Author: Omid David Tabibi
Date: 04:38:34 04/08/03
Go up one level in this thread
On April 08, 2003 at 03:36:19, Daniel Clausen wrote:
>On April 08, 2003 at 00:12:37, Dann Corbit wrote:
>
>[snip]
>
>>If everything else is equal, then lowering the price should sell more.
>
>I don't agree with this one in general. (but I won't argue nearly as colourful
>as Vincent does ;) While this is probably true in many areas (like cheaper
>CDs/DVDs get sold more) in certain areas people (especially the manager-types)
>think a product must be a bad product _because_ it's cheap.
>
>Our company sells software to financial institutes, and depending on the people
>you talk to, it's sometimes a good sales argument to tell them "you need the
>best and hugest sun server there is to run this application". If we'd always say
>that it would also run on a small PC laptop, they wouldn't be interested at all.
>("Big companies need big solutions...") Whether customers of chess software are
>also like that, I cannot say, but based on the fact that some 1400ELO fanatics
>"clearly prefer the 2645ELO engine over the 2640ELO engine" makes me believe
>they could be as well. ;) (numbers are just wild guesses)
>
>Sargon
I have no experience in computer chess marketing, but let me give you an example
from the program 'Braveheart 3D Checkers' which I released about a year and half
ago.
This program was (and still is) the only fully rendered 3D checkers program, so
it obviously drew a lot of attention. I released it as shareware, so that the
users can try it for 30 days, then they have to pay $20 to register it. $20
seemed to be too much, and the ratio of sells to downloads was rather low. After
a month or two, I changed the price to $9.99, the sales more than tripled.
Although in the hindsight I think that $9.99 was probably too low, sending a
message "hey this program is so poor, that is why it is priced 9.99". Maybe
something like $15 would have been better.
Today 'Braveheart 3D Checkers II' is available as advertising supported
freeware.
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