TITANS, Rather an expensive upgrade...

So, I'm seeing lots of people complaining about the TITANS upgrade because it's not free to them despite paying more than some kickstarts. Fair enough, I see where they're coming from.
Countering this, I see quite a few of the people saying - "but it's got a big discount", and PA themselves call it "a huge discount".

But thinking about it - it hasn't. In fact, not only is there no discount, the 66% mark-down is more expensive than the content probably warrants.

TITANS adds quite a bit of content no matter whether you want to call it an Upgrade, a DLC, an expansion, whatever. There's lots of content. 21 new units, and 5 TITANs, and this is certainly worth money, the devs spent time on it.

But the discount of 66% for those who already own PA suggests that TITANS adds 33-50% more content again than PA (depending on the cost of PA when you bought it - $30-$40).
It doesn't.

At most it's 25%, the new units takes the game over 100, but that's ignoring the fact the game is far more than unit count - AI, Pathfinding, gameplay, etc, is already in the game and while there's some new stuff there too, it's not much, mostly it's new units.

I'd suggest ballpark that an 80% "discount" would represent the value of the upgrade for the new content. If you actually wanted it to be "discounted" like their marketing is trying to make out it is, 85+% would be more fair.

(For those who are curious - this is a prime example of "Anchoring" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring). They set a high price then "discount" it by 66% if you own it to make you think you're getting a bargain - but you're not if you already own it - in fact you're paying more for the content than a completely new PA player who's paying full price!).

Yeah but you have been playing the base game for a while already. The assumption is that's worth something.

Sad that you don't think the work put into titans is worth 13$ or so. It's a subjective thing ofc.
I think it's easily worth 13$.

This is not how numbers work.

That's an interesting way of looking at it, but it isn't how economics works. If you don't think this price is worth it to you, don't buy it. Uber set this price taking into account more than just the number of new units, though. There is a lower boundary on the price they can sell it for if they want to be able to pay for the development hours that went into this. Other games can sell similar content for a little less because they make up for it in quantity of sales, but the RTS genre just isn't popular enough to do that.

Worth is subjective. It's tied to the intensity + duration of the fun you're going to have. Meaning that for one person it could have been worth the money even if it was triple the price, and for others it wouldn't have been worth the money even if it was three times cheaper.

I remember days where I payed 50 bucks for a whole game and 30 for an expansion. Now thats expensive! Games have become way more cheaper and this expansion is definately worth it.

Pathfinding needs to be changed because of the new CSG with hard edges and bigger units. Same goes for putting in the wreckage. AI needs to be able to use these new units so that needs some work too. It can look like not so much when you think like this but frankly if you want to do something good its going to take you some time.

Can't argue with that much logic. Good stuff.

Meanwhile, Civilization: Beyond Earth gets to charge $30 for their DLC, and no one even cares.

I may personally think that Uber should've just given a 75% discount to Kickstarter Backers and Early Access Backers alike (Since unfortunately, in this day and age, if you do something nice for those that stuck with you from the start, everyone else next to them gets mad at you for not being included too. >_> Aka "This is why we can't have nice things.".), but I still saw the PA DLC/addon/expansion as a good deal for a game I liked. Uber gave me a legit discount just for owning the base game, which convinced me to buy TITANS instead of waiting. What other game does that with their DLC?

I could go on with other examples from several games that do the same, or even worse, and don't get everyone upset about it somehow, but I think my point is made.

That's because no one cares about Civ: Beyond Earth.

Judging from their steam review % I would guess somewhere there you can find people raging at them as well

The UK minimum wage is £6.50 an hour, so its about 80 minutes to 'earn' the 'value' of this game if you are at the low end of the salary scale. There are many arguments to be made about the price, value, release process, ethics, but ultimately, is arguing worth the time and effort? They didn't have to give any discount at all, morally or legally.

Its a game, the clue is in the name - play or don't play.

Arguing and complaining both have their place, but perspective matters.

Well to get a bit off topic, I'm pretty sure that people do care about Beyond Earth being overpriced for their DLC, but there, there's something of fan fatigue to complain about it because that's how Firaxis has done DLC/expansions for the past several games with no sign of stopping. You just wait until the whole thing is on a holiday sale and pick it up for a much more reasonable price. (Also doesn't help that Beyond Earth is so unquestionably bad to meh that even long-time Civ fans simply aren't paying attention to it to complain).

Don't really agree with this at all, I mean there are commanders being sold for 15 dollars.. What's more worth it the commander or an expansion?

Worth is subjective, but I'd like to point out something that I don't think has been pointed out before.

When you give out something for free, you're actively lowering the worth of it. People see that and (Rightly or not) assume that since you're giving it away for free it can't be worth that much since you can afford to give it away to so many people anyway. It's not exactly the most logical approach, but hey, humans are fickle meat sacks.

In Australia, until the shift to digital game sales a few years ago, the standard price for any game in store... ANY game, was $100. the fixed price of Xbox360 games at launch was $120. Maybe if you were lucky they had a pre-owned or discount copy going for $70 or something.

Being able to buy anything game related for $13 is like a gift from on-high frankly.

Australia has always been ridiculous about video games though.

That was only for new games. Standard price for console games was $60. Which is still silly but it's not $100.

I had no idea there was an expansion. Logged into steam and found it in my queue took a look and moved on. It would have been nice 4 or 5 months ago...when the game still had some meaning to ME, that time has passed. Right now my mind is on Star Craft 3 - Legacy of the Void Beta. The game looks interesting but not compelling, to ME. I hope it sells well, and the reviewers like it.

10 to 13 dollars ... expensive ... yea ... ok

As someone from Civfanatics, I can assure you people do care

Nevertheless it's still a respectable price for an expansion pack. Just as the base price for TITANS. The discount simply makes it even better

Also, all expansion content that is delivered digitally counts as DLC. DLC has no constraints on size and cost.

People need to stop using "DLC" as some kind of "inferior" expansion. DownLoadable Content merely refers to the form of distribution, and not what is contained within.

$13.60 = too much for content that should have been in the original game. $40 = a fair price if you're new to the game.

If the original PA is no longer supported/updated, I'll be especially unhappy.