CompuServe Messages

Mike, I thought it might be appropriate for me to comment on your note that you think our IPAS routines are overpriced compared to Kai's Power Tools. 1) The market for KPT is at LEAST an order of magnitude bigger than the market for IPAS routines. Just this alone is justification for a publisher to charge a lower price. The corollary to 1 is: 2) Since the market for IPAS routines is so small, and since the programmers have to be compensated well enough for it to be worth their while, pricing is extremely important. To be perfectly honest, I'm barely making enough money from IPAS routines now to warrant going on with them, but since we've just implemented all those great IPAS3 features, I feel honor-bound to show everyone what's truly possible to do with r3. I'd MUCH rather spend my precious few free moments enjoying my life while I'm still here on the planet… which for all of us is an extremely short period of time. Rolf and Darrel (who are doing all the IPAS3 work for this spring's release… only 2 collections this time) have made just enough from the first disks to warrant doing more. (piracy of our unprotected routines has been a larger problem than you might realize) Your argument to this would probably be that we could charge less and sell more. Perhaps we could, but from the feedback we've gotten from many people and dealers, that's not the case. I'm sure that as the 3D plug-in market matures in the future, market dynamics will drive down prices. We're just WAY behind the 2D curve at the moment — but we're bound to catch up eventually. Thanks for listening, – G