AE Download Question

[GaryChildress]

FWIW, Fallschirmjager, the current packaging arrangements really don't make much sense to me either, given the apparent details which have been disclosed.

But, as I see it, Matrix can charge what they want for their product or package it however they see fit and it's up to me to determine whether or not I think the price is worth it given my current finances. I'm not going to bitch and moan because they didn't make it the price I want. Heck I won't even raise hell if I can't afford the game altogether. There's no law that says Gary Childress must be able to afford certain computer games. And there's no law that says Matrix can't try to put some extra money in the bank with a new release.

Granted, I'm for things like affordable health care and stuff like that. I'm even for socializing medicine if it will help people most, at least the "single-payer" version of "socialization" (sorry I'm not going to argue politics any further here) but things like computer games are not essential to life (I know...that's just crazy talk). It's everyone's right to bitch and moan about prices as they see fit and there is certainly much justification in it with today's economy but making things ugly just doesn't seem worth it to me...at least not with respect to computer games. If you argue about health care prices I'm all with you, but computer games...

[Fallschirmjager]

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress

FWIW, Fallschirmjager, the current packaging arrangements really don't make much sense to me either, given the apparent details which have been disclosed.

But, as I see it, Matrix can charge what they want for their product or package it however they see fit and it's up to me to determine whether or not I think the price is worth it given my current finances. I'm not going to bitch and moan because they didn't make it the price I want. Heck I won't even raise hell if I can't afford the game altogether. There's no law that says Gary Childress must be able to afford certain computer games. And there's no law that says Matrix can't try to put some extra money in the bank with a new release.

Granted, I'm for things like affordable health care and stuff like that. I'm even for socializing medicine if it will help people most, at least the "single-payer" version of "socialization" (sorry I'm not going to argue politics any further here) but things like computer games are not essential to life (I know...that's just crazy talk). It's everyone's right to bitch and moan about prices as they see fit and there is certainly much justification in it with today's economy but making things ugly just doesn't seem worth it to me...at least not with respect to computer games. If you argue about health care prices I'm all with you, but computer games...

I understand where you are coming from. However, I want to make my posistion clear. I have no issue with the price point. $70 is what I paid for the original WitP and AE looks to be about the same amount of effort on the part of the developers. I have no problem with the price or paying that price.
The issue I have is that is looks bad on the part of Matrix to have new users have to purchase both versions of the game and they cannot even come up with a good reason for having them do so.
I had assumed that AE needed code and files from WitP in order to run. It is quite a suprise that it does not and I was taken aback by that. I don't see that as a good buisness decision.

[AttuWatcher]

ORIGINAL: Fallschirmjager

The issue I have is that is looks bad on the part of Matrix to have new users have to purchase both versions of the game and they cannot even come up with a good reason for having them do so.
I had assumed that AE needed code and files from WitP in order to run. It is quite a suprise that it does not and I was taken aback by that. I don't see that as a good buisness decision.

Ideally what makes the most "sense" as a product is to go with a full price WiTP + a $40-50 AE expansion OR a standalone AE around $120. BUT I think with the cheaper-than-standalone AE and the discounted WiTP price, things will just about work out in the end.
Erik has already stated that as a stand alone game AE would have to sell for more than WiTP, it's just a fact. This way players have the "less complex" WiTP to fall back on and that's the way Matrix wants it for better or worse...right now it's certainly a source of confusion for some but in the long run it may be for the better...I don't know.

[GaryChildress]

Quite frankly, the more I think about it the more I can see reason for the seemingly high price of AE and its current "bundle" packaging.

Having been a Beta tester for AE (for all of 2 months before I just plain quit) I've seen this beast first hand, although, what I saw has changed significantly since over a year ago when I gave beta testing a shot. In my unofficial, ex-Beta-tester-of-over-a-year-ago opinion, I would seriously caution anyone from jumping into AE without having played WITP or UV or SOMETHING. AE is just immense. It was built to withstand the direct impact and fallout of the WITP forum's constant nitpicking (although there will be plenty of that regardless).

You think WITP makes your brain hurt? Wait till you try to dock and unload too many ships in a port that is rated too small to handle a fraction of them. You'll be pulling your hair out plenty trying to get your ships unloaded before KB comes calling. And just when you think you've got KB ready to quash the American carriers only to find out your TF has run out of torpedoes to equip your strike planes with...you'll be cursing. But that is all the reality of war in a SIMULATION designed to reproduce realistic results.

