Blogs Why Software Companies Should Slash Their Prices

Actually most companies I know are very reluctant with Office Upgrades.
...my company is on office 2003, and have just barely upgraded form office 2000.

I think the usual reason to upgrade is because the old version isnn't bugfixed any more, not that the new one is soooo cool.

Changing the look and feel on the latest Office hasn't made them any friends either. Noone likes to teach old secretarys new tricks *

Xir

*with no offense to any secretaries

 

If games were priced around $35 I would be buying them. I just can't justify buying a $60 game. I do have some friends that torrent everything except multiplayer stuff for obvious reasons. Then there's Adobe CS3, "I wonder why so many people Pirate it" Maybe if the prices of Photoshop were lowered to somewhere around $40 people would actually buy it instead of mounting a conspicuous .iso file from isohunt. Or there would be a reason to upgrade to CS4.

 

Games have become cheaper compared to ten or twenty years ago (I remember Microprose being routinely savaged in the early 90's over their attempt to standardise on a £45 price point) which is impressive given how development costs have escalated.

However the way prices are handled at the moment (£30-40 at launch, dropping steadily as time passes) is likely the best option from an industry standpoint. The "value" a game represents is always going to differ from person to person, so having prices drift lower over time is a good way to maximise profits from the "must-have-now" crowd while still being able to pull in sales from the bargain hunters. Offering "premium" editions, where appropriate, is another sensible move.

Where the industry is going wrong is with copy protection - while the more enlightened companies do remove it after a few months (the most enlightened, of course, don't use it at all) it has the effect of sticking two fingers at their most loyal customer base, who pay the highest price and receive the worst gaming experience as a result.

 

For me, if a company fails at launch time like EA(Bioware) did with Dragon Age, I will not purchase anymore games from that company until it hits the bargain shelves at the local BestBuy. Support for a game also matters, the more there is to get the more they will try to charge you for.

 

Works just as well as what ? 2007 ? If you are writing 'Hello World' saving it to a .doc and emailing it to yourself its just as good. For anything else, no.In fact the last time I tried to install it was on someones PC and they had Vista and it threw up CTL3D32.DLL errors. But then I suppose you are going to say you aren't using Vista or later and are using Windows 98 because it 'Works just as well' ?

 

The improvements between Office '97 and 2000 are mostly quite small (e.g. a larger palette of colours usable in documents, UI improvements like the Fonts menu displaying each font, the Office Assistant no longer having a separate window) so I certainly wouldn't dismiss Office 97 as "Hello World" material. With Office XP onwards, you have to deal with product activation which I consider a significant downside (enough reason for me to boycott anything after Office 2000).

What is "best" in such cases needs to be decided by individuals using their own criteria. If the "latest and greatest" has something that justifies the £60-80 then go ahead. However there can be downsides (including higher resource usage, new bugs and - an Office speciality - new incompatible file formats) so just splashing out can cause problems, especially for businesses.

 

No no no you have it all wrong, EA (Mainly) and a couple others have it right, release it at $50US and then raise the price to $80US or $90US in one specific region. I was going to buy Battlefield Bad Company 2 so I transferred the money to my credit card and the next day the price had gone up $20, but only for Aus/NZ. Same thing with Metro 2033, when it first got released to pre-order it was $50, now it is $90 for Aus/NZ and still $50 for the US.

I ask why have they raised their prices for us? Do you not want my money? After the currency conversion these now end up 50% more than in the shop and I no longer buy retail games.