Sat Jan 29, 2022 10:52 am
I don't wish to support or criticize MDA here, but pricing decisions are usually based on expected revenue, not based on what potential buyers would think of the pricing compared to past pricing. If the price is too low, you will have a lot of buyers but little revenue, and if the price is too high, you will have a lot of revenue per buyer, but less buyers. The revenue curve usually has a middle spot of maximized revenue, where there are enough buyers and enough money per buyer to maximize the amount of money earned.
For the upgrade from 6 perpetual to 7 perpetual, there are predicted a lot of buyers, which moves the maximum revenue curve to a lower price. The upgrade from V4 to 7 and V5 to 7 probably have predicted the same amount of buyers, and relatively a lot less, so the price has to be higher to move the curve to the right place.
So again, the decisions are likely to maximize revenue, which is an imperative for most businesses. I'm sure they don't want to anger any past users, but sometimes you don't have any choice, when the future of the business depends on making enough money to make ends meet and pay employees. This is the pricing strategy that is taught in marketing classes, and I would be surprised if any company didn't follow these procedures when setting pricing.
What's unusual (and good I suppose!) about Hauptwerk is there is a relatively very high level of user engagement in the software. That means that there are a lot of people who care about it, and use it daily, and use it for their leisure activities. It also has the challenges of any software instrument, where the basic functionality is present in the first version, and there will always be a subset of users who feel that any further updates should be free, or at low cost. The problem with doing that though, is that there is no or little further funding to support the company, which makes it hard to keep the doors open, and also to support further development to keep the software working on evolving operating systems. That has recently been a big challenge for small companies that produce software for Mac OS, since the OS has gone through a tremendous number of changes in the recent past, and supporting the new framework is very time and labour intensive. I have a couple of mac apps from small companies that stopped being updated and supported because of this, and I suspect that Hauptwerk would have gone the same way if they hadn't made changes to their funding model.
So, I understand the frustration at the pricing changes and decisions, but I suspect Hauptwerk's management is constrained by the financial considerations I mentioned.