I'm a sucker for packs. That is how Race07 hooked me into buying all the content and now Raceroom is doing the same thing. I first tried R3E back in closed beta and didn't buy into the whole individual car/livery business model. They were mostly fantasy cars at that point anyway so I pretty much forgot about it. But so much has changed now I can't keep my cart empty for long. I do think the pack discounts should be reworked so owning a car is weighted more heavily than the liveries. I feel slightly burned having bought DTM92 and the M3 and Volvo from the touring classics only to have the Touring M3 matched to the DTM and not getting much of a discount on the touring pack released days later but the content is so good it is hard to stay mad. I'm a little hesitant to buy individual cars now because of this but the Audi GTO should be a safe bet....right?
As long as they don't "overhaul" it to make it fit into whatever fantasy they want; like they did with the Touring Classics, why not.
Because he bought the car without discount and now he is buying a discount pack that contains the same car, so his 279 vrp are not 279 vrp anymore but it is a percentage of the pack, this percentage is the vrp less he will pay for the pack
Well, yeah... older users like us knows that system, but it's a bit difficult for a new user to understand that he has already invested 279 vRP for content out of a pack and than have to pay another 800vRP, what normally cost 899vRP. And when following the Discussions with this Pack or with the GTR2-Pack the most complains went in the direction that the users already own alot content and invested nearly as much vRP as the pack-price costs, but still have to pay more than 60% of the normal price for the pack.
So what? they will learn how we did. It is impossible to give 279 vrp back otherwise who bought 4 cars individually, 1116 vrp, has the right to claim a refund and have all livreries
What a great pack. One of my few gripes now is the inconsistent quality of the graphics; you have done such a great job with some of the recent car interiors and the detail on the Skyline is particularly impressive. Please, please, please update some of the older models to bring them up to the same level of quality as this
Well yeah, they can learn as we did, but it won't change the actual situation that there are always the same questions about the shop-system, pricing and the discounts and it wouldn't reduce the discussions after the disappointment that the discount for owned content isn't that high as expected. All those questions and discussions are indicators that there is a lack of transparency - even for hardcore-users - and a maybe problem in Price-Calculation. If you don't react on those indicators you will never make a step forward My Idea is just to reduce the gap between the full pack price and the price if you own content from the pack before, to make it an easier step buying the pack then... In my example of the Touring Classics-Pack I've already spend 796vRP for three cars and one BMW M3 livery before the pack-system even exist. Now with the new Touring Classics-Pack i still have to pay 705vRP. Owned Content 796 vRP Discounted Pack 705 vRP Sub-Total 1501 vRP - normal Pack -999 vRP Total Gap 502 vRP So I've spend slighlty more than 50% of the standard-Pack-Price. I don't want to say that you should get all the "rest"-content of the pack for free if you've already spend more vRP for the content in the pack before, but in my opinion the Refund should be a bit higher if you decide to buy the pack afterwards...
Currently being struck by kind of Klingon stubborness, I once again can only recommend to keep things simple - and forget all that "20% plus, 34,2% minus" stuff. Simply pack five cars and two dozen skins for them together, give it a price tag of ten Euros, and sell it as "get all or nothing at all". Life can be so simple. The complexity of microtransaction shop model is what keeps many potentially interested people away even before they tried the demo. And that you do not cure by making some cosmetic cuts in skin prices that already rank in the penny-price range anyway. The structure of the model is the problem, and the total cost if somebody calculates quickly what it would cost to get it all- and many potentially interested visitors do that when seeing the shop: they add it all together, end up with a price close to 200 Euros, maybe even count stuff double when adding single cars and tracks and packs together while not knowing it better, and are once and forever done with it - period. The first impression is what counts - and with this as a first impression, you loose quite many people already at the very beginning. I know how they tick, because I tick the same - it is very very rare that I accept to buy into online business models, extremely rare. Keep things simple. And cheaper. Its too expensive compared to the competition like AC, PC, GSC, and other racing titles out there. A 25% reduction on individual car skins will not do the trick. "Von Stöksken zu Hölzken", we would call that in German - from messy to even more messy.
