This is purely a speculative question for the regular supporters out there to whom we owe so much...

What would you consider paying for an exclusive yearly membership at WorldWorksGames that would grant you 100% catalog access to all releases (excluding TerraClips) and to every new PDF release that comes your way?

Throw some prices out there and be honest!

Not saying we're doing that but its one of many considerations and an interesting thought experiment

Let us know your thoughts if you have a minute!

-D

I love you guys, and try to buy everything I can. But I've gotten burned before doing something like this with companies that had irregular production schedules. For this to work for me, you'd have to get on a regular-ish schedule for releases. Then I could look at coming up with a 'what would I pay.'

Without that regular schedule, I'm going to fret whenever there is a slow spot, and that will take all the joy out of my support.

I know some companies have done both subscription & release: a subscription service that has guaranteed monthly releases (they could be small ones), that are separate from the more-irregular bigger releases. Profantasy does this with their mapping software -- the monthly subscription gets you a new mapping style every month that you cannot get any other way.

Steve

Oh absolutely. Part of what would be so great about a membership scenario would be general infrastructure/production sustainability. If we had enough members we could develop some of these obscure ideas, wants, needs from the community on a regular rotating basis without worrying about the end payback. We'd need some discussion about project scale and scope though because very often current terrain projects run between 2 and 3 months. We'd probably have to scale things down to keep it within shorter turnarounds.

Anyway, that's what this thread is for Open community discussion about the possibilities!

Intriguing idea, however I'm with Steve, and would want some details before committing a dollar figure.

Some brainstorming thoughts:

1. Subscribers get access to fan-created kitbashes. These kitbashes can be as far afield as the old megabashes. (Yes, I would like to share my Topsail Schooner bash of The Maiden with the rest of the WWG community!) Eliminate all other free access to kitbashes. Yes, this means that "kitbashes included" is a prime carrot to get yearly subs.

2. Subscribers get access to the back-catalog of WWG stuff.

3. Limit number of products (including kitbashes) downloaded each month with a subscrition (my suggestion is two) - that way some enterprising customers won't be able to grab the whole bag in one month. We can still pay one-off prices for additional products we just gotta have right now beyond our monthly allotment.

4. Come up with a minimum number of new downloadable products which would be available each year (my suggestion is two).

For pricing, you'd need to determine how much of a discount you could afford for new subs getting all the most expensive stuff right off the bat. If you feel you can handle $5 per download twice a month, then that gives $120/year. That may well cut it too close to the bone for you - I just don't know, and don't know how often new subs would stick to the more expensive stuff versus the cheaper kitbashes and props. However, I would suggest a discount for returning subs, possibly 10% - 20%, as these would more likely be used for the cheaper sets after gobbling up the more expensive ones.

In my view, the desirability of the above for longer-term customers is generating a vibrant kitbash community so that we can fill in for each other when WWG is going through a spot of focus on TCP or a slow creative time.

I would have the same considerations/concerns as sdavies2720.

That being said, I love the concept and would like to see what you come up with.

I have had two types of subscriptions in this manner:

1) ProFantasy Annual: which gives the map-pack download each month for the year (or you can buy the annual pack later on). Each year was collected and you only had access to the year you paid for - you would have to buy each year separately if you wanted back years' offerings.

2) WotC D&D Insider: unlimited access to all PDF issues of Dragon and Dungeon magazines, regardless of when you signed up - so theoretically you could sign up and have access to everything ever produced under that format. Also had the character builder and adventure tools, which started as a downloadable product then moved to online access only.

So, I guess one of the questions I would have in addition to what was asked already would be what would the delivery method/access type be for products under the subscription? Basically, would it lean towards one of the above models?

I see the PDFs and the TLX(/TCP) planner being bundled under this, but would they be permanent additions to my collection even if I dropped the sub or would they need to be accessed online only? There would most likely be big differences in the price I would pay if I "rented" the products vs. if I "owned" them.

Also, when you say 100% access, that is more like the WotC plan where you could get the back stuff or 100% access for stuff released that year?

Again - glad to see you considering this and even happier you have opened it up to our input.

Interesting thoughts! I think we are on similar wavelengths and I have some comments below where I differ a bit from you.



