3x Super-Saver Blundles!

[chimp_spanner]

This is a perfect example because it's actually not true. If you buy a Steam game, and then buy a bundle which includes that Steam game, you will get another copy. This copy is totally transferable. They don't have a marketplace to sell it, but you can transfer it to a friend or anyone as a gift. Which makes sense, because you should get exactly what your paid for. PH doesn't seem to agree with this philosophy though...

Last I heard there is no officially recognized or recommended way to transfer a license from your library to a friend's. You can buy a game as a gift (in which case it is never actually owned or activated by you in the first place) and then transfer it to someone else. The moment they claim it, it then becomes a part of their library *forever*. If they then buy a bundle later that contains the same game, they technically have two licenses/keys yeah. But in practical terms they might as well have one because they can't do anything with the second. Any other means of transferring licenses can result in suspension of the Steam account of the seller and/or buyer. In fact I believe there was a situation a while ago where a bunch of Steam keys were invalidated because they were bought in sales as gifts and transferred to customers outside of the Steam platform at a later date via Kinguin. Which btw I think is incredibly sh*tty! But, it's their platform. They made us aware of the rules. The choice was ours to sign up or not. Same applies here.

Of course if I'm mistaken about Steam, please do let me know! Because I have a library of about 100 games of which I play about 5 haha. 

[selig]

IF this is FRAUD as you suggest, should be an easy case to make! Just don't try to make it here, like I said, it falls on deaf ears and only stirs the pot without the possibility of any actual change. 

Why not? Maybe a relevant person (or forum member) of interest from Sweden will see this post and take action

You, as a Developer of products sold though an allegedly fraudulent Dealer/Vendor should be more interested into clearing this with your business partner and dealer/vendor - Propellerhead.

You Selig, do you have control over the licenses you produce and give to Propellerhead to sell?? Are you OK to take money for 2 licenses, then give only one license to your end customer?? How do you manage that in your fiscal/tax books?

If you're asking if I agree with you that this is fraud, I can't answer because I don't have a legal background. 

What I can say is that I have absolutely no problem with transfers or resale of my products, and I've made that abundantly clear to all parties since the subject was first brought up years ago. I also completely support "complete my bundle" deals. Obviously these things are outside of my control other than to make my views known.

Not saying I CAN do this, but all I could possibly offer at present is to gift any Selig Audio REs to the user of your choice if you ended up purchasing my products twice.

[lowpryo]

This is a perfect example because it's actually not true. If you buy a Steam game, and then buy a bundle which includes that Steam game, you will get another copy. This copy is totally transferable. They don't have a marketplace to sell it, but you can transfer it to a friend or anyone as a gift. Which makes sense, because you should get exactly what your paid for. PH doesn't seem to agree with this philosophy though...

Last I heard there is no officially recognized or recommended way to transfer a license from your library to a friend's. You can buy a game as a gift (in which case it is never actually owned or activated by you in the first place) and then transfer it to someone else. The moment they claim it, it then becomes a part of their library *forever*. If they then buy a bundle later that contains the same game, they technically have two licenses/keys yeah. But in practical terms they might as well have one because they can't do anything with the second. Any other means of transferring licenses can result in suspension of the Steam account of the seller and/or buyer. In fact I believe there was a situation a while ago where a bunch of Steam keys were invalidated because they were bought in sales as gifts and transferred to customers outside of the Steam platform at a later date via Kinguin. Which btw I think is incredibly sh*tty! But, it's their platform. They made us aware of the rules. The choice was ours to sign up or not. Same applies here.

Of course if I'm mistaken about Steam, please do let me know! Because I have a library of about 100 games of which I play about 5 haha. 

 
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_art ... -TPJL-2656
you can see it here. I guess it's not applied to every situation, but for their most popular bundle offers, when you end up with a duplicate, you can give your extra license away as a gift. they could have easily went with the "you're shit out of luck" route, but they apparently care about their customers a little bit.