Packaging WITP with AE is probably a good business move because many of the uninitiated will probably ignore warnings and jump into AE and become overwhelmed (Seriously, AE is going to be THAT immense). At least they will be able to fall back on WITP as part of the bundle if they get nothing else out of it. We in the WITP crowd OTOH should at least have some inkling of what we are getting into.

The question of price is really, if you are going to target a very narrow sector of the computer gaming community, how do you make all the effort and resources put into the game pay off? With a game like Command & Conquer you put maybe X amount of resources into making a game that requires almost no amount of initiation to play. Any 10 year old with the attention span of a gnat can pick it up and have easy fun with it right away. It has pretty graphics but has the complexity of checkers. You charge $30 for it and sell a million copies for $30,000,000.

With something like AE, you put that same X amount of resources into it, you sell it for $30 dollars and you sell maybe 1000 copies total for maybe $30,000. It's not going to be easy to recover the resources sunk into the development of a game like this (let alone reap a healthy profit from it). Granted Matrix doesn't have the same overhead that EA games does. But we're also talking about a very, VERY, wee, little, niche of gamers in relative terms.

Personally I think AE WILL be a great game but it's definitely not rated E for Everyone. Heck I don't know if after all the revisions and what-not after I left if I will be able to handle the final product (I'm not the sharpest rocket surgeon in the box). I think I will probably buy it regardless and give it a shot, though, just so I can say I've played the mother of all games. [8D]

[Hard Sarge]

ORIGINAL: Fallschirmjager

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress
WITP is over 1 gig in size. Since AE is an ad on for WITP I assume AE saves a little bit of size due to that? Or have things changed since I last checked and AE is now a standalone product?

It does not share files or install on top of WITP.

Which makes one wonder why you need WitP in the first place besides the fact that you can make your customers pay for two products.[&:]

well for me, I own two copies of WitP (long story)

but I think it was well worth it, even if I did buy two copies of the same game (at different times) I only wish I had the spare time to play it, been ages since since I sank anything

(or had anything sunk)

[viberpol]

ORIGINAL: pasternakski

ORIGINAL: viberpol
Sorry, but you're being rude... [:-]

Your apology for my rudeness is accepted. Now, how about you go undermine the companies that make computer wargames further by not buying directly from them?

And you're persistent in your rudeness... [&:] [:-]

So you say, that if you have a book "CAPITALISM FOR DUMMIES" in your local store and the same book titled "CAPITALISM FOR DUMMIES" but twice that expensive but in a bookstore downtown, you go buy downtown paying twice as much?
Why? Just because you can afford?
Now, that's a logic I cannot understand. I wouldn't call it a mission. It's a simple stupidity.
Why don't you go and buy a new Toshiba notebook, or Nissan... directly from Japan? [&:]
Then make a donation to US dealer.

The bottom line is that (& I am advocationg for all new players for Matrix):
Because WITP is an old game, it should be cheaper.
Cheaper WITP means more buyers, more WITP buyers means more new AE owners.
As simple as that.

That's the business logic I am sure Matrix is perfectly aware.
Otherwise, they wouldn't sell the licence for WITP to different distributors in other countries long ago. The Matrix community increased and profitted with many players from Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, part of Germany etc.

Saying things like:

ORIGINAL: pasternakski
Sorry, Mr. We Get It Cheaper Here in Our Former Communist Sh1thole Because We Don't Care if Matrix Goes Tits Up.

...you insult all these players.

To make myself clear -- I think WITP is a great game and I've been playing it for 4 years now.
And I am gonna pay as much as Matrix wants for marvellous AE (even 10 times more I paid for WITP) but actually BECAUSE (sic!) I had the possibility to play WITP after buing it legally at affordable price.

[EDIT] typos

[Dili]

Erik has already stated that as a stand alone game AE would have to sell for more than WiTP, it's just a fact.

Where he said that? I only have read that a standalone will have to be more expensive than the current AE "standalone extension [:D]" which is fair enough. People that bought witp should get a benefit as former costumers and not forgetting that AE got better because input of WITP users.

[Chris21wen]

ORIGINAL: Fallschirmjager

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress
WITP is over 1 gig in size. Since AE is an ad on for WITP I assume AE saves a little bit of size due to that? Or have things changed since I last checked and AE is now a standalone product?

It does not share files or install on top of WITP.

Which makes one wonder why you need WitP in the first place besides the fact that you can make your customers pay for two products.[&:]

Me too!

