I'm interested to know at what price people would purchase every route DLC. Select the highest price you would be willing to pay to purchase each and every individual route DLC for TSW.
18€ will be great price, but I don't purchase every route anyway. Only freight routes have value for me.
I think Matto140's is the important point - they don't intend everybody to buy every DLC. That's why the new Canada route has got everyone so riled - it's a switching route, for people who love switching duties. Some people like passenger routes, so – at least currently – the new DLC is not relevant to them at all. Only when every route contains a decent length of track for freight duties, plenty of stations for passenger services and huge yards for switching, can you ever expect them to appeal to every buyer. Personally, I like a range of services, and have a range of routes which I jump between, but I've only really ever bought them in the sales, so I've paid maybe £10 for a route. I think I've only bought one or two locos where I thought a route could use a bit more variety and again, only where they've been significantly reduced. As I have said on other threads though, if the routes came with their respective locos bundled in, the value of each DLC would be increased and I'd be more inclined to buy more of them, earlier, at a higher price. If they released Canada with the promise of a route extension and GO services to Toronto to be added for free within 3 months, I'd probably buy earlier and for more, knowing I could do the switching elements, and the route would continue to entertain with passenger tasks coming later. This would be especially true if the locos were usable on multiple routes, but came only with the route - eg, the DB BR 155 can be used on MSB, RRO etc, but could come as part of the RSN package. It'd be up to DTG to do the sums and see if the loss of the (lower cost, lower volume) loco income would be offset by an increased cost and volume of route DLC sales.
I'm just trying to establish a baseline price at which everyone would purchase every DLC. Nothing more.
Even 40/50 euros, as long as they are German routes (or OBB, SBB CFF FFS),and locomotives (such as ICE, Shunter, IC etc). AsIo i would pay 100 euros for Editor / QD. It's not a question of money for me. It is a matter of time. I don't want to wait much longer ..
You missed the opportunity to add higher Prices to your Poll... I would happily pay more for a Route if it was longer/more detailed, or even it its a niche route, but one i am interested in.
If I had to buy every route then I’d be happy with £9.99 I think. There are routes I’ve no interest in (WSR) for example and the German routes. When not in a sale RSN and MSB still at £24.99 is crazy.
As with others, I'd be willing to pay a lot more for a route that particularly interested me, or for an important expansion to a route I already enjoy. I'd love an expansion to NTP to shift it back in time by a few years to give us class 124 DMUs, Mark 1s (we could have carriage swaps at Huddersfield) and a greater variety of locomotives and wagons. Oh, and extend the route to Healey Mills - it's only two more miles, after all! There might be £100 worth of extra DLC in that little lot, but of course it's only going to appeal to people for whom Northern Transpennine already appeals. As for new routes, I can't see myself bothering with things like OSD or ECW since I have little interest in the settings and they seem, from a superficial glance, too similar in style to routes I already own but which I don't actually play (CSX and GWE respectively). I have absolutely no interest in WSR either, even though the locomotives are a good era for me. You could price them at a penny and I wouldn't think them worth buying, to merely clutter up menus. However, offer pre-1960 Aldgate to Rickmansworth (London Underground Metropolitan Line) and I'd bite your arm off!
I voted for the highest price. And like Matt said at the end the routes so far are similar in content. If you compare PC and OSD for instance. PC is more than 50 miles long, but it has little freight yards only. OSD is about half the lengh of PC, but it has much bigger freight yards than PC. I would also say I would pay higher prices for loco DLC too. Especially if we get special locos like steam locos, because these machines are very complex. I would pay more for big American freight locomotives too, because like in real these machines are much bigger compared with European diesels and so it will take much more effort to build it in TSW too.
There isn't a price at which I would buy every route. I wouldn't buy every route even if they were £5 each. I'm only going to buy what interests me. If on the other hand a route was offered which was something I found very interesting, I'd be willing to pay much more than the £25 standard price.
