Quote:
Originally Posted by daplunk
The recurring fee is to maintain the service. Pay for the power to keep the servers on and the air-conditioning in the DC, pay for space required to maintain the data requirements as everyone needs to store their data on the service also. Pay for the retention service that id wager they have in place. Pay for the floor space in what ever data center they are using.
In my last role I was an IT Infrastructure PM and this stuff is not generally cheap and it's certainly ongoing.
So if you break the cost down.
The $$ to purchase the content covers the license fee that LWD pay back to the content owner. It covers the time and effort for the LWD employee to do the data entry.
The $$ for the ongoing subscription covers everything above and the support for the tool.
This is the cost of accessibility. The cost of going online. The cost of supporting as many platforms as possible with the least resourcing requirements.
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I do not dispute any of this. LWD NEEDS to have a pricing system in place that is profitable. What I do have a problem with is paying full retail for a book at my local hobby store for $34.99. Then having the hobby shop charge me $2.00 a month FOREVER or they are going to repossess my book.
If $34.99 dose not cover the cost raise the unit price. I would not mind if LWD wanted me to pay $10 a month to access all content. I have no idea what price point the market will bear, but I am positive that Paizo, Hasbro, and LWD financial executives have looked long and hard at this question. LWD has the right to price their products however they see fit.
That being said if it was not for the $2.00 fee I would have spend $47.98 this week on Starfinder. As a loyal customer for over 8 years, who has purchased >75% of every data set ever released for Pathfinder; I am emphatically saying I will not pay both. I am willing to pay $34.99 for the Starfinder Core rule data set, I will not pay $514.99 for the same data set. $514.99 comes from 34.99 + $2.00 a month for ten years........Which is how long Pathfinder will have ran prior to second edition coming out. Plus remember that we do not know all the details yet, but in the upcoming content market for Realmworks you will be required to purchase the PDF from Paizo PRIOR to be allowed to purchase the data set from LWD. I do not disagree with this but it is an additional cost, as I have purchased FAR FAR FAR more data sets than books or PDF's. In the past I have purchased every data set but only the books I actually use. In fact having bought the data set has caused me to purchase the PDF so I could use the feat/class feature in organized play.