I could possibly get behind this, but I am not sure that it would be enough for me to consider a subscription as a prime selling point. If the WWG regular schedule is considered erratic, the kitbash arena would be even more so. It may develop over time (as you describe further down) but I really think the focus needs to be on officially-produced products - not user-generated add-ons, as good and useful as many of them are.



Love it, even though I own all of it.



This is the biggest disagreement with you that I have. If you are subscribing and it is all offered, there is no reason you should not have access to it all at once, and I sure to not want to pay more for accelerated access to an "all-inclusive" plan that I am already funding. The obvious answer for this would be to offer a minimum one-year term only, so no matter what you do not give the farm away for $9.99 (or whatever a monthly would be). Having limits, IMO, adds complexity and frustration where neither are warranted.



I am definitely down with this, but I think two is low, unless you are saying two major products. I would say a monthly smaller product is not too much to ask, even if it is a few standees, some reskinned tiles/walls, or even an add-on (official kitbash?) that enhances what is available. Regularity is something we have all said we want, so knowning we are getting something each month would be huge, even if the offering itself is not.



With subscription pricing, especially with an "unlimited" package, you have to look at it more from a "what do I want to make on a consistent basis monthly/annually" than a "what is the price-per- piece equivalent," as it will never match up - some months you may be averaging $30/download and others $2/download - but in the end if they can profit and deliver their exceptional products with even more regularity, then it is happy times all around.

I know miniwargaming has a subscription section called the vault. Of course they only offer videos, not pdf's and such, but while they offer a lot of really good videos for free, the vault has all the how-to's, extensive conversion and painting guides, and just tons of good stuff that you can only get if you subscribe.

Personally, I would be unable to subscribe to a service. I pick up a pdf from here maybe three times a year, and money is very tight this decade... Ive been relegated to painting models in the storage box that I haven't gotten around to yet (not a bad thing, just hate being forced to). I would think if you really wanted a sub service, You might consider offering all new product weeks or months earlier before releasing to standard issue, rather than access to complete library. If you have a sub, you can get the release as part of your membership, if you don't, you just have to pay for it when it finally releases. That'd be worth a couple/few dollars a month. I know for me, I play 40k, malifaux and specialist games. So I tend to not get the fantasy stuff, but you guys kinda release a couple fantasy then a sci fi, and/or a modern so if I had a sub, it might be a few releases before I cash in on the free release. Would balance out for me at least.

I am a fan of the subscription idea. This could include:
-behind the scenes developer interaction on products not yet released (previews beforehand, not actual beta product)
-Maybe videos of developers discussing their upcoming release.
-occasional unique kitbashes available only to subscribers created by developers (an extra prop or wall)
-Access to the back catalog. Maybe limit this to encourage longer subscriptions and more frequent visits to the store, maybe one or two a month depending on membership level.

I would be reluctant to release product earlier, or at least much earlier, to the paying crowd since it could further accelerate pirating further. A Friday release for subscribers and a Monday release for others might work out okay.

For pricing, I would say that it should work out to being less than the cost of a release every month (maybe $10 a month/$50 per six/$80 per year, or whatever). As seen in [urlhttp://www.worldworksgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5247]this thread[/url], 2011 saw a release of well above one release a month on average. If you count all official downloadable releases there were 28 by my count and that only goes to August. If you guys could even keep half that pace, it would be a good deal.

Maybe a subscription works more like Paizo's product subscription plan and gets you the new releases as the come out combined with the limited back catalog option I mentioned above.

Another idea is to get one or more mini releases plus benefits (early previews/dev. talk/etc) a month at the subscription cost and then a discounted rate for the bigger releases that could be scheduled quarterly.

I'm up for it, since i pretty much get at least everything fantasy related every year anyways, and have been for years.

Don't forget those of us who are cheap, and take care how we might hurt you.

Take for example, DnD Insider with their old toolset idea. They have now made it an online only thing, but originally, it was a series of downloadable tools. Instead of subscribing for 60-120 bucks a year, many of us would do the 1-month sub, download the tools and all the updates. Then 6 months to a year later, resub for one month and get the new ones.

This defeated the purpose of the sub, but gave us cheapscates a way to get what we wanted.

When it came to you guys? If you tried to do your sub as anything OTHER than a year, It would bite you in the butt. You have an awesome catalog of stuff, but once I've got it, why do I need the sub anymore?

