could start out charging a hundred+ at the beginning - front-load the cost of development onto the initial purchasers - and let the price decline over time. Or they can instead do what they're doing. Dropping a title into the bargain bin is as good as killing it. In retail stores its dumping unwanted product to clear shelf space. 

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This is an article advocating the good results of discounting games, of course, it's discounts on Steam where you have a wider audience than in your own site.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/174587/Steam_sales_How_deep_discounts_really_affect_your_games.php

Have the developers seen any increase in sale since they started selling BO on GOG?

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