Yes I would. At £2 per route. And only then if each route had at least three sets of motive power and three sets of rolling stock, whatever the passenger/freight mix. That would be a fair price, in my opinion. But, I wouldn't want them, necessarily, to be sold as single units at this price. I'd prefer to see a pack of ten routes, coupled to a decent UI, for a total general price of about £25. And it would be acceptable to me for such a product to be initially sold at £40. So, ten routes with thirty loco/MUs and thirty different types of coaching and freight rolling stock - as a minimum. This isn't, of course, what people are used to - but that doesn't make the current process right. The current process appears (to me) to be based on what happens with TS20xx. If this goes on with TSW, then there will eventually be a huge back cataolgue of old routes - and these could well be sold at the very high ultra-premium price of £25, even five or ten years down the line. The current model for sales appears to me to be: 1. Early price premium (as is usual with nearly every consumer product) 2. Light price/demand discounting (discounting from the notional ultra-premium price) 3. Deep discount (60 to 75%) approaching a nearly reasonable value 4. Permanent ultra-premium back catalogue pricing My belief is that stages 1 to 3 provide a short-term surge in income (and really useful if the organisation is really bad at financial planning and risk management), but I reckon that the real money comes in over the long haul, in stage 4. Stage 4 caters for the customer that comes to TS20xx or TSW very late on, but then suddenly spends £500 or £1000, or even £5000. These rare customers, often referred to as "whales" in the industry, are the prize in the hunt, because "one whale is worth many many fishes....". Although... there might be smaller whales that only frequent American, British or German waters. But to answer your question, more generally, from a wider public audience, the number of people that buy TSW (on PS4), but never ever buy any DLC at any price at all is the circa 85% that are never ever retained, because they are turned off from buying any more of the product (even though they knew it would be about trains....), because the UI and "gameplay" is so atrociously designed for the average person (and I mean the average person interested in trains, or perhaps "planes, trains and automobiles")....... to tolerate. With all that said...... Dovetail can do whatever they like with their business. It is their business. And customers can do whatever they want with their money and their time, because that is their money and time. What I would like to see is some attempt made to retain the 85% to 90% of customers that are lost, every time a copy of TSW is bought. I would like to see Dovetail make a success of TSW. But, frankly, if Microsoft roll in and do a 2025 "bells and whistles" trains version of the 2020 Microsoft Flight Simulator, and Dovetail melts into history, then I wouldn't be massively sorry for the company because it would be their own fault for not seizing the opportunity that they currently have.
In the current state, about $19.99. That seems reasonable for what we have been getting. As others have expressed, if they offered more fleshed out routes I would be willing to pay even more than what they want now for their routes.
At this stage it's interesting to see the two people who value TSW route DLC the lowest at £1.99. I think that in itself speaks volumes. They want perfection but don't want to pay anything for it. And one has explained that he wants more than is currently offered in a route as a minimum for the paltry amount he is willing to shell out of his pocket money. The other consistently complains about DTG's business model and why they should employ him. I think these guys should team up and make a train sim. I'd definitely buy their perfect in every detail £2 routes and help make them both millionaires. Bring it on.
Just to be clear - I do not want to be employed by DTG, although I would like TSW to be a success. Anyway, I just thought I would leave this bit of random text here, which seems to imply that eight routes in a (presumably reasonably priced) package is possible (or, at least, it once was possible): "The first release of RailWorks contained all five real-world routes of the original European and North American releases of Rail Simulator, and added three new fictional routes: Hedborough North, a large UK goods yard, Seebergbahn, a route set in the Alpine region and Castle Rock Railroad, a route based around Denver, Colorado."
I only buy UK routes, so my logic was based on the only UK route I don't own (ECW) which is worth £9.99 to me, so that's how I voted. If I was to consider every route DLC then my price would be much lower and possibly even zero, simply because they don't all appeal to me. That didn't seem reasonable, hence my logic.
It's probably down to the way the question is posed. DD asked, and reiterated, that he wanted to know a price for people to buy EVERY DLC. Since most people don't want EVERY DLC, the price would have to be unreasonably low to facilitate that. I usually pay around £10 in the sales, so that was my answer, but I haven't and wouldn't necessarily buy ALL of them at that price.