Lets say you do $10 a month (120 a year). I hop on for 1 month, download your entire back catelog for $10. Then after a few new releases come along, I re-sub, download all the new stuff, and then let the sub expire. In the end, I pay pennies on the dollar for your all's hard work.

Think very hard about the sub. Some of us might not pirate, but we'll definitely take advantage.

<rambling>

If a subscription were an advance on the coming year, and it had more perks (like, inclusion in some form of beta? influence over which sets are worked on?) then I'd probably bite. Maybe with a year's subscription you get the back catalog at a discounted price? I can't see exclusive downloadable content with a subscription - in light of your recent note regarding the state of piracy, anything you make downloadable probably wouldn't stay "exclusive" for long. I mean, I like the idea though. Maybe some extra props? A couple extra wall styles? But, I'd imagine there'd be plenty of people who'd feel OK pirating the extras knowing they bought the set they go with...

The full access to the catalog seems crazy, unless the price is *really* high. I think I'm prepared to blow $50-$60/year based on the past couple of years of fantasy releases. At this point, I own *most* of what I'm expecting to buy, though there are a couple of things that I'd get were they available - things like the cove or swamp sets. I really enjoy the hobby, though, so even if there's $50 of stuff in the coming year that I'd normally want to pick up, I'd gladly pay a premium up front if it meant more consistency in the pace of releases, or maybe some form of assistance with kitbash resources, etc...

I don't know if decoupling the old catalog from the subscription would make sense - I totally agree that access to the old catalog is only useful for the first 30 minutes of the subscription. That's probably more than enough time to download everything. If there were a "bundle" price for access to all of The Vault, and a "bundle" price for access to all of The Classics... There's so much good stuff in your catalog! I just can't think of how to put a price on essentially the whole thing. It's making my head spin. I could totally make use of pieces of wildwood grove, or swampwoods, atlantis... chunky dungeons! the arena! Even hellworks would be fun to me for kitbashing potential. Undercrypt... there's some TLX kitbash potential there. The cathedral! Well, ok... I just wish you guys would convert this beautiful set... I have no room for it if I can't break it down...

Yeah - maybe if the vault/classic sets were discounted heavily while you've got a subscription, or with a subscription you can get some number of those old sets at a heavy discount (or even one free with the subscription? that'd be cool.) The TLX sets, maybe also discounted, but not quite as heavily. Then, all of the coming year sets are paid for by the subscription...

But you asked how much I'd be willing to pay? It's easy for me to slip a $11.50 purchase under the radar. I'd be willing to pay $75 for a 1-year subscription, knowing that I only normally pick up $50 worth of stuff, but that the other $25 would go to... I don't know... covering $25 worth of revenue you'd miss due to others pirating downloads? :-/ If I were to download more than the $50 that I normally download, it's honestly probably stuff I'd never intend to build anyway, like Mayhem stuff.

If you were to tell me that you were working on a whole monster manual's worth of standees using the One Monk format (I do like those removable bases!) then I'd pay up front, and I'd pay plenty.

</rambling>

I've been having a think about your subscription question ... and about comments and requests people have posted regarding WWG's different product lines, about piracy, and about ways to leverage the different parts of WWG's businesses.

The following isn't the answer to to question you asked, Denny, but hopefully some of my ramblings may be helpful somewhere along the way (if only to stimulate, contrast or back up your own thinking).

Firstly, some key factors (Yes, I know most of these are obvious but bear with me, please):

• The value of WWG's products, both digital and physical, occurs primarily when they land on the gaming table
• Physical products appeal to a wide market and are hard to pirate
• Up-sell opportunities can be impractical and/or slow to realize for physical products, due to their large volume requirements and long release times
• Digital products have faster lead times and lower cost to produce and sell, meaning they can be profitable faster and in smaller volumes
• Some digital products, (e.g. PDFs) are easy to pirate
• The interoperability ('lego-ness') of first TLX and now TCP has significantly increased the up-sell value of purchases in these lines
• Many customers don't know how to realize the potential of the interoperable sets they've bought
• The long build times for TLX tiles is constraining WWG's TLX/digital sales

So how do you start to realize WWG's market potential given all these things?

