PMDG raises prices for US customers?

[JDWalley 354]

>So at issue is that PMDG raised its prices across the board.>Without mentioning it clearly on their website.The last bit is the important one. Any company has the right to set prices wherever they want, just as any consumer has the right to refuse to pay the higher price.What I object to here is what looks to me like a somewhat-underhanded way of raising prices that has the potential to fool customers. Since the price used to be $54.95, and is now 54.95 Euros, people who have been thinking about buying this add-on and finally decided to take the plunge could easily go through the e-Commerce site, see the familiar "54.95" price, and not give the currency a second thought. After all, PMDG is a U.S. company (based in Nevada), so why wouldn't that price be in dollars, especially since all the reviews, etc., list it as being $54.95? (This is even more so, since there is no mechanism to display the price in different currencies on that site.) It would only be a month or so later, when the consumer gets their credit card bill and sees a much higher charge than they agreed to, that they would find out what happened...but, by then, the transaction would be final.In fact, that's almost what happened to me. I was all set to make the purchase earlier this week, until I just happened to notice the Euro symbol. Instead of continuing, I sent an e-mail to PMDG, and got the not-too-convincing reply that their e-Commerce partner required that their product be priced in Euros, and had no means to do a currency conversion on the site (which must make them a pretty amateurish outfit, since virtually every other Europe-based e-store has no problem doing so). I sent a quick reply asking why, then, it wouldn't make more sense to purchase the CD version from one of the sites that were still charging only $59.99 for it? Was the downloadable version more recent, with more features, etc.? Needless to say, I didn't get an answer...

[Guest A32X]

The way PMDG are operating at the moment isn't on! They've hacked up prices, on the quiet, and deleted any discussion of it in their forum. This too is for old products, not to mention they've started making derogatory remarks aimed at other developers! For example: you can buy the 747-400, boxed format, for less than $60 in the UK, including packaging. Why pay nearly $75 for a download version? And ofcourse we all know about PMDG's 'Extended Download Service' let's make that an $80 download. From now on it makes sense to wait for the CD version !

[JDWalley 354]

Check the main AVSim page for a link for American customers to Aerosoft's Victoria Day sale. Over there, you can purchase the boxed version of PMDG's 747-400 for only $50.00 (and, yes, those are in dollars). As an extra bonus, shipping is free! $50 or around $75...which would you choose?As far as I know, this offer only lasts through Monday, so, if you've been hesitating on whether or not to buy, this might be your best chance.(By the way, here's the link you need: http://www.aerosoft.com/cgi-local/us/iboshop.cgi?show440)

[Guest A32X]

also the topic should be headed; PMDG raises prices for all customers.:(

[JDWalley 354]

>From now on it makes sense to wait for the CD version !Why do I get the feeling that you won't see many CD versions of their products from now on? As long as it's download-only, changing the price at any time only requires a few keystrokes -- and buyers will have no choice but to "put up or shut up."(BTW, I notice that PMDG won't allow posting of business matters on their forum here, including in the thread about the MD-11 being FSX-only. God forbid that anyone should mention the main motivation for companies like PMDG to make their new products FSX-only -- the sooner they convince us to switch over to FSX in order to run their new products, and thus the sooner they get us used to running FSX as our "default" flight sim, the sooner we'll need to buy new FSX-compatible versions of all their old products we already own. Just think...at current exchange rates, even if they keep the prices the same, new FSX versions of their 747 and 737NGs will wind up costing us at least $160 total.)

[EngineRoom 205]

It's not that PMDG will no longer accept US Dollars...It's that they have arbitrarily changed their price to Euros, and not adjusted the price to take into account the exchange rate.This means that we *ALL* have to pay considerably more for their products now, regardless of what country we are in or currency we use. What appears particularly bad about this move is they have applied it to their existing products, not just the future ones.

[JDWalley 354]

>What appears particularly bad about this move>is they have applied it to their existing products, not just>the future ones.Actually, as I posted earlier, what makes this particularly bad-looking was that they essentially raised prices simply by changing a currency symbol. It was a "stealth" price-increase that would be unnoticable to most customers, who would see the usual "54.95" price without noticing the new currency symbol, and wouldn't find out they'd really paid nearly $75 until a month or so later when their credit-card bill arrived, too late to do anything about it.

[EngineRoom 205]

Just to clear things up, as there appears to be a misunderstanding by a few people here:The change in pricing from PMDG affects everyone, not just US customers. Changing prices from US Dollars Euros means *EVERYONE* pays more, regardless of the country you are in or currency you use because PMDG have not adjusted the price to take into account the exchange rates.To give an example:54.95 US Dollars = 40.67 Euros/27.82 Pound Sterling/59.84 Canadian Dollars/66.61 Australian Dollars.Now....54.95 Euros = 74.24 US Dollars/37.58 Pound Sterling/80.84 Canadian Dollars/89.99 Australian Dollars.As far as I can tell the products haven't changed, they have just (very quietly) increased the price by more than 35% for *ALL* of us.