But isn't that close to that what it is now? Touring Classics = one Pack, 4Cars, 39 additional Liveries, 10€. What's missing in your Model is the reaction on owned content.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmh, not my content. when I will drive a nissan, I play GT6. Sorry, not car`s for me to have fun.
sorry but you can't be so vague, if you are proposing a new model of price reduction for a pack, you should propose an exact model, atm S3R use this https://forum.sector3studios.com/in...ence-faq-and-game-features-w-i-p.72/#post-218 and this is exactly what I dont' want, again, for the WTCC2014, if I buy the 4 cars individually when there is a 50% off, I'll pay 558 vRP, if I buy 10000 vRP I get a 35% discount http://www.raceroomstore.com/shop_en/vrp , so 10000 vRP for 65 euros, so I get 558 vRP for 3.6 euros, in short: I can drive all 4 cars for 3.6 euros and I dont' care skins, it's enought to see them on track it's simple after reading FAQs, I don't want to be penalized for fault of some guys too lazy to read the FAQ
I keep saying this time and again but the fact that these discussions keep happening is symptomatic of the sales model and pricing being convoluted, confusing and inconsistent.
Well I would like to go to detail, but we all as normal users don't have a chance for going deeper than I did in my posts before, as we don't know whats possible in the shopping-system. We can just point out a possible problem and make some suggestions. But to make a simple suggestions for Pack-Prices with discount for owned Content. Give a Pack an individual Price. A Car-Pack is based on the number of Cars-Models and a Track-Pack is based on the included Track. Behind every Car-Model or every Track in that pack is a number, representing how much the pack would be discounted if a user already has it. So back to the Touring-Classics-Example. We have a Car-Pack with 4 Car-Models. The Pack is at 999vrp. The individual Cars are: Volvo = 249 vRP 635 = 249 vRP M3 = 249 vRP Nissan = 279vRP In the Pack, each car get his "owned-Content"-Number: Volvo = 200 vRP 635 = 200 vRP M3 = 200 vRP Nissan = 220 vRP If now a user wants to buy that pack and owns the Three older cars. The pack will be discounted by 600vRP, so he still have to pay 399vRP for the Nissan. In Total he had payed 1146 vRP. So if somebody just want to buy a car individually and Liveries don't care, nothing will change...
Attention, long post ahead. I actually agree with Skybird. In my opinion the user-numbers of RRRE are quite low compared to AC or PCars. In my opinion there are mainly two reasons for that. One - it's quite pricey compared to those titles, then again, that's something sector3 has to decide. You can't really ask the community here as they obvisouly would want lower prices. Second - the pricing model isn't very transparent and has a few "unfair" bugs in it (which actually partly occure due to the low transparency IMO). If we look at the pricing model right now, you have cars, tracks and liveries. Then you got experiences which bundle all 3 of the above. And you got packs which either bundle a few cars with their liveries or only one car with its liveries or a few tracks. And then you got this whole discount thing, when you already got parts of the experiences or tracks. I think most of the people don't understand how this discounting works, because you got cars and liveries in there, all with different prices... Not to mention you first have to buy vRP, where you get another discount - it's really very complicated if you don't spend a lot of time to understand how everything works and how you can use the system to have the smallest price possible. I agree with Skybird that it is probably the easiest thing to get rid of the "pay for liveries" idea. That would make experiences and packs more transparent and also it would be much easier to understand how the discount is calculated, when you already own some content of the experiences/packs. The question is: What would be the consequences? How would it effect the sales/income sector3 makes? It is obvious that s3 would make less money, if liveries were just for free. So the price of the cars would have to go up. I think most people (who don't buy packs) only buy the car they like + maybe one livery they like. I don't see many people buying all or even several liveries for 49vRP each. S3 have got the salesnumbers in their database, so it shouldn't actually be to difficult to calculate how much more expensive a car would have to be to compensate for the sales of the standalone-liveries. But I guess 100vRP more per car should do the trick and I think (and that is only a personal thought) most people would accept that and find it more fair. Another positive thing (at least most people see it that way I guess - I personally don't really care about it) would be, that custom skins would be possible. At the moment custom skins would make the sales of the liveries obsolete but if you buy them with the car in any case, there isn't really a reason for S3 to not support custom skins. Of course this must be coded in the whole game and there must be coding how custom skins would be handled in multiplayer etc. but at least there wouldn't be a conflict with the sales model of RRRE. So, on the other side: What problems would occure? Well, of course for example the BMW M1 Procar pack would be obsolete. S3 made a lot of skins for this car and then again you have cars like the Opel Omega which only have one skin available. So the price-increase due to the liveries which you would