Author: Uri Blass
Date: 16:11:16 04/08/03
Go up one level in this thread
On April 08, 2003 at 18:36:24, Sune Fischer wrote:
>On April 08, 2003 at 13:41:07, Omid David Tabibi wrote:
>
>>On April 08, 2003 at 09:38:28, Sune Fischer wrote:
>>
>>>On April 08, 2003 at 07:38:34, Omid David Tabibi wrote:
>>>
>>>>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.
>>>
>>>Interesting, although I don't see how people can pre-judge it as poor based on
>>>the price alone, if they can try out the demo first.
>>>
>>>I generally think software and music is too expensive, if a music CD only costed
>>>$1 I'd buy tons of them, when they go for $20 a piece I rarely buy anything.
>>>
>>>Too high price and you don't sell anything, too low and you don't make money.
>>>You need a market specialist to tell you the right price.
>>>
>>>I think Uri could try to set a price of $1, that's more of a symbolic value.
>>>There should be a few collectors wanting to buy then.
>>
>>Your profit will be 0 or less for any price below $5. Just think about the time
>>you spend for customer support, in addition to a fee you pay to a company which
>>takes the orders for you (most charge something like minimum $2 plus 10%-20% of
>>software's price). Also consider your development costs (tools, time, etc).
>>
>>For example for each $5 sale, you give 2$ + $1 to the company taking your
>>orders, so you are left with $2. Reduce another dollar for your customer support
>>time, and another $2 for your development cost. You are left with $-1. Enjoy!
>
>But you have to consider this case here as a bit special.
>
>Movei is his hobby, he has already done the work and now wants to see if he can
>get some "cool cash" returns. Zero development costs in this case, mostly he
>spent his free time. That's the great thing about software, very cheap to
>mass-produce :)
>
>No need to get involved with any business here, just use paypal or something,
>sell it off his own webpage.
>
>Customer support? Just refer them to the winboard faq. ;)
>
>-S.
Movei is not at the level that I think to sell it today.
I may think again about it only if movei promotes to the premier division(best
22 winboard engines).
tests that I did suggest that latest Movei is more than twice better than
movei0.0799(it means that it can beat public movei with time handicap of 2:1)
I have not enough games to be sure about it(I played only 20 games and latest
movei beated public movei 11.5-8.5 when latest movei got 1 minute per game
against 2 minutes per game for public movei).
It is still losing against Junior5 with time handicap of 3:1 so it is not in the
level that I even think of doing it commercial.
It will take a lot of time if I do not start to work more seriously about it(
Unfortunately I use more time for discussions and for thinking and less time for
programming and even after I have a productive idea I think maybe there is
something better to do and do not hurry to implement it)
I believe that most of the improvement relative to 0.0799 is evaluation and not
search.
I guess that I am going to improve the search after some more improvement in the
evaluation.
Uri
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