[JDWalley 354]

>As far as I can tell the products haven't changed, they have>just (very quietly) increased the price by more than 35% for>*ALL* of us.Exactly. And I wonder how many European customers likewise figured that the price on their website was $54.95, and assumed that the exchange rate meant that they'd only be paying 40 or so Euros?Probably not as many as in the U.S., since I'm sure a lot more people there would quickly recognize the "Euro" symbol, whereas most Americans don't even know about it and would probably think it was just some odd graphic glitch. But I'm sure some would fail to notice.One interesting thing I found from PMDG's reps on their forum here is that, supposedly, 85% of their sales are to people in the European Community. Considering the population difference, that implies that U.S. sales have been pretty disappointing. I somehow doubt raising the price 35% is going to improve them any...

[CanadaOne 36]

PDMG may chage what they wish in whatever currency they wish. It's a free world. (Well, parts of it almost are.)But unless it is made very clear on their site that long standing US prices have changed to Euros (maybe it has, I don't know), it is unethical at best, a blatant rip off at worse.As for the excuse of not allowing discussions of internal business practices on their forums in order to delete threads about the issue...Cheesy. And it is ackowleged as cheesy and will be remembered as cheesy. When in doubt - disallow the dissenting opinion. :-walksmile "La-la-la-la-la. Sorry, I can't hear you. I'm walking away now."

[boshar 6]

Wrong the old dollar price converted to Euro's came to 41 Euro. The new price is 55 Euro. Percentage wise the price hike is about the same for Europeans. See my other post for a real numbers example.

[EngineRoom 205]

The cynical viewpoint on this would be to say this is simply a rather underhanded way to generate more income for PMDG.A more reasoned viewpoint would be to say that PMDG realise that going down the FSX only route will hurt their sales because they are excluding the sizeable part of the customer base who are staying with FS9. Now unless PMDG can come up with some absolutely genius programming and create detailed simulations of sophisticated airliners without crippling FSX performance I expect their sales will be decreased further. After all, who wants to pay upwards of 50 Euros for an MD-11 that will run at 10fps on most people's systems? By increasing their prices they may be thinking they can claw back some cash from the people who will buy whatever the cost or performance, in order to offset the lost income from customers who are not prepared to pay the high prices or put up with poor performance. Just an idea...I do remember when the 747 was released in 2005, and there was something of an outcry about it being the first aircraft to break the 50 US Dollar mark. Just imagine going back in time to 2005 and telling everyone "That's nothing, in 2007 you will have to pay nearly 80 US Dollars for EXACTLY THE SAME aircraft!"Is this really progress? Or cynical developers trying to milk the FS cash cow for all it's worth?

[JDWalley 354]

>But unless it is made very clear on their site that long>standing US prices have changed to Euros (maybe it has, I>don't know)It hasn't. I had to send an e-mail to PMDG to confirm that a) the price is now in Euros and :( there's no way on the site to tell what the price in dollars will be (keeping in mind that the exchange rate may well change, possibly for the worse, between the time you hit the "order" button on their website and the time your card is actually charged).The only way you can tell is if you know enough to recognize that funny lower-case "e" after the price as the Euro symbol...and I doubt more than one in five potential U.S. purchasers would know that.

[Guest A32X]

I'd like PMDG to end this speculation and tell their customers why their old products are now so expensive, in my mind it's the only way to get some credibility back... However even if you assume a heavy 5% inflation over three years (since when did a piece of software go up with inflation) the 'new price' should still only be around 45 Euros. Once again I believe some explaining needs to be done by PMDG...

[Tabs 2,790]

FYI, Robert has made several posts addressing this in our forum in the two active sticky threads - please read those.Yes, we've raised prices, it's not a conspiracy or trick - it actually happened almost 2 weeks ago and no one noticed until our new site was announced here.That said, please try to refrain from jumping to more conclusions about what this means for future products and so on. Everything I've seen regarding that will most likely be very wrong.I was deleting posts earlier today because it is a forum rule that we don't allow this type of discussion - it's a support forum, not a place for armchair economists to tell us how our business should be run. I don't make PMDG policy, I just enforce it as the forum moderator. Please try to understand that before you start attacking me personally over something you're upset about. I saw several instances of it on other forums today and I received a couple of vaguely threatening emails earlier - not cool. I can't unilaterally make the decision to speak for the company on large issues like this and the policy is to delete rule violations. From now on I'll be modifying my actions in the form of actually pasting the forum rule that was violated over top of the post that would normally have been deleted, as simply deleting without an explanation as before does not work.EngineRoom - regarding FS addon companies - I think it's important to realize that it isn't a homogeneous industry. Yes, there are professional companies like us or Flight 1 who are doing this as a full time business - we've never denied that we do that, it's what allows us to make the products we make. At the same time, I'm sure that it IS actually true of many developers that they are doing this in their spare time. I think it would be a bad thing for the community to get the idea that there aren't developers of all sizes and resources out there. I can think of several right away who are one-man-shows out of their houses.