buy with that car probably should be different. The price of cars with a lot of liveries available would go up higher then cars with only a few liveries. But then again, prices for different cars vary already. For example Chevrolet Camaro GT3 is 199vRP and the Merc SLS is 329vRP, so there is alreay a car-individual differentiation of price between cars. So it shouldn't be a big problem to take the number of skins somehow into account. But this has to be done very carefully and the difference of cars with a lot of liveries compared to those with few liveries shouldn't be too high in my opinion... I think most people don't care too much for 20 different liveries to be honest. The most noticable difference probably would be, that it wouldn't make much sense for S3 to make a lot of liveries, because they don't really get paid for a livery... I don't know quite how S3 handles the whole skin-making process (do they have a staff member who only does liveries or do they kind of "outsource" this?) but it probably could have consequences on that. It also would have an effect on the discount of the packs if you already own content. At the moment it is that the more liveries are available the less discount you get when owning a car or a few cars of the pack. The result is the criticism we see right now with the Touring Car Pack and which we already have seen with the GTR2-pack. It surely would make things fairer in the eyes of us costomers, then again the prices for the pack would be lower on average thus meaning less money for s3! The questions is, if higher sales-numbers would compensate for that. As I've read a few times already, there are quite a few people who didn't buy the pack as the price was too high for them respectively the discount for the previous content was too low. This again is something s3 has to decide. But as I've read @J-F Chardon s Post earlier in this thread they are aware of this problem and aren't happy with the situation either. But higher user-numbers always are good as they have positive side-effects, for example multiplayer-numbers are still quite low at the moment. If there are more people owning content and more people playing online this is a positive aspect of the sim which might persuade some players to stick with RRRE instead of playing AC or something because the servers are more filled. So all in all I would say it would be quite a big step to get rid of the pay-per-livery strategy, but I do think it would make the pricing model a lot easier to understand and more fair while not reducing the income of s3 respectivly increaseing the sales numbers because just more people would accept the simpler pricing model. Plus it would make custom liveries possible, which seems to be quite a big deal for a lot of players. For me personally i don't really care if the content is a few vRP more or less as I'm one of the lucky ones who can pretty much pay via the competition prizes, but I do care a lot about the number of people playing the game as I'm pretty much only interested in multiplayer. I talk to a lot to people who play rFactor, Race, AC etc. and most of them actually quite like RRRE, but don't own a lot of content due to the pricing system. So I have quite a interest if this get changed to the better as I really like the approach which S3 is doing concerning the content. Really like that you always have classes which are BOPed exceptionally well while keeping the character of the individual cars pretty much intact which accounts for wonderful online racing. S3 has really done a superb job there and this is actually something that RRRE has for itself at the moment as other sims mostly have individual cars or only very few cars per class, which sometimes even aren't BOPed properly. Gotta go now, have to buy new keyboard.
There could be positive consequences. Charging for liveries leaves a bitter taste with many people, so making them free would be a good move in my opinion. It would be one step towards streamlining the sales model, making it more transparent and, hopefully, winning back the trust of sim racers. Actually, I wouldn't increase the price of a car to compensate for including liveries. If anything make all content a little cheaper. I'm a firm believer in the 'charge a little less, sell more' concept. It's the only way to build a large, loyal player base that will go on to buy more content. Again, at the risk of repeating what has been said many, many times, I firmly believe there is only ONE thing holding this game back, and only ONE thing that is responsible for low player numbers. We all know the rest of the game is excellent and getting better all the time.
I think including all the liveries in the car price is the best way to go. If new liveries are added later, then by all means, charge for them. As I said earlier, I'm not opposed to paying a bit more for cars if I don't have to pay for liveries later (unless it's a new and updated livery which I want to purchase). As I said earlier in thread and I'll echo it here, there has to be more attention paid to the amount of cars already owned in a pack when pricing them. If there are four cars and you own three of em and the pack is 999, then 250 points should be the balance, if you own two, then 500 points should be the balance, and so on and so forth. That is the fairest way to price a pack IMO because it rewards both newcomers and folks who've already purchased some of the content in a pack, plus I really feel like it would cut down on some of the misgivings and misunderstandings about pricing.