[lowpryo]

I wonder how many of you are as "generous" with your own customers as you insist that Propellerhead be to you? Do you "grandfather in" every customer that ever purchased your products to get refunds whenever you put a product on sale that they purchased at a higher price? 

that's not the issue here. I know that if I buy a product, and then it goes on sale, I am out of luck. there is no argument there. they can't "grandfather" you in because if they don't treat that sale date as a hard deadline, then everyone is entitled to the deal.

but with these bundles, we are getting worse deals on products we don't even own yet. as an example, the fact that I already bought Selig's REs means that I cannot get the other products in that bundle at the same value as everyone else. sure it's still good value, but it's not the maximum value that's being offered. and it doesn't make sense considering these products were all just arbitrarily lumped together. it's not a matter of missing a sale date. it's being punished for having made a previous unrelated purchase.

Do you let everyone get equal access to customer support, even if you can't find a record of them actually buying the product?

that's also not relevant here. we all have records of the products that we've purchased, and so does PH.


I can't really speak to your other points because I've never had customers of my own.

[chimp_spanner]

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_art ... -TPJL-2656
you can see it here. I guess it's not applied to every situation, but for their most popular bundle offers, when you end up with a duplicate, you can give your extra license away as a gift. they could have easily went with the "you're shit out of luck" route, but they apparently care about their customers a little bit.

Interesting...although, as you point out, limited to very specific cases. In fact I think with the exception of Dawn of War they're all Valve games? Maybe it's up to other publishers as to whether or not they want to do? Who knows.

I mean to be honest I can see both sides of the coin. As a consumer (and a poor musician!) it'd be nice to make money back on prior purchases, or hold out for second-hand licenses to become available for software I want. But I can also understand perfectly well why a developer would want to keep new money flowing through the store. One user, one account, one key. All updates and support linked to me forever...or as long as the developer is around! Maybe this is something that will change in time. Businesses do have to adapt and respond, after all. For now though I think cries of "fraud" and "scam" are a little over-dramatic. Like I said, we knew the ground-rules.

Complete-my-bundle would have been nice though. And not impossible to implement. I'm just lucky that Backline contained a lot of stuff I didn't own. 

[guckzilla]

Good promo, just bought Synthetic rig and will buy Outboard rig next month if it still available.
 

Most of steam bundle will not give you another gift when you already have it in your account.
Just valve's game and some bundles (I think around 10% of all bundles in steam store) that give you extra gift.
Trust me because I have library of more than 3,000 games 

[lowpryo]

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_art ... -TPJL-2656
you can see it here. I guess it's not applied to every situation, but for their most popular bundle offers, when you end up with a duplicate, you can give your extra license away as a gift. they could have easily went with the "you're shit out of luck" route, but they apparently care about their customers a little bit.

Interesting...although, as you point out, limited to very specific cases. In fact I think with the exception of Dawn of War they're all Valve games? Maybe it's up to other publishers as to whether or not they want to do? Who knows.

I mean to be honest I can see both sides of the coin. As a consumer (and a poor musician!) it'd be nice to make money back on prior purchases, or hold out for second-hand licenses to become available for software I want.

But I can also understand perfectly well why a developer would want to keep new money flowing through the store.

One user, one account, one key. All updates and support linked to me forever...or as long as the developer is around! Maybe this is something that will change in time. Businesses do have to adapt and respond, after all. For now though I think cries of "fraud" and "scam" are a little over-dramatic. Like I said, we knew the ground-rules.

Complete-my-bundle would have been nice though. And not impossible to implement. I'm just lucky that Backline contained a lot of stuff I didn't own. 

 
I think a great compromise would be something like a $10 dollar store credit towards any future purchase, for each owned product. That way they are acknowledging that we aren't getting the full bundle, but they're promoting continued money flow into their store. just a random thought.

[chimp_spanner]

I think a great compromise would be something like a $10 dollar store credit towards any future purchase, for each owned product. That way they are acknowledging that we aren't getting the full bundle, but they're promoting continued money flow into their store. just a random thought.

Yeah I agree man. It's kind of silly that they didn't anticipate some of this given the so-so reaction to Reason 8 by a lot of users. They really don't want to be mis-stepping! I think I've already mentioned it but they should really cut us 8 users a sweet deal on 8.5 or 9. It'll be very interesting to see how they handle that!

[Faastwalker]

They admitted that they don't even issue license numbers for RE & Refills! They sell licenses and don't deliver all of them, that is FRAUD!

