Somehow I think you don't want to undestand. Ok, you won. I'm going to talk to a parking meter. May be this is more productive.
Yes, we have seen with AMS2 how the season pass has not been a good buy as a lot of promised content has not been delivered, in part because they are still fixing the game and when they release free content or new DLCs without finishing previous ones, people get annoyed. I also understand that a game like RRE is closer to end of life than beginning so although the premium pack is better value now than in 2016, you missed those years being able to use the items released at that time. I think the "buy all content" button would ideally put everthing in the basket listed individually but applying a flate rate cost in vRP as an incentive to buy everything at once starting 12 months after purchase of premium pack. If you wanted to pick and choose liveries or cars then you would have to do it manually like now and with no special price. I´d be aiming for around 2500 vRP for 1 year of missing content at regular prices that way those who buy the 65 euro 10k vRP pack would have premium pack plus 1 more year all inclusive. When considering a year typically includes 3 or 4 totally new tracks and 5 or 6 totally new cars plus any liveries and annual refresh packs like ADAC or WTCR, that seems fair. So then the buyer has the choice of buying new content immediately on release at regular prices (with any linked discount) or waiting 12 months to use up their annual loyalty discount - this would appear in the store as a countdown till it is available so people can see how long they need to wait. If they prefer to wait for more than a year then they would get more content but then the cost would be say 5000 vRP as they are into the third year. Someone who wants to support the game in exchange for all content would therefore have an annual consumption of 2500 vRP in addition to the 10k vRP spent for the first two years so in real money that would be 65 euros plus 35 euros more more if they were to buy a 5k vRP pack so 100 euros expense for 4 years of content. Using Steam wallet instead would make the cost closer to 130 euros, so in line with the AMS2 3-year season pass. It´s effectively a reverse season pass as you would be buying content once it has been released. If you want to buy discounted vRP in advance to do so that´s on you. You could also just snipe individual packs or items if and when they go on sale, as now, but at the same price as everyone else - just please fix the WTCR pricing. Right now a 2019 Hyundai costs 1 euro for everyone and I think that´s max what the other duplicated cars should cost too for those that already own them.
I´m member since early 2013 and I spend over 700 € for content in Raceroom so far. I bought the pack very early and so all new content had to buy seperately. So it went very expensive so far. Is this fair or not, is the question.
You suggested a 20% discount, right now there's a 50% discount. If you mean an additional discount that will stack with sale discounts (like the 50% right now), that wouldn't really solve the problem at hand, would it? Even allowing people to buy the premium pack again won't. Theoretically you could still end up in the same situation of being better off discarding your account and getting a new one (which is a terrible situation, there's no denying that), even with an additional 90% discount applied to your purchases if you just waited long enough after buying premium. What then, a yet higher discount? You'd eventually end up giving away new content for free to users who "play" the system right, which would be everyone once people figured out how it's done. Right now you can get individual items at 50% off. How much higher would that discount have to be for you to feel you're paying a just price?
Maybe you missed the word permanent. A discount, which is offered to owners of premium pack in store permanently, not on top at sales.
Let's look the discussion again. Arthur Spooner: "They could as well not offer any discounted content packs at all and this discussion wouldn't even exist". Me: The game probably wouldn't exist either because paying the default price for all content would be a very bad value for money, compared to other racing sims except iRacing. You: Those other sims are abandoned after 2-3 years and get a new release at full price. Me: Even considering this (and putting those new releases together with the original games), Raceroom would be a worse value for money. Raceroom needs discounts, a lot of good discounts, to stay competitive. That's why they are there. You can't just treat them as "extra".
To elaborate further, the discount system in the R3E store is a clever way to reach two goals: 1) Make the game reasonably priced and accessible for new players. 2) Create a steady income from future content to offset the costs of constantly updating the game. When you pay $5 for a new car, only a part of these $5 go to cover the development of this car, the rest goes to cover the online features, bugfixes, new features and updates to old content. So it's a kind of a one-time purchase plus a subscription for live service features. It works good when a player gets the game and then sticks with it for a long period of time: the player then gets all the benefits of a lot of various content and a constantly updated game. The costs stay reasonable at every moment: 50-80 Euro for a game with this amount of content is adequate; a few bucks here and there is adequate too. But it doesn't work as good when a player drops the game for a few years. Now, he essentially has to pay the "subscription" money for all the time he didn't play the game, otherwise he won't get back to the state of owning all content. It wouldn't be as bad if, for example, the older content got discounted further and further each year - you would then pay for the latest content as much as everyone else, and then pay a bit more to get the rest of the missing content. This is what usually happens with older DLCs in other games, they get a bigger discount (or the whole bundle gets a bigger discount the older the game is). This is the part that's missing in R3E, on top of not having a somewhat convenient way to add all content you don't own.
What's the point in that though? Do you enjoy the game less from mere awereness that there's some content missing in your collection? I don't and I find the complaints to be based on this bizarre presupposition. Every Premium Pack owner should have enough content to enjoy the game with a few small complementing purchases a year. And if somebody abandoned the game for a few years, I don't really see a reason for them NOT to start a new account and buy the Premium Pack. They don't have much to hang on to and they'll get their money's worth, even considering the content they already owned.
