Projected Release date and final price?

Questions and comments about Other World Mapper.

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Big Mac
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Re: Projected Release date and final price?

Post by Big Mac » Mon Jan 01, 2018 1:45 pm

stefanstr wrote:
Kanchou wrote: We are planning to do versions with less functionality for those that, for instance, only want to do overland maps, and versions stripped of artwork for those who wouldn't be using ours, but pricing for those versions is still TBD.
Do you really want to do that? It will drive your average selling price down, will make support more complex, and it's a market with no good free choices, so people who need your software will probably buy it anyway.
As a user I have to say that there is also some advantage to having a larger user base.

Users who pay more money help fund development, so that's great. But users who interact with the community and who make stuff (like tutorials or objects) that they share with others also help.

A lot of software companies do educational deals, where students pay less. They often do that so that the can try to bloat out the userbase with experts that know that company's software.

I'm not sure that Other World Mapper is in quite that position, as cartography is a bit of a specialist market, and I think you are right about people being prepared to pay the full price, but once those people are onboard, a low-feature version or an educational version might pick up some extra customers that the main version doesn't capture.

Perhaps it would be good (for the OWM) people to think about what sort of secondary uses demo versions or cut down versions might have. If you think about Adobe Acrobat Reader, people build documents with the full-blown version of Adobe Acrobat and then get end users to use Adobe Acrobat Reader to fill in forms. So the free version supports the commercial version.

So, I wonder what sort of secondary market the stripped out version might have? Would there be OWM experts designing awesome looking bespoke maps and then wanting to sell those maps to individual GMs, along with a "basic" version of OWM that allows that GM to add extra towns?

Would the demo version and the stripped down version make for a good learning route, for someone who wanted to check that OWM was right for them before moving onto the full version?

I think there are other things than the average selling price at play here.

But I do take on board your concern about support being more complex. It's probably complicated enough with three operating systems to support, without multiplying that all by three (demo, stripped down and full).

But, I think that the worse case scenrio is that if OWM decide to do this as an experiment, and then decide they don't want to continue to support a stripped down version, they could simply stop selling the stripped down version. (And they could then migrate the people with the cut-down version onto the full-blown version, next time they need to upgrade to fix bugs.)

I'll be interested to see which way the team decides to go. I've been away from the OWM community for a while, but the build up with stretch goals on the Kickstarter was fun and the 1.0-to-1.99 progression is going to be fun too.
David "Big Mac" Shepheard
(A Spelljammer fan hoping to user Other World Mapper to make lots of maps of planets.)
You can see more of me over at The Piazza campaign settings forums

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Kanchou
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Re: Projected Release date and final price?

Post by Kanchou » Tue Jan 02, 2018 11:39 pm

Big Mac wrote:A reduced feature version might help increase the size of the user base. 8-)
It already has :). A good number of people bought the Basic version on our website (though the expansion is still the biggest seller).

Our main thing was not wanting to force people to buy things/features they wouldn't use.

- Alejandro
Alejandro S. Canosa
Three Minds Software

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Big Mac
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Re: Projected Release date and final price?

Post by Big Mac » Thu Jan 25, 2018 12:33 pm

Kanchou wrote:
Big Mac wrote:A reduced feature version might help increase the size of the user base. 8-)
It already has :). A good number of people bought the Basic version on our website (though the expansion is still the biggest seller).

Our main thing was not wanting to force people to buy things/features they wouldn't use.

- Alejandro
The forum says you have 981 registered users. That's pretty good. Maybe we should have a party, when you hit 1K forum members! 8-)
David "Big Mac" Shepheard
(A Spelljammer fan hoping to user Other World Mapper to make lots of maps of planets.)
You can see more of me over at The Piazza campaign settings forums

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