Exactly, as I started with the assumption that everyone would buy every DLC for 1p per DLC, then most would be happy to pay £1.99 per DLC for every DLC, with almost nobody prepared to buy every single DLC at £24.99. As it transpires most people have voted as though I was asking what price they think the DLC should be. So perhaps I wasn't clear enough. What I was wanting to see was whether setting the price of the DLCs at £4.99 would result in perhaps 6 or 7 times number of sales that would be made at £24.99, so DTG would actually make more money by lowering the price and selling far more units.
I think your interpretation of the question makes more sense than mine. I looked at it literally (possibly too literally...), when the OP was asking for: "...a baseline price at which everyone would purchase every DLC..." So - this would be a bit like the BBC TV Tax (the one where you have no choice but for the tax-payer funded State to pay Gary Lineker £10 per second to get his views on whether something was off-side....). Or a subscription where you must buy every model (whether you like it or not), or end the subscription. Personally - I would prefer the variety. But if I had to guess, I reckon there is a fairly good chance that individual TSW/TS20xx DLC is mostly bought by people that take your approach, and focus on just one area, be it British, German or North American - these also happen to be the three geographical areas that are probably most interested in physical railway modelling (plus Japan and Italy). I still think that £40 for ten routes is fair (generally). So, that is actually £4 per route (which wasn't an option in the poll) - for a mixed bag. But if you could get the three routes that you actually want for £30, then that's obviously better (for you) than £40 (including seven routes you don't want). But then again, to be completely honest, I am a complete hypocrite (which I openly admit), because I have spent about £200 on TSW...um....so far... After spending the first £100 I had serious doubts about whether it was sensible to spend more - but the TVL route, with RF Class 37s was just too much me..., so I took the bait... and bought RSN, and the Br 155 and the Class 31 at the same time.... ;-O Explanation: I looked at my beautiful N gauge departmental Class 37, still in its box, which I dare not run in case I damage the radio aerials on the noses. I bought that loco, at a bargain price, of about £100. Unused. My layout is currently "undergoing an electrical refit", which is marketing-speak for "it is currently without power, and I haven't continued the necessary works on it for over four years". And I have quite a few locos, a lot of them boxed and unused. And, um, quite a lot of rolling stock... Unused. With TSW, on the PS4, you can jump into a cab and get going - for hours and hours on end, if you want. From your sofa. Sitting down. With a cup of tea. So, I spent the second £100 chunk on TSW, because I knew that I, personally, would get £100 of value out of it....eventually, especially compared to the physical model of just one very nice yellow loco. And that is (for me) one aspect of the sheer brilliance of TSW, in a nutshell. I suspect that the above story will be familiar to many other people... But this is only currently true if you are prepared to perservere through the UI, and clamber your way through the broken scenarios, and if you are prepared to accept tha the software won't be tested at a basic level before it is put on sale, and that it will contain bugs that won't get fixed, etc. My main point (and, basically, my main theme): I'd like TSW to be more popular. I would like TSW to be accessible to 100% of the people that buy the software, and not just the 15% that don't get put off by the very poor packaging, that has, at its core, an utterly awesome product. I would like TSW's "packaging" to be fixed. I personally don't need to be hand-holded, but some sort of decent manual that actually explains how to explore the depths of the game, coupled with challenging progression on learning to drive without aids, would be a plus.... Surely it is essential...? I would also like TSW to be more affordable. As it happens, I am both time-rich and reasonably affluent, so for my sake, I could actually buy all of the TSW DLC at £25. I won't though. And I have stopped (um.... probably...), at TVL, and won't be going any further until TSW matures into a reasonable quality product, all round.... (um... probably).....
That's exactly what I thought you were doing. And I think that your apparent premise (cheaper DLC equals more sales) is likely to be right (but I don't know this for a fact). I thought that you were clear enough, but I think the general debate of whether it is worth spending £25 on the next DLC has influenced the results.... Anyway.... I don't completely blame DTG for charging £25 for a DLC. As soon as you can successfully sell a product for £25 to a very small number of very dedicated people, it is difficult to "unknow" that and stop yourself from doing it again, no matter how many other people get alienated in the process. And that number of "maximum" price payers is very very small (....on PS4, about 1% of people that purchased the base game buy any DLC at any price, so the number of purchasers at £25 is likely to be miniscule). With all that said, DTG have actually moved in the right direction on pricing with their "Collector's" edition of TSW, with six routes (possibly eight routes, on PS4...?) for an initial RRP of £40. And I applaud them for that. I was once criticised by a DTG employee for asking for exactly this to happen, but they did it anyway. But the reall killer, for me, is the ongoing extremely poor QA and QC. That's the thing that damages any estimation of value for the product, especially new DLC.
