Please get rid of the .99 thing...

Aetherdyne · February 28, 2015, 1:25pm

Paranoia/cynicism aside, I would highly recommend removing that power from non-moderators. On one of the other forums I frequent, thread deletions aren’t a user power; users would have to formally request it from the mod staff, and in general it is rarely if ever done. Threads can be merged, moved, locked, or temporarily pulled into a private moderator forum (with an announcement to that effect) to allow very contentious threads to be reviewed for infractions, or to let them cool off for awhile, but rarely are they ever deleted. Spambot threads are the main exception, and sometimes not even those (to let users have some fun by mocking the defused post). Works pretty well.

Anyway, what with preparation for GDC going on at Epic, I now have no idea whether the relevant Epic staff even saw my feedback (I moved it from the original 4.7 thread to the one that has now been deleted, in order to help keep the 4.7 thread on target), so now I’m left trying to decide whether to post it again.

Eh, third time’s the charm? Made some alterations and elaborated while I’m at it…

me on the original thread:

In the interests of facilitating your research into ways to improve the marketplace for both buyers and sellers, I will point out that this is a downgrade in my eyes from either perspective. As a consumer, I have always found this practice, no matter how ubiquitous, to be rather slimy. As a creator who might eventually end up selling on the marketplace, I would be extremely unhappy were I forced to become part of the problem.

I realize that the actual difference in price is negligible, and neither I nor the customer are likely to actually care about it (which means “but it’s cheaper” is not a useful argument). However, what the technique says about my mindset, should I chose to use it, is not.

If I have a potential customer that would buy my product at (say) $69.99, but they would not purchase it at my intended price of $70.00, I am pretty certain that that is not because that person has exactly one penny less than the intended price. I am also confident that my product at $70.00 is not priced precisely one penny more than it is actually worth. Instead, this technique relies on the customer subconsciously thinking the price difference is 10, 100, or even 1000 times greater than it actually is (depending on which digit they stop taking into account). They should see 69.99 and think “almost 70”, but it is very easy to instead react as though it’s “60 with some irrelevant numbers at the end”, and most people don’t even notice they’ve done it, even when they’re familiar with the technique.

But regardless what customers should do, I shouldn’t be trying to exploit people’s tendency to do it. I can understand people going this route because they’ve never questioned the practice, but once one is aware of the trick and has the option, choosing to do it anyway raises questions about exactly how far one is willing to go into dubious practices in order to make a sale.

If and when I sell products on the marketplace, I’d prefer that they be sold on their merits, not this sort of manipulation. I don’t feel that something is ethical merely because it increases efficiency at separating people from their money, particularly not when they wouldn’t have bought it otherwise. “Increased sales benefit everybody” is just “the ends justifies the means” in disguise. Any putative extra sales arising from what amounts to willfully trying to trick people are therefore sales that I quite frankly am happy to live without.

Therefore, I hope that Epic reconsiders the wisdom of making all prices follow this model and makes the practice optional.