I'm fuzzy on the whole digital licensing thing. Has always confused the hell out of me. It's not like there is one rule to bind them all. Different companies seem to have different conditions & rules. I'm not sure if it's based on locale or purely a licensing agreement that you're tied into whenever you buy a particular companies product. In any case I would think it highly unlikely that Propellerhead might be committing fraud as you suggest. Saying that it would be interesting to get some feedback from someone that (by the grace of God!!!) actually understands all this ridiculously confusing legal stuff.

[muffins4all]

I think a great compromise would be something like a $10 dollar store credit towards any future purchase, for each owned product. That way they are acknowledging that we aren't getting the full bundle, but they're promoting continued money flow into their store. just a random thought.

Yeah I agree man. It's kind of silly that they didn't anticipate some of this given the so-so reaction to Reason 8 by a lot of users. They really don't want to be mis-stepping! I think I've already mentioned it but they should really cut us 8 users a sweet deal on 8.5 or 9. It'll be very interesting to see how they handle that!

If their intention over the last 6 months or so has been to train their users to skip updates, and to stop buying individual rack extensions and just wait for more Rig bundles, they're certainly succeeding with me.

At the very least, I think they should have coordinated the Rig bundles launch with Selig's sale.  What was the need for those two to overlap?  They couldn't anticipate that that would cause some problems and some feelings of being burned?

One dude here hadn't even installed the Selig stuff he bought on sale when the Rig bundles were announced!

That's got to feel like a smack in the face, and it was so easily avoidable.

[craven]

Not saying I CAN do this, but all I could possibly offer at present is to gift any Selig Audio REs to the user of your choice if you ended up purchasing my products twice.

that is great Selig, it makes it much easier for me to think about the deal again, thanks!

[Grinder One]

At the very least, I think they should have coordinated the Rig bundles launch with Selig's sale.  What was the need for those two to overlap?  They couldn't anticipate that that would cause some problems and some feelings of being burned?

One dude here hadn't even installed the Selig stuff he bought on sale when the Rig bundles were announced!

That's got to feel like a smack in the face, and it was so easily avoidable.

It's a bit naive to think that PH arranged their sale after Selig's....it's more likely to have happened the other way round

Mart.

[joeyluck]

I think a great compromise would be something like a $10 dollar store credit towards any future purchase, for each owned product. That way they are acknowledging that we aren't getting the full bundle, but they're promoting continued money flow into their store. just a random thought.

Yeah I agree man. It's kind of silly that they didn't anticipate some of this given the so-so reaction to Reason 8 by a lot of users. They really don't want to be mis-stepping! I think I've already mentioned it but they should really cut us 8 users a sweet deal on 8.5 or 9. It'll be very interesting to see how they handle that!

If their intention over the last 6 months or so has been to train their users to skip updates, and to stop buying individual rack extensions and just wait for more Rig bundles, they're certainly succeeding with me.

At the very least, I think they should have coordinated the Rig bundles launch with Selig's sale.  What was the need for those two to overlap?  They couldn't anticipate that that would cause some problems and some feelings of being burned?

One dude here hadn't even installed the Selig stuff he bought on sale when the Rig bundles were announced!

That's got to feel like a smack in the face, and it was so easily avoidable.

I find it better to have the Selig sale beforehand as it eases customers into it. I think had folks just paid full price before the Rig Bundle was released they would be much more upset. But instead they too got an amazing deal which is still an option for some. And many will still choose that over the Rig bundle.

[muffins4all]

At the very least, I think they should have coordinated the Rig bundles launch with Selig's sale.  What was the need for those two to overlap?  They couldn't anticipate that that would cause some problems and some feelings of being burned?

One dude here hadn't even installed the Selig stuff he bought on sale when the Rig bundles were announced!

That's got to feel like a smack in the face, and it was so easily avoidable.

It's a bit naive to think that PH arranged their sale after Selig's....it's more likely to have happened the other way round

Mart.

Yeah, I automatically put it all on Props: their shop, their bundles.  But Selig had to have known something was cookin' and didn't/couldn't say anything, and went ahead and put his rack extensions on sale, anyway.

[mrj1nx]

As a buyer and user i really welcome these bundles (allthough my wallet is crying, and I might be reluctant to buy some stuff that i dont absolutely 100% need right now). In general though, i get the feeling that the rack extension shop has stagnated quite a bit the last year or so. Every time i check in i see the same tired rack extensions at the top of the list. I hope this does more good than harm towards the developers, but as many are saying, a sale&bundle based shopping behaviour seems more and more likely. If you look at Unity Asset Store for example, there are constant sales and specials there as well, i guess thats where these kind of things end up sooner or later.

