I don't mean to be a troll...

[Storm]

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of Shockwave...I got everything, well everything except for the Long nose and Owl, but I can't say I'm a fan of either of those aircrafts...

...Shockwave is hands down my number one favorite FS Addon developer (thanks to your Spitfire...!) and somewhere up there in the top 5 for game developers (BoB II...CTDs are still quite frequent, but if y'all fix that, I'll bump y'all up to the top 3 ). And I am throughly anxious waiting for the Flying Tigers game (not because of the planes or theather of war or anything like that (the P-40 was good, but not THAT good...and being a full time a$$hole, I kinda think Burma was just a malaria infested wasteland that is nothing more than God's punishment toward mankind that honstly wasn't worth fighting/dying for...just dig another Burma road, and don't put it in Burma this time...) but rather because my grandpa was lucky enough to be one of the very first Chinese aviators (with the Chinese Nationalist Air Force) and was lucky enough to have flown sorties with the AVG pilots...and just thought it'd be cool to get an idea about how he, according to my mother, "wasted away the best years of his life"...given that his life was kinda short because after the war, China was kinda communist and he kinda flew for a not-so-communist organization...

...ok enough rambling (wow, I do like to talk alot...) I was just browsing through your online store and noticed the new Solo "packages"...

...I understand that you published the new line of products as "budget" addons, but I take that as "shallow" at the least. Given that the new line of addons are only $18 dollars a piece, which, considering the quality of the product, is a steal. But, the the new addon packages are nothing more than individually packaged aircrafts from your WWII Fighters box set, which you are only charing $30 for. It doesn't take a mathematical genious here to figure out that if you buy each "budget" pack individually, you will be paying considerably more.

I'm not here to suggest that the pricing is unfair -- the Spitfire, Emil, and Zero are all bargains for only $20 and I would be more than happy to pay for them, if I didn't already purchase them in the WWII Fighters pack (the P-51D and P-47...not so much, because for $10 more, you can have numerous more paints and a "H" variant for the P-51 and Bubble canopy and XP-72 for the P-47...) but I am here to say that the prices for your so called "budget" addons are unfair because of the mere fact that you simutaneously offer a much better valued package along side them.

I understand that small bussinesses like yours need the income (and frankly, I think you deserve it) but please don't try to accomplish that through an underhanded marketing technique that preys off of people's inability to use common sense. You can, for example, bump the prices of the regular packages to $40 or $50...

So all in all, I'm here to ask you to drop the prices of the "budget" aircrafts to a more reasonable price, like $6-$10, so its more "budgety" and comes out more evenly when you tally up individual aircraft costs against the whole pack.

Thanks!
Jeff

[SD_Research]

I'm with you on the Chinese thing...I have family that was there, too, Chinese, and had to escape the Mao thing...

But think about the pricing for a minute. You take any of your most popular outfits, say, AlphaSim, for example, who probably sells more planes than anyone, and you cannot get a plane for less than twenty bucks. They just release a Russian bomber, $24 US. Some of the best planes go for $30 US. So any single plane is going to set you back 20 bucks minimum.

What Shockwave is doing is to give HUGE value in bulk. In other words if you buy five planes, you get a gigantic discount. Buy them singly, you pay the normal price. Actually if you compare Shockwave's single aircraft to anyone else's, we believe the value is incredible, because we think our planes are the best add-ons out there for any price. Compare feature for feature and you won't find anything better in the WWII classic genre.

Some people don't like certain planes, they only want one, and they are fine buying JUST the Mustang, for example, or JUST the 109, or Spitfire, etc. For those, they're saving ten bucks. However if you think about it you will see that if you buy the WWII Fighters package, you are getting $100 worth of planes for $30. And the new PowerPack is an even better value.

Just do the math again and you will see it works FOR our customers and not against them!

[-E]

Note also that you're paying for the ability to download them (singly). As stated before, if you ONLY want one of them and/or GOT to have it NOW, then the singles make sense to the consumer. If you can wait a bit and even MIGHT like a minimum two of the bunch, then the CD is indeed the only way to go (in my book *grin*).

[Storm]

I'm not denying that the customer is getting alot for only $19, but you guys are trying to pass this off as a "money saver"...and in all reality, it isn't.

I don't know, I always loved your products because of its quality and the small price tag, and this marketing tactic came accross me as "unshockwaveish"...

...I got my WWII Fighters pack at CompUSA, so the Solo line doesn't really get you anything any faster.

[Scott - A2A]

Of course it's a money saver. Where can you get a downloadable aircraft of the same quality for under $20? Don't let the extremely good deal of the Wings of POWER boxed sets mess up the actual value. Don't compare it to the boxed set, compare it to the competition. The only reason why the boxed set is $30 is because retail would not accept it for any more.

Scott.

[thefrog]

I'm very happy I can download the planes individually. The last thing I need is for my wife to see a box to arrive in the post with flight sim software inside it! And I'm really only interested in the BF-109 and the Spit (which I will get when it's released - not too long hopefully?) Dave.

[toddw]

Well the thing to remember here "Storm"... if the solo products are selling @ $20 each... then the buying customer is satisfied with the pricing... it's self regulating in other words... if sales were down and remained down, then a price adjustment would be in order... but certainly I can see your point of view... the downloaded package is more cost effect for the Dev, because of no packaging costs, but the downloads have to be hosted... and bandwidth cost money.... but then there is the convenience factor of the download... so the long short of it is... there is more to pricing than just comparing an single apple to a create of apples.

Todd,