I can’t take this anymore… “Scam”? Do you guys regularly walk into ASDA, Tesco or Walmart and start having a cardiac arrest or something? Or ask to speak to the manager because their prices should be higher, or that they’re somehow deceiving you? I’ve never seen such a hostile response to something so insignificant. This goes for everybody posting such ridiculous comments.
According to research, using the .99 helps people sell things, period. WHY is that a bad thing? Should Epic not be doing what they can to help shift marketplace content? As a marketplace developer I’d be thrilled if it shifts an extra few purchases a month (nobody who actually contributes to the Marketplace has complained yet - funny that).
Hell the engine is $19 a month. Would you all be happier if it was $20? The premise is exactly the same, but I don’t see anybody winging about that. It’s close to $20 a month, but it’s not, so you feel more inclined to part with your cash. Everybody wins regardless, you get a bad-*** engine and Epic gets more business.
Like, I can barely handle these threads anymore. It’s getting so ridiculous. The only explanation I can give myself is that Epic are doing such a good job with everything that people are looking for things to moan about…
You made your point in first post of this thread, everyone else is giving feedback too. Don’t insult people who disagrees with your point of view. It does not contribute to the feedback thread at all and serves only as a troll bait.
Edit: I didn’t read either thread so if i am reiterating, ignore me.
This is called price charm. It’s a psychological theory on pricing and marketing strategy. The prices are often expressed as an odd price. A little less than a round number like $24.99 or £1.98. People tend to see these odd prices being significantly lower than they really are. Laymen will round to the lowest monetary unit. So a price such as $1.99 are associated with spending one dollar rather than two dollars. There is greater demand in a $1.99 item than a $2.00 item.
If anyone is from the UK and is old enough, you’d probably remember when decimalization came into play. The coins consisted of pounds, shillings (£1=20 shillings) and pence (1 shilling= 12 pence). People old enough will remember prices ending in 11 pence. Those even older, will remember when half-pennies and farthings (quarter pennies) were still being circulated. Prices such as “seven and eleven pence, three farthings”or “1 pound 19 shillings, eleven pence and a half’penny” were very very common.
Non-economists view this practice as harming the consumers, and only the producers really benefiting, and actually is more likely the result of some vaguely specified form of consumer irrationality than harming the customer and benefiting the producer.
People will either round up (1.99 to 2.00), round down (1.99 to 1.00), or ignore it (1.99 to 1.99). In general a person is far more likely to buy an item at a price charm of 1.99 then 2.00. Which could show that’s it’s actually hurting the producer rather than the customer.
There have been multiple studies using game theory and maths trying to prove that it’s harmful for the producer or harmful for the consumer, but really no one knows exactly who it’s harming or benefiting, because there is an equal argument in all cases.
In general if you’re a customer you’re better off spending 1.99 than 2.00.
If i buy 200 1.99 items, I can buy 1 more item for less than 200 2.00 items, for a total of 201 items, whereas if i had spent 2.00 i could only buy 200 items.
In general if you’re a producer you’re better off selling as 1.99 than 2.00.
Since more % of people are likely to buy it at 1.99.
While 1 cent cheaper is ‘cheaper’, let’s deal in the reality that the .99 cent setup does ‘fool’ some people into believing they are getting a ‘great deal’. In general those that use UE4 are a heck of a lot brighter than that, no need for Epic to insinuate a low level of intelligence from it’s user base.
If you equate a penny to a dollar, sure, exactly the same. :rolleyes:
It is not insulting to say that I think one side has presented better arguments than the side. It is merely pointing out that I think one set of arguments are better than the others. No matter how much one might want to paint it as some sort of insult or troll bait, that reality is simply not supported.
Glad to see the moderators all come out in force at once to support each other. Have a great day.
It is not cheaper. It is made to look cheaper so it sells more. It uses psychology to make people spend their money more often.
For a buyer (the one who is supposed to get cheaper deal) things don’t change, he pays 10 20 30 40 etc. because the difference between having 1 cent back or not is not relevant. But and here is the crunch for the seller the difference is:
a) sell - because people are more willing to spend their money if the price is .99
b) don’t sell - because people are more willing to spend their money if the price is .99
This trick’s one and only purpose is to sell more. And I believe, that Epic with its great reputation of company who states that cares about dev community, should avoid places like this one. Just because ASDA, TESCO and Wallmart do it, IT DOESN’T MEAN THAT Epic must do it to.
And why people are getting irritated (that is in reply to latest TheJamsh comment) when they see such practices done by Epic and they are not getting irritated when they see it at TESCO, WallMart etc.
I tell you why. Because if you pay $50 for a room in a cheap motel, you know what you’re getting into. You don’t mind occasional roach, not so clean shower, bed not as fresh as it could be. But if you pay $500 for a room in a five star hotel and you see occasional roach, not so clean shower, bed not as fresh as it could be you simply get annoyed.
And that’s what is getting to people.
