Music Box Alpha model

[quantock]

I am a huge video game nerd and fell in love with Launchbox.. what a stellar application! I saw that you advertised Music Box Alpha and the only thing I love more than video games is music!! I was super excited to see you were working on a similar application for music. I understand that Music Box Alpha is super early in development but I was considering to purchase it early as you are advertising 50% off now.

 

I have to be completely honest.. I was shocked that you are expecting people to pay $50 for this application.. even when it is eventually full featured. Even at the current 50% off $25 that is a hugely steep price IMO. I think the 50$ price tag for Launchbox is entirely reasonable, as handling Emulation and all the various configurations and emulators etc etc is a lot more complex than simply organizing and playing music. I am not sure if you are familiar with an app for Android called "Shuttle Music Player" but it seems to be very similar to what you are trying to achieve with Music Box Alpha and it's hard for me to not use it as a point of comparison.

 

Shuttle is currently being sold for $1.50. Shuttle is a fully featured application that (very similarly to your Launchbox model) offers no major restrictions in the free version.  The Music Box Alpha free version has a 1000 song limit which makes it basically worthless (to me at least). I downloaded the free version of Shuttle and fell in love with it. After getting all my music loaded in and organized and having it become a part of my daily life, I decided to pay for it to unlock the advanced features, which I believe were the ability to edit meta data easily from within the app itself as well as some extra skins etc. Launchbox was very similar - I also fell in love with it in the free version, got all my games loaded in and organized,  had everything working properly... then after seeing how well it worked and already having everything set up ready for use, it was a no brainer to upgrade to Big Box.

 

It's obviously your application, you do seem to do amazing work, so it's up to you what you want to do with it. I just honestly don't see why you are going with this model for Music Box Alpha instead of what was  seemingly a great model that worked well for Launchbox. Especially when there are already many music players/organizers out there that have been around for decades vs emulation organizers which there are not many alternative options. If you are selling licenses up the wazoo and are happy with everything then by all means go ahead with your plan. I just have to be honest that I am directly in your target market, am a huge fan of your other work, but have a really bad taste in mouth with both the 1000 song limit in the demo version, and then the asking price of $50 when I have a similar application that actually has full support of pretty much every planned feature for your application (& more) and it is being sold for $1.50.

 

Sorry if I come off like an ungrateful complainer. I wish you success and wanted to share my thoughts with you.

[Jason Carr]

Thank you @quantock. Truthfully, the price is only $10 right now, and only $25 if you get a forever-updates license. Most Windows software that you purchase doesn't even have a forever-updates option available, so it's not really fair to look at the forever-updates price as *the price* of the app. On top of that, comparing the price of an Android application to the price of a Windows application is like comparing apples to oranges.

Music Box Alpha is selling well (about as expected) at this point, so I don't see lowering the price any lower than the current $10 to be a good idea for us. Still, thanks for the feedback.

[quantock]

Fair enough, I do understand that phone apps are typically priced disgustingly low so I am not suggesting you should be in that territory (even though I imagine they require about the same amount of work to program?  Shuttle is a very good app!).  It's just that on the other hand, $50 is kind of a lot vs a $20 or $30 pricepoint that would seem more reasonable IMO.

 

In any event, more than even the price complaint is the fact that the Music Box Alpha demo has a 1000 song limit imposed.. I would rather see the free version have unlimited songs but some other kind of feature limit (maybe some kind of awesome visualizer system and extra EQ settings or something for purchasers), similar to the way Launchbox works. I think that would be a better way to get people hooked.

 

In any event, thank you for the very quick response.  I am very impressed :-)   I have a few more questions for you but they would probably be suited better for a separate thread