One way would be the subscription model you've suggested. This doesn't change the game, but it may stabilize part of the digital revenue stream. (Aside, I'm hardly surprised at the caution shown in this thread so far, given the huge variation in WWG's digital output between last year and this one, and your comments elsewhere on the forum suggesting a major swing towards physical products.)

Or, what if we turn the whole game on its head? What if, instead of thinking in terms of pushing sets onto the market, we start with what the customers actually use and work backwards from there? What would that look like?

Now for some pure speculation. John is going to run a game and wants some terrain to run it on. Here's what he does:

1. The first thing John does is log onto the WWG program (something a bit like the TLX planner) and copies or knocks together a layout he likes
2. John already has some of what he needs, so the program just tells him what he's missing
3. John takes the option to purchase a TCP set he hasn't got yet to cover the biggest gaps, knowing it will arrive well ahead f the game
4. Meanwhile, John gets the program to print the other, more specialized pieces he's missing and starts to work building them, following the on-line instructions provided in the program.
5. The TCP set arrives and John does a quick assembly including the the pieces he's built, to see how it looks - not bad, just needs a couple of changes to make it more challenging and some props to bring it to life
6. John goes back to the program and discovers that the changes he wants aren't covered by items he has already, so he gets it to prints off a couple more pieces that will do the job
7. While he's at it, John also decides he likes the look of some of the new props that have just been released and prints the ones he wants to use in the scene
8. (Along the way, the program has kept track of each TCP set John has bought and each item he's printed so it has kept his inventory up to date. It occasionally prompts him to confirm he's built the items he's printed, and to let it know about any items that have been damaged or lost so it can remove them from his inventory.)

How does John pay for all this? An obvious place to start is that he pays for what he uses. Maybe he pays for each item as it is released for printing, plus the TCP set. Maybe he has a WWG subscription with unlimited printing and just had to pay the extra for the TCP sets he buys. Maybe he pays for unlimited printing from some sets and is charged item-by-item for others. - There's plenty of options. (As for those customers who support WWG by buying more than they build, this can be covered by things like premium subscriptions.)

Regarding piracy, working this way moves WWG away from PDFs, as the program would print direct from WWG's database to the customer's printer. Yes, the print output could be still be pirated, but that would be harder to do and deliver a less useful package than the current WWG PDFs.

While all this is feasible now, there some key few things that are required to make this fly:

• There's a bunch of programming involved. This isn't WWG's core business, but is a slowly growing part of WWG's operations. WWG also has an initial proof of concept (the TLX planner), some learning about the complexities of such a project (also from the TLX planner - whatever the success of that product, the learning from that project is very valuable), and access to friendly expertise to help oversee such a development.
• The product would require ongoing technical support (e.g. to handle new printers, operating systems, etc.). Again, tech support is a small but growing part of WWG's operations.
• The rigid separation between physical and digital products would want to be loosened. (This is not absolutely required, but failing to do this would significantly reduce the scope and massively reduce the value of such an initiative.)

I'm not saying this would be easy, or that it would necessarily be worth it right now. But thinking about how WWG can leverage the success of both it's physical and digital businesses, something like this might be the way to go.

We've already seen the value of WWG moving to integrated sets (first with TLX, now with TCP). Is there value in WWG integrating its digital and physical businesses? If so, would this look something like the picture outlined above? Or is there an even better way of doing this?

It's really a question of how WWG will deliver its products in the future. Now that WWG has broken into the physical market, is it going to continue to keep its physical and digital product businesses separate? Is it going to focus on one and let the other languish? Or is it time to start thinking about the market opportunities that could potentially arise from integrating its two lines of business?

Oh darn ... I wonder how this is all going to work out.

Subscriptions sound nice but there are a couple of caveats.

A lot of potential subscribers will only be interested in part of your products, e.g. only fantasy terrain, or only SF or horror. Given the huge scope of WWG products even if the subscription would in effect give you a 50% discount on all the stuff you get, they might still be worse off with the subscription.

Access to old productsets is something you should not do, as that access is worth far more than the products which will be released during a subscription period. What you could do however is give subscribers one free product from the catalogue every subscription year, for instance.

As stated by most others, currently it is very hard to anticipate what will be coming in the next year, so it is hard to decide whether a subscription will be worth it.

