| |
BGonline.org Forums
Pricing
Posted By: phil simborg In Response To: Camera App--It's happening -- I'm doing it with my partner (Istvan Eger)
Date: Sunday, 26 July 2015, at 2:40 p.m.
To answer Istvan, and others, we have no idea about the pricing at this time. We would like to eventually cover our out of pocket costs and all of the personal time and energy put into this and hopefully, eventually make a profit some day. (Anyone who thinks this isn't a labor of love and not totally for profit is wrong...we are doing this because it's fun, and we think it would be great for the game, and we hope to cover our costs and maybe make a few bucks some day.)
We could price it at $1000 and I am sure we would have several buyers, but few players could afford it at that price and we would like to see it used widely as we believe it will enhance the game greatly and even contribute to making the game more popular and accessible to the public as well as encourage tournament and match play as it would be such a great learning tool.
If we price it at $100 I can't imagine any serious money or tournament player wouldn't buy it, and the total sales would be huge, but the expense of making and distributing for that amount would hardly be worth it to try to cover development expenses etc.
So it has to be somewhere in between, and we need to do some research and test marketing and polling to get a feel for what we can get for it to make a profit while making it reasonably affordable to a large number.
I would love help and feedback from this forum. What would you "comfortably" pay for this product (the software, a stand and camera, a clock) which automatically and accurately puts every move and cube into XG or into a flash drive (if you prefer) that you can use to load XG later? (A good chess clock, alone, is worth $50 or more and that would be integrated into the product.)
When I had this same discussion with Xavier and he told me he was going to charge $50 for XG I told him he was crazy. I told him to charge at least $100 as his product was far better and faster than Snowie and we had all paid $400 for that. I am sure most of us would not blink at $100, but Xavier felt he would get a lot more people to convert from Snowie faster at $50 and get a lot more new people as well. We will never know if he would have made more at $100 than at $50 but for sure he had more sales sooner. (I hope many of you will remember the tremendous negativity to XG on this forum when XG first came out...I even took personal abuse for claiming that anything could be as good or better than Snowie--it takes time for a new product to be recognized and accepted. Now, no one doubts XG or Xavier's commitment to the backgammon community!)
It's hard to test a market like Backgammon as it's not such a huge market and other than the tournament community, it's difficult to reach the rest of the backgammon players in the world, but I am sure even money and casual players would love this product and many of them would start to buy and use XG who don't have it now, and again, we think this will help bring more people into the world of tournament backgammon as they see and learn the skill and nuances of the game that XG will show them.
So, what would you pay for it? What do you think is a reasonable price?
Now, having said this, once we can show the world a good, working model, and can prove it is easy to set up and use and works well, I am sure everyone will want one, and if we cannot accomplish this, WE WILL NOT PRODUCE THE PRODUCT. It is going to be an excellent, easy to use product or we will not bring it to market.
We have been working on this for several months and the reason we have now gone public is because we are confident we can produce such a quality end product. I will be somewhat embarrassed (and sad) if I can't produce this product as promised, but we are pretty confident it will happen and wanted to get exactly this kind of feedback (and suggestions) from the intelligencia on this forum.
| |
BGonline.org Forums is maintained by Stick with WebBBS 5.12.