Well, you´d have to start a new steam account, lose any vRP you had on your old account and of course your ingame ranked data would be split between two accounts - maybe useful if you were ever banned from some dedi servers. FOMO is definitely there, you are right - it´s what keeps these companies running! I have another suggestion that might keep everyone happy - both new and old players and result in minimum changes to the backend and pricing policy Make the Pro pack, which right now is a decoy option anyway as it is only there to push people to the starter or premium, into an Update Pack. For the same price as now the pro pack is refreshed every 2-3 years with the latest most popular content and, most importantly, you can buy it if you have it or the premium pack already. They already did that when they refreshed the track packs last year but not with the starter pack refresh. As of today, the pack could include stuff like: WTCR21, DTM21, ADAC21 (if it comes), GT4 pack, Scirocco, plus a dozen of the most recently released tracks. In two or three years time, when those annual ones are outdated and there are enough new tracks, rerelease it. Would it cannibalise Premium pack sales? Maybe but you would get older players buying both packs and rebuying the Update pack so it would compensate. New liveries etc would obviously be up to the player to buy separately.
Just because it's permanent doesn't necessarily exclude stacking, does it? Sale discounts also stack with the existing permanent pack discounts. So what about packs, would it stack with any of the permanent discounts that are already there? Or none? Just a 20% discount on loose items? And honstely, what good would that discount do? Would you really rather buy stuff with a 20% discount when you know there's periodical sales with a discount more than double that? I have my doubts many people would make use of that if it wouldn't stack with other discounts.
I don't. But even without packs you wouldn't (have to) end up spending the loose item price, would you? There'd still be raceroomstore.com, there'd still be the 18% bulk discount, there'd still be the periodical sales. And those other games still wouldn't be the cheap options some try to make others believe, if you did a fair comparison. I simply don't get how this whole system you're imagining should work, and I also don't know of any market that works this way. "I bought a car from you ten years ago but then I barely used it. Now I want to buy a new car from you, and because I didn't get my money's worth on the first one you sold me I think I deserve a considerable discount on the new one."
Let's imagine a situation. Someone dropped money on Premium pack 5+ years ago, had a bit of fun with the game and left. Perhaps for other sim, perhaps for other things in life. Now in 2022, he and his rookie simracing friend want to try Raceroom again. The rookie friend can pay 65 Eur to have all the content in the game. The guy who owns old premium pack would have to spend hundreds, or even close to 1000 Eur to get the same content. I think it's really hard to justify how this makes sense. Just because someone was unlucky to support the game in its infancy by buying premium pack, over time the person needs to pay hundreds of percent more for the rest of the content compared to new player. I get small discrepancy, some incentive for new players is good to have, but in Raceroom case the difference can get absolutely massive.
Yes, that´s exactly the scenario exclusive to RRE. No other game is more expensive for old time players than new ones to own everything. The counter argument is that player 1 was able to use and enjoy the content (including retired cars like Citröen and RUF GT3) for 5 years - opportunity cost exemplified. Maybe the current Premium Pack should cost 50% more to reflect inflation and extra content. Would that be fairer?
Unlucky? The deal was clear. You get everything Raceroom has now, and buy whatever future content you want later separately. And he had five years to get his money's worth. He had this content for five years and didn't use it. He made a bad purchase, that's all. A stupid one, if it was entirely his call to abandon the game. You don't pay 50 Euros just to move on. I don't see how the game's financial model should account for people making bad financial decisions. And also again we go with that ridiculous notion that you should have ALL THE CONTENTS! All of them! Why? That's just jealousy and entitlement. If you want all the content, pay for it, like the deal said. Or make a new account, get the Premium Pack again and be grateful Raceroom won't ban you for scamming them and using the one-time-deal for the second time. Because yeah, that's a scam. They gave you the entire content with expectation that you will buy more stuff later. Don't play dumb, guys. You knew the deal.
This whole section of your post is, of course, absolutely irrelevant to the whole discussion. How much value the early adopter gets from his purchase of the early version of premium pack has zero connection to the discrepancy in price between early/late adopter for the rest of the content. The hypothetical guy in my post could have gotten great value out of his 65 Eur during his time, doesn't change the fact he needs to pay hundreds of Eur later on to get the content which can be purchased by new player for fraction of it, effectively penalizing the early adoption by hundreds of percent increase in price on the subsequent content. Sure, it's not mandatory to own everything, personally I am skipping all those yearly reskins like WTCR etc, but again, that is pretty irrelevant.
That's what a one-time-deal is. Its inherent part is that after you use it, you cannot use it again. You can't call it penalization when it's a known part of the deal, unless it's self-penalization. So I'd say it's pretty relevant if people are complaining about a deal they willingly and knowingly entered.
Show some actual numbers or data, please. I'd like to see these cases and why/how it is that they can't make use of packs or sale discounts. And again, which other real world market rewards early adopting? Have you ever made any kind of service contract? People who made that same contract one year after you did most likely paid a lower fee, every single month.
New content since 2016/7 is about 150 euros in cars at current sale prices, even taking advantage of packs. I only calculated single livery buys for cars not in packs so it will be much more if you want all liveries for all cars. It´s approx 65 euros for tracks. This is not taking advantage of packs as it does not seem possible to buy track packs when you have the premium one. Without sales that would be closer to 300 euros and then there are many liveries on top of that so 500 euros is not hard to spend if you are clumsy, impatient or both. Go back to 2015 and it could well be 700 euros depending on stuff like linked discounts,whether they bought vRP and so on. That´s another argument in favour of the buy all missing content option to prevent people falling into a trap of paying more than they could. There are some rewards for early adopters such as crowd funders and beta backers in the software sector as they get special prices and or side benefits - I think RRE also gave out some promo codes back in the day to early players and there was even a 50% off everything sale, but that´s before my time so I don´t know the details and if there was a premium pack then. Another example is the housing sector where buying off plan is cheaper than when the house is built and also the property rental market where rent increases are capped by inflation rather than market factors, provided you keep the same contract. One could argue that new RRE customers should get a better deal as games have a finite life and they are unlikely to get another 8 years out of the same game especially unless offline access is provided.
There is, rF2 is a lot more expensive to buy in if you are old time players. I still havent bought Monza and Spa there.