But I assume your subscription will be mainly aimed at the 'fanboys', i.e. the people who buy the subscription because they like WWG. You still have to give them a good deal of course, but things like early access to pictures of what is coming might already make it worth it for them.

Be careful with subscriber only stuff, you might very well alienate your other customers.

And although I don't know what I'll be getting, I do know what in general I would be prepared to pay for a subscription. If it is a yearly fee, $50 is fine with me, for $75 I really need to know it will be worth it, $100 I'll only pay for exceptional deals and if it becomes more I'll probably skip it no matter what.

Zenguy, as usual your post is very thoughtful, however from my own IT experience, I have to point out two items I know are not true:


As Games Workshop found out, printed physical products are very easy to pirate. This is a big reason why they only produce very basic printed physical products these days when they do so at all (compared to the 1990s).


A software PDF printer is all I need to get the same quality as the source image. There are simple and well-known ways to get around detection routines in companies' attempts to restrict printing to physical printers only.

To me, and to others I've seen post in these forums, the value of WWG's digital output is not in the small-scale, quick-to-market nature of digital: it is in the access to the source images and ability to kitbash those images into what we want. WWG's attention to that digital market and extreme quality is what brought me to WWG in the first place. If WWG abandons that market, then my reason for staying with WWG will disappear. I understand that physical product has another and potentially lucrative market, and I hope that WWG is able to fully realize the potential of that market, however I find physical product - even Heroscape's wonderful attempt - too limiting these days. I want to build my own vision, not someone else's. I use WWG's excellent imagery to assist (rather than replace) my vision.

Huhmmmm....
A subscription could be very cool and something I would do if it included things I wanted at a regular rate.
I would need to see very regularly a new item to make the subscription worthwhile, and it would likely have to be a “new” item for pretty much each type to get me interested, and keeping interested. All fantasy items are not of interest to me I would need some Sci-fi, so there would have to be a balance of set types.

The size is very negotiable, depending on the frequency I would be very happy with a number of "small" (2-6 pages) regular releases. These could just be new versions of pretty much existing products to bulk up a line. However there would have to be a very regular release of Something (preferably of interest for me). Examples of small regular releases I can think of, that personally would be of interest to me are new skins of a number of walls and new options that didn't exist for TLX.
Examples would be
My favorite wall (the clean white/blue gray one) from Firstlight, but in a TLX format.
"Missing" TLX posts [two way double high for the Dwarven set].
Two way double high walls for Titian
Double high walls for Titan
Destroyed versions of many, many sets.
6x6 ramps for Titian
3x6 ramps for many sets
Windows or doors in existing walls but in new positions.
1 inch, 2 inch, etc walls for Titan (in multiple skins).
New Skins for Swift Scenics or just new swift scenics but like “one building” to keep the frequency up.

These while being just reskins are new and something I don’t have, and would not mind getting versions of, these are basically wish list items that probably never seemed like good investments to WWG as they are reworking old material, but these reworked items could be the right idea for something small to come out regularly and not require a large time investment as they are reskins and hopefully much of the work will have been done and thus lighter work load to get new things out.

Thanks for the thoughtful comments all. Let me take a minute to address a few things that have come up here...

Zen: What you've described is essentially something we've had on the books for 3 years. Without getting into the details, the problem with the project was scope, logistics & resources. We had it all mapped out to be a completely integrated "pick & choose" experience with a ton of bells and whistles that flipped the whole notion of the storefront on its head. The problem at the end of the day is that we aren't Valve and we don't have $200,000 kicking around to engineer the software and work out the bugs. Eventually we had to accept our limitations and move on.

The focus is on YOU!

Niche markets such as ours have a limited ceiling of potential support, others might argue otherwise but we've tried harder than most to reach out and extend our reach to people in different ways. Each time we venture out we're pulled back by the gravity of our core supporters and their enthusiasm for what we do.

The subscription idea is just one concept that places the focus on that core group of supporters, their wants, needs and desires but it has flaws. Our challenge is to come up with a scenario that leverages "the core" of support so that we can continue to produce PDF's in a more sustainable way. Crowdsourcing is another way to handle it but we've seen others attempt that with terrain and they essentially have to sell their souls to reach the right funding level.

Another option might be to go for direct polling on projects and then do a straight across preorder. Not sure that would fix anything directly but just throwing it out there.

So, this remains a very open, honest conversation about possibilities with the people that we respect most.

