Heya all. Hi IA.
I was thinking about prices on IA Studios site. They are more expensive than on Steam but that’s at least understandable since they include all editions. But there is something that is not understandable. Why are they always on permanent discount? Marketing tactics of making the deal more worthy than it is? Not a nice thing to do, not to even mention it might be illegal in some countries. Fallout 76 had similar case with one of their sold items. You can hear more about it on “The Fall of 76” YouTube video by Internet Historian, timestamp - 23:26. Now true, not all of your games debuted with discounted price that stayed on, but I’m pretty sure at least CI5 did.
Can we get some info about how long this sale will last or if you plan on slashing the pre-discount price permanently?
When the website was launched in 2000, $20 was the industry-standard price for a downloadable game, so IA games were priced accordingly.
As far as I can recall, I added code to the website to support a 50% discount which originally only ran during Christmas each year.
A few years later, one of the big channels/distributors came along and suddenly slashed the typical price to $7. Suddenly, the difference from IA website prices and the same games found on other portals became too large. A price drop was necessary to remain competitive, but I didn’t want it to be permanent as I felt that $7 is too low, and would possibly/hopefully be a phase and not catch on. To that end I re-used the code for the 50% discount, which I applied all year round.
A few more years passed, and it became apparent that the $7 price point was here to stay, so I was never able to revert the discount.
The discount is still there because it’s the path of least resistance (for me). The website is 100% hand-coded and maintaining it has become an increasingly large burden, so “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it”.