[MadmanRick]

I bought WITP when it was released, so all this is a moot point as far as I am concerned. However, I will say that it seems to me that the majority of the people that will truly be interested in AE, will already own WITP. Obviously, there will be some who maybe weren't old enough or even in this Solar System when WITP was released, but I cannot believe that it would amount to a substantial number of buyers. As far as the price goes, it is a difficult time in economic terms obviously, however judging how much play value (msrp divided by hours actually played) I received from WITP, purchasing AE is a no-brainer for me.

Rick

[John Lansford]

Count me as being in the "I thought AE was going to use some of the existing WitP files" crowd, too.  Prior ownership of WitP was, I thought, required for AE because it shared files with the earlier game, and since it uses the same game engine that made sense to me.  Finding that all AE does is look for certain files of WitP on your hard drive, but ---does not use or refer to them after that---, is very confusing to me and I have to say it does look like Matrix is trying to milk the maximum amount of money out of buyers by requiring them to buy both WitP and AE (if they don't already have a copy of WitP).

The price to me is not a problem; if it were $100 I'd probably buy it so that's not an issue.  I don't expect too many noobs to run out and buy AE without playing WitP or UV or even PacWar, though, and if that was the concern then perhaps a caution tag (WARNING: This game is extremely complex, etc, etc) could have been added to the packaging.  But really, as long as people BUY the game, does Matrix really care if it gets played?  Someone new to the UV/WitP/AE world might buy and then give up on the game after finding how complex it is, but they already paid for it so what's the problem?

[Erik Rutins]

Re-posting this here from another thread:

Ok, I had a night to sleep on some of the feedback here. Let me try to approach this again, because we do most definitely care what you all think.

War in the Pacific is, in our opinion, a unique game. We looked at that game and made some unique decisions on how to proceed with developing, marketing and pricing AE. Unfortunately, these decisions don't fit neatly into one of the existing marketing "boxes" that you've seen before. I think the key misunderstanding in all this though is that from our point of view, everything we did was with existing owners of WITP in mind. New customers who did not own WITP were a secondary concern. This may seem strange, but again WITP is unique and for a number of reasons we feel this is the right way to go. The decisions we made were intended to make things as convenient and affordable as we could for existing owners of WITP.

First, having AE share files or not share files with WITP is a minor technical issue. We could easily have it share files or not. We decided early on to have it not share files so that customers could continue playing their modded or unmodded WITP games without any disruption. We didn't see how it would be a good thing to have AE share files and create possible issues for WITP game continuation. Having AE share files and having it not disrupt WITP in any way would be a bigger technical issue.

Every "expansion" you've ever bought could have been a stand-alone game, it's just a technical issue to do it one way or the other and not a particularly difficult one. For those of you who see it as a big difference ethically, I want you to understand that the reason we made the decision way back when to do it this way was specifically because we did not want to inconvenience existing WITP players.

Second, the pricing. We could have priced AE as a stand-alone game and not had it require WITP. This would have increased its price significantly and also required us to offer a discount to owners of WITP. The only way to offer a discount is to check serial numbers, create a discount coupon unique to each serial number (only one per serial number) and then have customers use that in the store. We've done this before, it's not a technical challenge.

However, in our experience it is definitely a hassle for some customers. This type of route creates many possible points of failure, from customers who can't find their old serial number, to customers who lose their coupon code (or don't receive it) to customers who use it and place the order incorrectly and then can't use it again, etc. We decided that rather than make existing WITP owners jump through these hoops, if we had AE require WITP then the purchase price could already be set at the discount level and all that existing WITP owners would have to do is buy the game as they would buy any other.

Third, new customers. I've been told that we are strong-arming them, thinking for them, etc. I suppose I can see how this can come across. The truth though is that AE was always for existing owners of WITP first. That's a pretty big crowd and we felt that it's also the group that would likely be responsible for 90% of the sales of AE. We did not see AE as having a lot of appeal to customers that had already decided, over the course of the five years it's been on the market, that WITP was not for them. Still, based on recent feedback we made the decision to discount WITP for a limited time to give folks who were having second thoughts about missing out on WITP now that AE was coming out a chance to test the waters.

I am also telling you our real thoughts and discussion when I say that we really feel that AE is not a game for someone to really jump into without any previous experience with WITP. We think that for WITP players, AE is a wonderful thing, but for people who have never played WITP, AE is not just "WITP 2.0". It has a much larger map, many more units and many more rules that are based on increasing realism but that a player who is not already steeped in the real history of the War in the Pacific may not understand. It also has fewer scenarios than WITP and fewer small scenarios. It has just enough of those to help WITP vets get their feet wet before jumping into the new grand campaign, basically.