Keep that conversation flowing!

~ D

I agree with eveything you said! Everything!

And that's why I'm asking you all what you feel the best direction would be to help that part of the market continue to thrive.

I'm not sure what form it should take, and I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to pay, but I can tell you that I would be interested in a subscription plan, if that's helpful. Even if some of the products that I'd be paying for weren't things that I had a specific use for, I'm interested in keeping WWG in business, so I'd want to subscribe for that reason alone.

I don't think offering your full back catalog is at all a good idea, for reasons that have already been discussed. Personally, I'd be much more interested in a TCPs subscription (I'm planning to buy it all anyway ). I know you presently don't have the infrastructure for it, but I'd be thrilled to get a monthly card of new TCP terrain (perhaps enough to build a square foot one level high). I'd consider it a really awesome magazine subscription.

Hi,

Interesting idea. And a new revenue stream is always nice!

I've no idea how easy it would be to split a substription into different bits, but as everyone else is throwing in their 2 pennyworth, here's mine!

(BTW, I know some of this is taking away from where we are. Bearing in mind Denny et al actually need money to live, I think at the moment they're being too generous!)

1. No Subscription at all.
Basic access to the forums (as now), access to normal pdf products etc.
NO access to kitbashes, legacy products etc.

2. "Small" subscription (no more than say $5/month)
Basic Access to forums, access to kitbashes TO BUY, Access to SOME legacy products TO BUY.

3. "Medium" subscription (say $15/month, minimum 3 months)
"Enhanced" access to forums (e.g. kitbash testing, possibly beta tests, definitely a "Patrons area" to slag off the plebs!), access to Kitbashes FREE, Access to pretty much anything you still have in PDF TO BUY (if people are prepared to pay at this point, they should be aware that older products won't be as good as the new stuff!).

4. "WTF" subscription (say $25/month(!), minimum 1 year)
If there's a forum (apart from Moderator only), they have access to it. If it's a PDF, they get it FREE. (your price point for this is probably about 80% of the total cost for everything you currently could buy from the store, annualised).

If you're feeling generous, if people post a lot (not me then!), and are helpful on the forums, you could enhance their forum access?

A couple of other things, a "Press here to give us money" button may be nice. Get subscribers to be extra beta testers. Offer a "bounty" of a free pdf if you spot a WWG product out there in the wild.

Ah well, back to work...

My £0.02

Holy Cow! I paid $15 a month to play MMOs that I played every day for hours... I no longer play them because I cant afford that kind of commitment. Subscriptions at other services rarely go over $7 a month for regularly updated and enhanced services, with the median being around 3-5 a month. Some even annually like Army Builder for their license, but you can still use AB if your sub is not up to date. Im all for WWG doing what it needs to do to stay in business, I love the company, but lets be honest, the point of paper modelling is a cheaper alternative to plastic/resin kits from other companies, or scratch building from lots of space consuming materials. When the sub starts encroaching on numbers that high the cheaper alternative begins to rival the others and is no longer cheaper.

Denny, I apologize if this makes me out to be a cheapskate, and I hope you understand my point. I try to buy a kit from WWG when I get some extra cash and there are several kits on my wishlist, but I am mostly relegated to scratch building my own stuff because I still have tons of materials just lying around. As my WIP thread shows, it costs me nothing to build and paint from my stockpile. While several of the WWG kits I own might look good on my build, I'm so broke atm I can't afford the ink atm to do anything.

Kah, I'm rambling....

SpaceTrucker731, I understand your point completely!

But if you look at how much money WWG could lose if they offered their catalogue...

... for choice I'd prefer them to "play safe" and if they only get a couple of people going for it, well I like their products and I'd like them to be around a bit longer...

I'd only consider something like a subscription if there was the guarantee that there were at least X releases per year, split somewhat evenly across genre lines (say, Scifi - Fantasy - Western - Horror). The latter part would be crucial to me, since I'm not at all interested in Western, and only marginally in Fantasy.

The price I'd be willing to pay would obviously depend on release frequency, and possibly on extra specials thrown for subscribers. Access to the full catalog would be a given, without that, I'd not even consider a subscription, regardless of the price or details.



That would be a dealbreaker for me. Why on earth would I pay to have access to everything, and then agree to limited access? I understand your reasoning, but from a customer perspective, this would suck big time, in my opinion.