Whilst it seems difficult for DTG to "unknow" the £25 price tag, they seem to have no problem "unknowing" the route lengths and traction variety associated with such a price tag.
Having sold loco addons to TS1 for both £4.99 and £11.99 of similar levels of quality, I can say with some degree of certainty that the one at £4.99 didn't make it up in volume of sales compared with the other locos. It has not made anywhere even close to the same amounts of profits as the higher priced addons, certainly it did sell more, but simply halving the price does not correlate to double the number of sales and certainly not more than double. If you think you can make a route profitably for £4 then you simply can't, heck a loco addon for £4.99 could barely be counted as profitable let alone a route which has development costs like ranging into the tens maybe even hundreds of times higher.
Yes, £24.99 seems almost arbitrary. As you say, it's not as though each route DLC has a budget with the goal of producing a £24.99 per unit product as the content in each DLC varies so wildly. The same goes for the loco DLC. You have the Heavy Freight Loco DLC with the Class 40, Class 08 and two wagons, £11.99. The Class 33 DLC, includes only the Class 33, but still, £11.99. The marketing dept should be using sales data from previous DLCs, both TS2020 and TSW, to come up with the optimum price per unit.
I have always held you in quite high esteem, and my respect for you has further increased with your post above. Thank you for your honesty - it is really appreciated.
But... TSW is not the same as TS1/TS202x. At least, it doesn't have to be - it doesn't have to have the same barriers to entry as TS202x on PC... It's a completely different market, as I am sure you know, far better than me. TSW has far more potential to reach a wider audience on console (and PC), if the software can be properly designed to be reasonably user friendly, and reliable, and made to an acceptable standard. Also - a console product is usually more transient/ephemeral - so the long-term value can literally evaporate... Thankfully, for PS4, it looks like PS5 will be immediately PS4 compatible, so TSW will have another ten years of life in it... but that wasn't guaranteed to happen.
Not with TS2020 these days. Ten years ago however you certainly could. I worked on some of the first wagon DLCs for Railworks on Steam and we pulled in over £12,000 in sales for a single wagon and a few scenarios. That was purely because there were so few DLCs at the time. Now you'd be lucky to get even 5% of that figure for the same content. Whether TSW sales are currently like the good old days of Railworks before the market was saturated, I don't know. DTG is also at a disadvantage with TS development because they have so much flab that accompanies the development. For every £1 they spend on development they're probably spending 30p on rent, admin and HR. When you're in small development team you don't have those overheads. Fortunately for DTG, being subsidised by the tax payer offsets some of the extra costs in development, but certainly not all of them.
So - it's not quite arbitrary. It is set to an expected demand/yield, and if exclusivity is expected to be more profitable, irrespective of quality, then that's the path that gets taken. It's literally a case of "more is less". It's a shame, and quite cynical (in my opinion), but not everybody welcomes the facts of life. I am one of the exclusive bunch that can afford the price, and I have bought at premium price (until now), but I am not going to stop demanding a significant ramp up on quality with regard to the material that I have bought, which is still on sale in its defective state. NB: I genuinely believe that if a high quality approach is taken on console, that the demand/yield curve would look very different, and that prices could come down. Well, regarding the Marketing Department, I tend to agree with The Guide. And if a future copy of the Encyclopaedia Galactica drops into my lap and confirms that The Guide was prophetic in its opinion, then that wouldn't bother me very much at all.
I sincerely hope that you are not suggesting that DTG has got Gary Lineker on the payroll, at his standard rates.......... at taxpayer's expense.....?
It’s the location of the route that makes me download it. British and German Routes I think I have everything and I was happy with the prices. American routes though just don’t do anything for me, I wouldn’t download them if they were free. if Swiss content ever appears then I’d buy it (almost) regardless of cost. The value is entirely in the location for me, not in owning all the DLC’s.