$28 To Upgrade?

[BeaconSlash 0]

Obviously by the large number of posts quickly generated in this thread, this is a hot topic. A good number of YOUR PREVIOUS CUSTOMERS (including myself) have voiced honest, albeit sometimes brash, opinions regarding the pricing of your new product.I already know 10 people from other forums that I frequent that have stated they will not be buying ASV because of the price, and most of them are already owners of 4.5. On the low end, that's $280 for your company lost, just from people I've observed posting. Given the laws of probability, it's not likely that these are the only 10 people that will not give you repeat business.Many others have stated quite throughly that the marketing of the new product was at the very least somewhat, I'll say, off-kilter. A few days before I purchased 4.5, I specifically asked about whether there would be a discount when ASV comes out. The reply in the affirmative helped my decision to buy, but I was still skeptical of something EXACTLY like this happening. I put faith in HiFi to give a fair price to previous customers.On 05/18/05, essentialy $39 came out of my account for the purchase of this product that I had only very recently before then read rave reviews about. After watching so many sim companies flounder (read push back) on release dates on products, after even inferring that the product was "near release," I decided that, between the wait for your new product to come out, and the now falsified assumption that a fair discount would be given to previous users of AS4/4.5 for what (as stated above) amounts to an upgrade to an end user of this product, despite potentially complete re-development.For all those that bring the argument that it costs $100 an hour to fly in a real plane, or some other touchy monetary value comparison, or that this product gives you the hours and hours of enjoyment that you claim: I challenge you to place a dollar amount on just how much, monetarily, this program gives you and you expect it to give you in enjoyment or otherwise, and GIVE HiFi that money for the product. If you are that pleased with the product, I'm sure they would be perfectly happy with your sentiment.Toward that end, of course this company is going to enjoy hearing support from people who say these sort of things. What company would deny positive "word-of-mouth" marketing? Of course you are going to get new business, and surely there has been plenty that has already poured in. My argument is that there apparantly are many previous customers of your products who are put off by the way this situation was handled, both in terms of release and pricing issues.To me, this product is still an add on that smooths over some rough spots in how FS handles weather by default. Not to say that that I wasn't impressed with what 4.5 did, but firing it up for the first time still made me scratch about what I spend nearly $40 on. ActiveSky is an upgrade to an existing product, both M$ Flight Sim, and previous HiFi sim FS weather products.To that, when I purchased 4.5, I ACCEPTED the likelihood of an upgrade price. $28, though, was a rather unexpected gut-punch which I still reel from after reading all posts on this forum and more carefully considering HiFi's position. $5 or $10 I figured in my head would be the new "Hey, thanks for buying from us before" price, especially for a product in the same line of task goal. $20 I would have balked at, and would have liked to see some proof (other than pretty screens, area-restricted-demo possibly) of product viability, enhancements, and performance before throwing down for this upgrade. $28 (in all fairness, $27.99... but why do companies bother with the 1 penny off in this day in age anyway) though is, in my mind, a wholly unreasonable price for someone who recently placed faith enough in your company and the opinions of others to purchase product, only to be utterly suprised by this new development.I have little faith that HiFi will restructure pricing. They are (as yet another stated above) in the free market and taking advantage of their right to price and profit as they choose. With that said, I state my own high concern about the image HiFi gives as a customer-service oriented company when the product offered to very recent, possibly new customers (in my case, less than 1 month prior) when using a "brand new" piece of software essentially will cost them $67 total when they could have waited only slightly longer and paid "merely" $39 had people been better informed by the company prior.I'm just going to observe now and hope that HiFi attempts to make this right to its previous customers.~Nate

[Damian Clark 1,251]

Hi,Thanks to all for voicing your opinions.As stated in several other threads, anyone who has purchased AS2004.5 in the past 30 days who had no idea about ASV can write me directly at damianc@hifisim.com for feedback and resolution.We always want to be fair to our customers. I think if the history of things is examined, this becomes very apparent. We in no way are trying to do anything other than give our customers what they want and enjoy learning and making great software in the process.In the future we will most likely not be offering upgrade offers. We can at this time see no other way to avoid this kind of problem. Using the term upgrade in itself has been misleading, each of our new products for sale always contain dozens of major new features that take months to develop. Our intention in the matter was simply to provide AS2004.5 users a discount (most of which have purchased the software over 10 months ago). We have failed at providing a good solution for everyone, and we apologize. If there IS such thing as a good solution for everyone, we will be working towards that. We would appreciate any feedback in the matter by sending directly to damianc@hifisim.com.This thread is now locked...