Agree on the last posts!! Including the liveries would probably sell more both single cars and packs! Selling big cheap will always be better than selling small expensive! And selling cheaper will always sell more! Just look at Gekås (a large department store in sweden), can't get much cheaper than that, and no other store in sweden is making more money than they do! And again: *Also adding a content based loyalty discount encouraging players to spend more, and keep spending after +150€. *Bring back the Vrp bundle purchase in the store to make it easier for new players to make better deals. *Make the car packs more attractive by adding a few tracks to them, just as you did with earlier packs. *And maybe also add the price in $ / € next to the vrp price in the store (based on that you haven't bought vrp bundles with discount), based on what can be read on steam many don't know how to count / convert these things. If you get to the point where most people don't even do a count before they buy, that will start spreading. And that's when the big bucks will start to roll in.
It's too bad this discussion gets spread around in so many different threads, but this is the latest "hot spot" for talking about the RRRE sales model, so ... I'm a new customer, having just bought a couple packs in the Steam summer sale, and I'm quite interested in buying more content. This silly and confusing store is what's keeping me from doing that, however. First off, for me anyway, it's not the actual total cost of the content that I dislike. When a PC gaming product is high quality and worth my time, I support it. Two examples come to mind easily: I've spent ~$300 on DCS World and ~$600 on iRacing. The problem is how the RRRE content is sold. - Why aren't liveries just included with the cars? Of course they take some additional work to produce, but to me, separate liveries is really going beyond reason and into nickel-and-diming the customers. Also, let people make their own (such as with TradingPaints on iRacing). - Why is the discount so hard to decipher? I'm not a fool (really, I'm not ), but should I have to waste time trying to determine what content I really own and why the discount I'm being shown is as it is? One simple example is that the discount/price for packs changes depending on how much of the included content you own. At first, I thought I could only see that breakdown if I went to the store from in-game. Then I realized I can actually hover over the yellow discount bubble in the online store to see the same details. Nothing tells you that will work, however, so it was just dumb luck that I discovered that. - Why am I not shown what content (in detail) I own in these discount calculations? For example, for this new Touring Classics Pack, I'm shown an "already own[ed]" discount of 6.8%. What is that for? As far as I can figure, I don't own any of the cars, so liveries? But do liveries actually apply across different car models? For some odd reason, when shown the cars and liveries on the pack page, they're only images, without links to those store pages or with the "Add to Cart", "Owned", or "Free" icons. It really feels that this information is being hidden from the customer. - Do packs that contain cars and liveries include all the liveries? They ought to (as long as they'll continue to be sold separately), but do they? From what I've found, that's not made clear. Why is that not clear? - Can I even easily find out how much a selection of content will cost? I don't think so, since I've read that the store's cart is bugged and won't credit you for overlapping content in your cart. Supposedly, I have to buy packs one at a time, so that any owned content discount will be properly calculated. If I add a bunch of packs to my cart at once, I don't get that same discount. Really? That's quite hard to believe, as all that can do is seriously anger any customers not lucky enough to have figured that out before purchasing. I've got ~$90 sitting in my store cart right now (11 packs). I assume that will actually cost less if I buy them separately -- maybe? - Of course, that leads to the bulk discount aspect: I guess I would get less of a bulk discount by buying packs separately, even though I have to do that to ensure overlapping content is properly discounted. So, then I should buy vRP packs through that other, somewhat hidden store here: http://www.raceroomstore.com/shop_en/vrp ? That way, I can still get the bulk discount on the vRP up front. I think. But then I won't get it at all in the store, right? I mean, really, the way this whole thing is set up is just kind of unbelievable. It's crazily confusing. That is only a sampling of the questions and concerns I have (as a potential new customer). And most of these questions could just be answered with a more transparent store/pricing model. It's odd to me that Sector3 hasn't already cleaned this up. I'm certain if the store was clearer, more customers would come flowing in. That's obvious just from how often this confusion is discussed (across so many different threads). I would bet there's a pretty large group of people out there with fond memories of driving in all of the SimBin games (I'm one of those). This odd purchasing system is likely what keeps many of them away. (Oh, and the always online requirement, even for single-player -- but that's a different discussion ). Thanks for reading! Justin