avasopht wrote: ↑12 Jan 2023
I recall one RE developer complaining about the low profit margins (especially after the 50% and sales tax were subtracted). But this was barely a year into it.
I always thought it was JP ...
Well, yeah, hmmm. <coughs>. Hehe. Probably was. It does sound a
bit like me
Mind you, I don't think I was the only one, though.
You are right on timescales.
When it actually first appeared and the first months results were it was really truly odd getting the accounting reports back as it just listed £0.00 revenue but no-one at PH cared to explain it. I think I managed to work out they reported the actual values in the following month or something, so each Sub was effectively invoiced us twice: once at £0.00, and again later at our £0.0x per product share. Break out the champers, Jeeves! The first few months did feel like it was a waste of time and eventually I stopped even looking at the revenue on Subs. Of course, as you correctly note, it took a good year, maybe even more, for the subscriber numbers to build up enough to where losing that revenue was noticable to the extent it's going to be genuinely frustrating at this time.
When they sold us on the idea, they really went to town what an important revenue stream this was going be, but of course, stupid me: that's what marketing people do! Over-promise and under-deliver! Everything's rosy in PowerPoint!
It was never anywhere near what we were led to believe, but despite that, turns out it's still a revenue stream of not insignicant value to us devs. They're saying me getting a few hundred pounds a month, which is what it's been, is, somehow, not important or valuable. It's not like, you know, we've not been paying them to maintain the infrastructure to sell our products on their service! </s>. This kind of demonstrates it's been very much been a zero sum game they've been winning. And if I alone am earning that, again, they're earning several times that across all devs. So some users aren't put off by the complexity
PHintroduced to make it harder to find and use
their system, that
we pay for because they told us we do so to support
their management of the ecosystem. Well, that ecosystem includes the website. So if it's too "complex" (read: broken) , why wasn't it "simplified" (read: fixed)?
Now, on the flip side, cos I like to consider opposing views, it might be the case they've seen some genuine signs of attrition MoM in the past year and feel it's not worth it long term.
But there'd be a strong case to make that any such falloff is simply a short term issue due tot he CoL crisis, or could equally be they've just given up on third party REs generally where promotion of the RE shop to new users seems to remain sidelined. At worst, one has to wonder if they basically consider it a legacy plugin format at this point and something they reluctantly and begrudginly are forced to have to waste server bandwidth on. It was announced on the ReDev forum last summer even that forum was going to be closed "at some point". I don't know if it has yet, it was getting so hard to actually log in to read the blasted thing it I stopped bothering six months ago. And as I've noted previously, the main R+ sub itself takes most of monthly free "hobby" spending cash younger users, in particular, will have, and provides so much filler material and overwhelming users with content there's not necessarily much incentive or need to delve into the shop's third-party gems to find the things they might actually
want.
It seems to me all RS want now is that recurring R+ fee. Everything else is just a damn hassle.
I can't explain the number of people who add
free products to fill up their Subscription packages though.
And again, still no actual official notice from Reason Studios to this dev at least. None. Nada. It think it's been about four or five years since MHG posted on ReDev "we aim to improve our communication with devs". When's that aim due to be kicking in then, my man?
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3. Abbey Road Keyboards (2007-c.2012?)