City Of Heroes: Gaffer on the DVD Edition Extras

Not that it matters, but here's the true scoop on reasons behind the collector's edition and followup "booster pack" with the same goodies:

Retailers (i.e. the guys with boxes on their shelves where you probably bought the game) aren't real familiar with how MMPs work. Where for a normal offline game, you might stock a ton of it for the first couple months, basically, after 5-6 months you've sold all you're ever going to sell and you don't bother replacing it on the shelves. There are some rare exceptions (Diablo, Sid Meier games, etc.) but that's the norm.

Also, over time, the price of the game goes down (called price protection). COH actually went a LONG time w/o price protection, staying at it's premium price, because it sold so well (it was the number 1 game basically from launch in April to whenever Doom 3 came out). This was certainly longer than standard. However, over time, the price will continue to drop to lower levels.

So, we want to make sure the shelves get restocked (especially in time for Xmas) and continue to have both a premium priced game (the Collectors edition) and a value priced game (the regular ol' blue box) so that people will spend as much or little as they want to (we want em to spend more, of course)

However, existing customers who want the goodies from the Collectors Edition would have to pony up $50 to get them. This didn't seem fair to us...however, if we gave the goodies away for free, there would be no difference between the blue box accounts and the collector's edition and no one would buy the collectors edition. Thus, we charge for them separately, and we get the Booster Pack (that's my name, I don't know what the official one is) which will give the goodies w/o having to buy the premium box for our older subs.

The goodies are aimed to be cool-but-not-must-have so, if they're worth the price to you, buy em - and if they aren't worth it, don't buy them - but in either way, it's tough to argue (IMO) that we're charging too much or too little since everyone will vote with their wallets. If the goodies were you-must-have-this-to-compete, yes, that would be pretty cruel of us. As it is, we're just providing an option for you to get them if you think they're worth the price.

As always, thoughts welcome.

-jg

You can respond to him on this thread right here.