Enough Is Enough!!! The Ongoing Saga!!! It's Almost The 3 Year Anniversary

No way...

if this means that the standard route pricing is now £32.99, the absolute cheek of this company is insane.

when JT revealed Preston - Carlisle with a brand new £32.99 price tag, that was understandable, the route had a lot of things going for it and it was detailed and long enough to warrant it, Zwolle Groningen had 2 new locos, fair enough, locos are expensive to make. Same with the Czech route, that was incredibly detailed with a bunch of different varients and 2 new locos.

however, as the standard route pricing? What the hell are DTG thinking? Did they not earn enough from the 6 iterations previously? Do they seriously have to raise prices again?

Unless DTG or other third party devs actually puts in effort to make DLCs worth it, its the worst thing you can possibly do...

If £32.99 becomes the standard price for routes, what would be the price for super detailed routes, like the Czech routes, the JT routes, the TSG routes and other routes that are incredibly detailed and filled with loads of different things?

£35.99? £39.99?

the absolute nerve, honestly, I cant believe this company sometimes.

 

Sorry you feel that way old chum, but I don’t intend to leave the forum. If you don’t like what I have to say put me on your ignore list…

 

No problem its you're choice. You are the one that have a lot of complaints. I thought maybe you don't like the game so it's better that you move on and enjoy other games on the market.

 

Gotta make up for that lost Gen8 income somehow.

 

The employment cost of people is a lot more than their salary. NI, pension contributions, office space, IT, line management and support activities (like payroll and HR), training etc. Their actual cost to the business is probably nearer twice what they get paid.

 

Sorry, are you serious?

Because if a company were to spend twice as much money as it earns, it would have gone bankrupt long ago and would no longer be in business.

 

I think you misunderstand me. I'm saying the true cost to a business of employing an individual is a lot more than the salary they are paid.

If I employ you on £30K a year, the full cost to my business will be nearer £60K a year, so you have to be productive.

This is in the context of OldVern's comment above about apparently unnecessary roles at DTG.

 

DLC has been £32.99 for a while now, at least for the TSW6 stuff. There's still content on the XBox store from older games that was priced lower, but whenever a route arrived on XBox in the last year or so it's been that price, apart from the Thames Valley Branches.
I'm bracing myself for a "costs are higher than we anticipated, we're having to nudge prices up to £35" around the time of the December update when console versions don't get the lovely new lighting features, or extra layers for forthcoming routes.

 

In defence of DTG, the new prices aren't unreasonable, taking into account inflation.

Routes in TSC and the early years of TSW were £25, which people seemed to find acceptable.

According to the Bank of England's inflation calculator, something costing £25 in 2020 should now cost £32.81, if it's risen exactly with inflation. DTG don't look like they are profiteering.

 

Yes but as I pointed out, this is entertainment not food, gas, electricity or water. It should be pitched at what people are prepared to pay. And most route DLC’s with one (or no) new train have been priced at £29.99. The only sweetener they could bring is the return of the 5 or 10% off discount for a pre release purchase.

And at this point maybe DTG do need to do a serious assessment of how they can cut costs (but not product quality) to keep the price of DLC attractive.

Even if this was a totally bug free game and high quality DLC (which it isn’t) it doesn’t justify that sort of price level.

 

Sorry, but over the past 10 years the prices of TSW have hardly increased. You can’t really claim that it has become excessively more expensive over a decade, especially when you compare it to triple‑A games, which have easily gone up by 20–30% in the same period.

 

Raising the prices, especially at this moment, is not a smart move in my opinion. The quality of the product is not good enough, the blurry texture issues are going on for to long now and some route specific issues are never fixed. This all is not really justifying a price raise and then there is that level of what people seems a fair price and what not. For a good product, 30 - 33 Euro is acceptable, 36 Euro was for me already not feeling as a good price point anymore. They did already routes of 40 Euro, but for me this was not good value for money. Maybe if a route is exceptional or when they include more train, so you don't need layers.

The last point about layers is another thing, once you bought that route of 36 or now 40 Euro, you aren't there. You need other routes for layers to get a somehow busy line and other routes for only some static stock.

So for 40 Euro, I expect better quality and more included with the route, so I don't have to buy other routes for static stock and other layers. I also expect less reused locos, BR 185 and Class 66 comes to mind.

 

Triple A games tend to work, and have the same features across all their platforms.

 

If there are going to be patch updates and core improvents that go along with these price increases then sure. but Dovetail are offering the exact same experience (to console players at least) as the last few years..... and we still have DLC that needs reduced layers (read: less content) compared to the PC and history has proven Dovetail dont mind charging us the same price for an objectively different piece of DLC.

Seems the more one thinks about this the more squiffy it seems to be.... curious

 

It's the whole "look at these amazing new graphics and these things we have coming. Wishlist and pre-order it now on Steam and the Epic Game Store. Oh yeah, it'll be on consoles as well." They don't even have different horn noises for the UK locos anymore, which is part of how you tell the difference between them when you're out and about in real life.

 

Simrail has routes from one country, and has limited single player appeal unless you want to play multiplayer.

The experience on TSW is much more varied with yet another new country being added to the latest roadmap, it has routes dating back to the 60's and 70's.

It amuses me that some seem to be so keen to promote Simrail. How often have we seen "I'm off to play Simrail" for the poster a few weeks later, seemingly bored with Simrail is back here interested in the latest add-on for TSW. Rinse and repeat.

Does Simrail not have it's own forum?

When I can drive a first generation BR DMU in Simrail on a 24 hour timetable then I will take a closer look, this is something I can do in TSW on multiple routes.

 

If you dont like dont spill your'e money on TSW and play tripple A games... Those games are so perfect right?!

 

Yeah true...
By now it has become the usual tantrum… constantly complaining about prices and promoting SimRail as “the place to be.” It’s quite irritating and frankly unnecessary.

 

If one discusses prices, one should discount for general inflation. So you can gauge what the actual value of the increase is.
If you do this over a longer period (say to the beginning of TSW in 2017), prices may not seem so bad compared to then.

 

People have so much free time to write about this on forums. Although, a simple bot that would post hackneyed phrases about sim rails, poor quality, blurry textures, etc. would be enough.

 

Will draw a line under this one as far as mentioning the Polish Sim. As someone who has decades of experience on front line rail ops its not hard to get pretty tired of TSWs rigid routing, emphasis on points scoring and marketing spin and no way of saving more than once and still possibly crashing. In the end its only an opinion. Other sims such as Zusi, TSC and DRS also provide a decent few hours.

I am looking forward very much to the 108 on the JT routes and the remaster of NTP.

 

I haven't played it, it does look good in screenshots and you don't need to own just one simulator.

I personally don't see what it offers that TSW doesn't apart from Polish routes, multiplayer and the ability to be a signaller, the latter is something I would love to see in TSW.

Is Simrail perfect, does it not have flaws? And, if it does are they less than TSW's flaws?

As for the cost, no-one ever needs to buy anything full price, especially if you are on Steam. Work out whether a particuar DLC is going to be value for money at that price, if not, wait for a sale or don't buy it at all. Everything is going up related to running a business, wages, utility bills, rents, rates, NI contributions recently, stationary, other supplies. There gets to a point where a company cannot keep absorbing these extra costs. I see it as part of my day job.

But, I am glad I don't work for some of these business "experts". For 18 years we have been hearing how RSDL, then Dovetail in its former guise and current guise as part of Pullup or whatever they are called, is doing this wrong, charging too much, is dying, they don't know what they are doing etc. Well they are still here, do people not get bored of repeating the same conspiracy theories ad-infinitum.