Epic’s market place, is supposed to be “safe” place for devs, where they shouldn’t feel that on any corner there will be someone trying to play tricks on them in order to get their money. Devs have so much on their plate that when they are with company like Epic and with reputation like Epic’s they want to feel as if they are walking into friendly environment provided for them to help them make a great games, not to get as much money from them as possible.
That’s all.
It’s not a “scam” but it is exploiting a shortcoming in human powers of estimation to trick your brain into thinking something is substantially cheaper than it actually is. Your brain defaults to front-ending numbers to the category of the highest significant digit; thus $20 and $19.99 get “categorized” intuitively as “$20” and “$10”, and even if you know rationally that this isn’t the case you cannot avoid your brain working in this way reflexively.
It’s a very common technique, sure… But then again, it’s not as though Wal Mart has a forum where customers regularly interact with the head of their marketing division so these types of conversations don’t really occur in that case. What Epic has done with UE4 is UNCONVENTIONAL by design, appeals to common practice mean little here.
For my own part, I don’t have a horse in this race as I neither buy nor sell on the Marketplace, but I’m always a firm believer that more choice is a better situation… I don’t, frankly, see why Epic don’t let SELLERS choose the advertised price point, be it $15 or $14.99 or $14.95 or £14.30 or what have you.
I think there’s plenty of reason to suspect that a price of $19 would sell better than a price of $18.99 in certain circumstances (and I think the subscription price of UE4 proves that off the cuff).
At the very least, if Epic are going to insist on pricing all Marketplace stuff at a $0.99 price point, I think they should also price their own subscriptions at $18.99 (or $19.99 or whatever) because IMO it really makes Marketplace offerings look cheap and unclassy by comparison to have that nice, clean, “$19/mo” floating up and to the left above “$29.99 /NEW/” on the Marketplace stuff. It makes it feel like some unsophisticated nonsense taped on to the side of UE4, rather than an integral and modular part of the whole product. I think it cheapens Marketplace offerings relative to the engine itself by making them, psychologically, feel like something utterly distinct from the engine.
Yes, and if every day you put one pence into piggy bank and for next couple of millions of years from now one of your relations will do it too, after that, one of your descendants will be a millionaire. Same mechanism.
And no, .99 is not cheaper than 1.00. It looks as if it is, you see, you already fell for that trick and you think that you’re getting something cheaper, when in real terms the price is virtually the same. Like I’ve said above.
And your “formula”: (n).99 is cheaper than (n+1).00;
Is incorrect. I’m pretty sure that you meant:
(n + 1-0.01) is cheaper than (n + 1).
I personally do not see how anyone ‘rounds down’ 19.99 to 19 bucks. To me, 19.99 is and has always been equated to 20 bucks. Though it is clear that those that price with a .99 think us stupid.
I can’t believe we’re having this discussion. I understand where you’re coming from but .99 IS cheaper. I understand why you mean by psychology but 0.99 is cheaper then 1 (As has been said many times in this thread).
That’s like saying 1 penny is more expensive then two pennies. It makes no sense. I can’t tell if you’re trolling or what but no matter what way you look at it; 0.99 is cheaper than 1.
It is irrelevant. For 1 penny, as clearly what Epic said on this very forum is they changed to this .99 pricing thing due to market research, aka, the psychology of tricking people. That is the big point. If a seller wants to set their item at x.99 or x.52, LET THEM. But that Epic determined it would lower all prices across the board for the purpose of attempting to trick US, is the bad thing. They might as well have come out and said “we do not feel WE are making enough off of the market place, so in order to try to increase our PROFIT on the works of others, we are going to use an old tried and true bit of psychological trickery.” Bad form.
What is really amazing, is that in every other facet I have seen, Epic is doing a great job with the engine and support. So this new ‘policy’ seems to damage all that good will and caring they have otherwise presented to the public. My .02.
The question revolves around whether the consumer rounded down by active choice versus it being about charging 1.99 instead of 1.78 or 2 for $3 instead of one for 1.50. They are talking about the ethics of gaining the profit versus the profit itself.
However, all the articles I read back in the day were all talking about situations where there was additional pressure on consumer. Time constraints, a child :), no access to equivalent prices and need versus want. Again, the articles were talking about 1.99 versus 0 and not 2.00 as the point of contention. Consumer purchasing when they normally would not have because of playing with the consumers perception of cost.
It’s not that relevant to UE Marketplace, but I do not know Epics end goal ambitions. I do know, buyer protections such as previews and refund policies would make such a tactic moot if it was applicable. More choice is always better. Give sellers mass market pricing options but the buyers need protection too.
For the older folks, it’s like cars. No matter what you payed for it, you’re still stuck with the repair department for the long term. So you always check out the repair department…
Any chance a mod can send me my second post (referencing awesome Ray-Ray) from the other Marketplace thread as it took me a good 20 minutes to think through. I don’t have any saves on since I assumed everything would always be available on here. Also, any chance the thread can be brought back? There was a longish post I didn’t have a chance to read. It was interesting. I don’t know who.
Hi hi, thanks, no. The other one with questions. I wasn’t sure whether to post a new thread because it felt like clutter to open up another Marketplace thread. Wrong choice.