Having AE released on its own and having people jump right into it without prior WITP experience would, in our opinion, have created a potential for a lot of misunderstanding and confusion and unhappy new customers. I think existing WITP players will be delighted with AE. Someone who has not played WITP might be lost at sea though.

Finally, it is to our benefit to have both WITP and AE on the market. First, while we love AE and believe it will do well, there is always risk. Taking WITP off the market, with its smaller scale and greater initial accessibility as well as increased scenario selection didn't make a lot of sense to us. Pricing AE at $100 or more stand-alone in this economy also seemed likely to provoke a knee jerk reaction (at this point, I think frankly we were going to take heat whatever we did). More importantly, WITP and AE both fund ongoing development - WITP primarily is a help to funding 2by3 and AE primarily will help fund ongoing development of the WITP series.

This was our thought process as far as why we made the decisions we made. We're well aware of what the economy is doing now. What I think some folks here don't realize is that we really do see existing WITP players as our market and the way we set things up was deliberately intended to make new players who don't have WITP think twice about whether they want to step all the way up to AE in one jump. I think this is surprising to a lot of folks, but we felt that our primary concern should be addressing the needs of the people we think will make up 90% of AE's sales and making sure that the pricing and procedures were set to make it as enjoyable as possible for them.

Regards,

- Erik

[DuckofTindalos]

To expand on what I've said before, our current build INSTALLER (which is what customers will be dealing with for download)is about 500 Megs. The installed game is about 1.3 Gigs.

[Przemcio231]

[quote]Sorry, Mr. We Get It Cheaper Here in Our Former Communist Sh1thole Because We Don't Care if Matrix Goes Tits Up. [/quote


Hmmmm where is the moderator?? I feel offended by this statement[:@] AND I DEMAND PASTERNASKI BE BANNED FROM THIS FORUM!!!!!!!!
I Think he is one arrogant A*****e!!!!!

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: Przemcio231
Hmmmm where is the moderator?? I feel offended by this statement[:@] AND I DEMAND PASTERNASKI BE BANNED FROM THIS FORUM!!!!!!!!
I Think he is one arrogant A*****e!!!!!

Pasternakski has been warned, that means he's on probation as far as this goes. We don't ban on first offenses, we warn. If you take to personal insults in response, I'll have to warn you as well. Let's drop it and move on, if this snowballs all it will result in is a lot of unhappy folks with temporary bans.

[Przemcio231]

Sorry my Languege Erik... i just felt offended... by his post. Yech i should not allow myself to come to the same level of argument as him.

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: Przemcio231
Sorry my Languege Erik... i just felt offended... by his post. Yech i should not allow myself to come to the same level of argument as him.

No problem, thanks. People post things in haste based on emotion rather than logic, I think that's what happened with Pasternakski too and is part of why we don't ban on first offenses.

[MadmanRick]

Erik,
As a long-time WitP owner and overall Matrix customer, I can only say thanks for at least recognizing that this dedicated bunch exists and for thinking abut us first!

Rick

[scout1]

Guys,

I asked a technical question, wanting a technical answer. I got that. If you have issue with anything else, please take it up with your own thread. I have no problems with the approach that Matrix is taking and WitP has been by .... FAR .... the most economical game I've owned relative to play time. Erik, price it as you see it and "damn the torpedoes"

[byron13]

SO I have another technical download question. I've lost my members club log-in information and, in trying to have my password sent to me, it appears that my e-mail address has changed at some point because the customer service function doesn't recognize my e-mail address.

Am I correct that purchasing and installing AE is nothing more than (i) buying AE on-line and downloading and (ii) when installing, the loader will check to see if I have WitP already loaded? Am I correct that the only bad thing that will happen by not having my secret agent ID log-in info is that I won't be able to download the manual in advance?

Or am I not going to be able to install AE until I have members club log-in information available? I have the serial number of the game - just not the online log-in info.

Thanks.

If you can't tell, I am trying to avoid the nightmare of AE being released and not being able to play because I don't have some stupid PIN number. I've got enough flippin PINs as it is. If I really need it, I want to start working on the solution now - not when AE is released.

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: byron13
Am I correct that purchasing and installing AE is nothing more than (i) buying AE on-line and downloading and (ii) when installing, the loader will check to see if I have WitP already loaded? Am I correct that the only bad thing that will happen by not having my secret agent ID log-in info is that I won't be able to download the manual in advance?

That's correct. As long as you have WITP installed, you're all set.

Contact our Help Desk at www.matrixgames.com/helpdesk for assistance with your account.

Regards,

- Erik