Dear community
I’d like to add some final words regarding the upgrade pricing calculations, hopefully this is helpful for a better understanding of the whole situation.
The discussion is always based on the statement of “not paying twice for the same samples”.
“Same samples” means samples which are used a second time in a upgrade product, where we didn’t invest any additional manpower to produce these samples for the new product.
This worked very well going from First Edition to Pro Edition on the same platforms.
The already existing sample base was more or less copy & pasted for the new products.
But it never worked changing to Vienna Instruments.
We didn’t have to record the existing samples once again, but most of the database was completely reedited, especially the complex database of the performance samples (legatos and repetitions).
You have to know that the editing manpower is 10 times higher that the recording manpower.
That means, for 1 hour recording audiodata you have to invest 10 hours and sometimes much more to get the samples ready.
Other additional costs are the software developement, all the mapping doing from scretch, and quality testing, which was an enormous task for the VIs.
Finally you get a calculation of costs about the value of each sample in a certain product,
and the result was, only 10% of the developement costs of Pro Edition and Horizon products could be added into the producing costs of the Symphonic Cube.
In other words the correct mercandile calculation “of the same samples “ in the Symphonic Cube is only 900 Euros for Pro Edition user (including all relevant Horizon products).
That’s terrifying less, and I expected that our user base would have been very annoyed if we have offered only 900 Euros discount (instead of 4000 – 5000 Euros)
So we decided to give as much discount as possible as long as possible, even this is heavely divergent to the correct commercial calculation.
Now you could argue, that VSL is so expensive, that this fact shouldn’t matter.
Generally the production costs of any library depends on the volume of the library, how much manpower ist invested to produce it. If you compare the sample price ration of our products to other companies products you will see, that our calculation is very, very tight.
There is not much margin, especially considering and adding these large discounts.
When we decided to discontinue the Sample Library products, it was clear that the “wrong” discount system has to be discontinued also sometimes in the future. One solution could have been to lower the discounts step by step (which I didn’t prefer) or to keep the discounts to a certain point of time and offering a grace period with some extra bonus.
best
Herb