[muffins4all]

As a buyer and user i really welcome these bundles (allthough my wallet is crying, and I might be reluctant to buy some stuff that i dont absolutely 100% need right now). In general though, i get the feeling that the rack extension shop has stagnated quite a bit the last year or so. Every time i check in i see the same tired rack extensions at the top of the list. I hope this does more good than harm towards the developers, but as many are saying, a sale&bundle based shopping behaviour seems more and more likely. If you look at Unity Asset Store for example, there are constant sales and specials there as well, i guess thats where these kind of things end up sooner or later.

Native Instruments is a good example of this, too.  They're always having sales, and everything winds up going on sale eventually.  There's actually a "50% off all Komplete effects" sale going on right now.

Yet it doesn't seem to be hurting Native Instruments, or look like a sign of desperation.  They seem like a thriving company to me, as they keep pumping out products, both software and hardware.  They seem to have a clear vision, which is "unification": getting all their plug-ins to work under one roof, theirs (Maschine), using their hardware, and they seem to be working towards that goal at a very brisk pace.

Frankly, I'm not getting anything close to that "clear vision, moving towards it at a brisk pace" vibe from Propellerhead.  I agree with your assessment of the rack extension shop.  They need a major injection of quality instruments and effects from some established plug-in devs, asap.

It's coming up on three years since the rack extension shop opened, and it seems like more bigger devs are hopping off than hopping on the rack extension train, while the mom and pop operations keep releasing "smaller" rack extensions, which doesn't really do anything to raise the overall profile.

Quite the opposite.

[chimp_spanner]

 Frankly, I'm not getting anything close to that "clear vision, moving towards it at a brisk pace" vibe from Propellerhead.  I agree with your assessment of the rack extension shop.  They need a major injection of quality instruments and effects from some established plug-in devs, asap.

It's coming up on three years since the rack extension shop opened, and it seems like more bigger devs are hopping off than hopping on the rack extension train, while the mom and pop operations keep releasing "smaller" rack extensions, which doesn't really do anything to raise the overall profile.

Quite the opposite.

Things do seem to have gone quiet after the release of 8. I'm glad to see that they're trying to build this new online music community and I'm hoping that this little flourish of activity and the new sales and stuff are a prelude to some real news from PH. They don't do themselves any favours by being so quiet. People wanna know what's in the pipeline and feel like they're investing in something that's gonna stick around. Hype us up a bit or something!

*Edit: on the subject of NI, I'm having a hard time getting any support from them. Emailed three times about the same thing, about 3 months apart. Got auto-responses and nothing else. Crazy!

[devilfish]

I have nothing from the first Bundle (Backline Rig) ;D
Really cool!

[pjeudy]

A choice to create your own bundle with the devices that they have chosen to be used in a possible bundle would be the way to go.
this way I can get any device from any category I need...now that's power to the people

[iramrezso]

What are your thoughts about Synthetic Rig? I'm not a big synth-fan, I'm still being in learning curve with in-built synths in Reason (plus Parsec that's a really nice stuff), but I'm interested in this genre or just getting better in applying synths in my tracks at least. However I have only one single RE from that bundle (Synchronous), so this package seem to be a really big deal for me. Hardly would buy so much synths at their original price
But do these synths and effects really worth to buy? I usually don't hear big differences between synths checking their demos and intro videos.

[EddieG]

even though its only 10 bux difference

I bought the kuassa amp bundle

They're great
 

[Puckboy2000]

These are cool, but none appeal to me as I already own the ones I want (quite naturally). A handful from each. Would be cool for some other folks if they made a 'make your own rig bundle' with eligible REs for other fixed prices.

To expand on this idea, I just posted this to the Propellerhead facebook page:

Just select which REs are eligible for the bundle and assign each RE a tier. And then say something like... You can get x number of REs at Tier 1, or x number of REs at Tier 2, etc or any equivalent combination. The total would still be $199. Going over that would begin your second bundle for an addition minimum of $199. Seems feasible and is an excellent idea

I had a similar idea. But just giving us a few choices to make our I wn bundle. For people like us that already have a lot of the REs in the current bundles. That would get me to buy for sure.