Hm. With 2/year, I don't see much point in paying for a subscription. That would be way to little new content for me.


Preorders, or regular polls, might be a good idea in any case, regardless of where a subscription might go (look at the feedback on the poll you had recently!). As you see from my preferences I stated above, there is currently nothing the pipeline I can see which is relevant to my interests, which is a pity... The ability to poll on other items would make me feel all warm (and excited, and greedy) inside

There are going to be a variety of reasons why people do this stuff, and it's great to see different opinions expressed here. I personally don't even USE the stuff I build all that much - I let my kids play with the stuff and have learned not to cringe when the tabs get ripped off. My wife has learned not to question the time I spend edging all of these little bits when she never sees me use the end product - she gets that it's a relaxing hobby for me. I enjoy learning to kitbash the stuff - I've become much more adept at using GIMP since I started making my own tiles. I enjoy the building process (of most of the stuff) and seeing how clever WWG can be to make new things happen out of paper. And when I do get to use it, I really enjoy the end product.

I used to pay $65/year on a brain-dead online game that consumed WAY too much of my time with nothing to show for it. I'm totally willing to redirect those funds to a source of good papercrafting material, because that's now where my hobby interests lie.

I dropped about $100 on a set of papercraft building models that I probably will never build. The bundle seemed like a great value for the quantity I was getting, but I have no room to store the end product! I've built three buildings so far, but since I can't play INSIDE the buildings, I'm really just making scenery to place around my TLX stuff. Maybe I can kitbash TLX pieces out of what I paid for, and enjoy them that way...

The selling points for me are:
I don't have the time to learn how to make paint-it-yourself kits look good. It's a lot of work, and it's a skill that doesn't come naturally to me.
I don't have the space to house stuff that doesn't fold flat. TLX takes up quite a bit of space as it is, but it's as compact as I can imagine without becoming TCP...
I get a lot of bang for my buck with TLX, given that I like being able to modify stuff. If I were a gamer, I'd probably prefer TCP, but I can barely squeeze out one encounter a month with my kids. But, given one hour in an evening, I can feel like I'm creating something by kitbashing some tiles or something.

I guess understanding what people are getting out of their products should influence the direction to go in. What I'd be looking for in a subscription is really access to great geometry and texture - I'm willing to pay for the skilled work WWG produces, because I just can't do it myself. I'd totally pay a premium for the ability to get access to the layers that make up the Hinterland tiles, for example, so I could more easily create different style tiles -- angled rivers, wider rivers, etc. That kind of thing is really hard to pull off nicely just by teasing apart the end result of merging layers of stuff together. That's why I'm interested in the older sets. Not because I'd make them as-is, but I'd take them apart and reuse some geometry with newer textures, or I'd apply the textures from those sets to newer TLX geometry, etc.

I am more interested in textures and geometry as well. I'd subscribe if those were part of the offerings and kitbashes. Just give me a B/W sketch or two and some textures and I 'll finish the rest. Aside from that, the Swift Scenics line is a joy and a new monthly model free would be great.

As for your catalog ... it would not be in your best interest to open that up for grabs so to speak, but it could be a choose one model a month free sort of thing.

Put it all together and I'd pay $15-$20 per month. It depends on what you can actually commit yourself to do monthly. If it turns out you cannot meet your obligations I would drop my subscription post haste and would be very upset with WWG. So above all else be certain of what you can do.

Why wouldn't it? Personally, I already have most of the available sets I'm interested in. I guess the same goes for many others who'd consider a subscription. Having access to other sets on top of that would basically only serve to get me hooked on more lines; or let me have a look at stuff I wouldn't buy anyway. I don't see the downside for WWG.

I see this as a pricing problem: People who, like you (and me), own much of the old catalog will only really want to pay for the new content. But newcomers to WWG won't have the catalog, and will value that part of the subscription highly.

So, if WWG prices for you and me, the subscription doesn't cost all that much, and newbies get a value windfall. On the other hand, if WWG prices it based on the value to newbies, you and I don't see it as a good deal.

I agree that the two things shouldn't be comingled in the subscription.

Steve

For me, there's a ton of stuff I'm kind of interested in, but not enough to spend money on it right now, and presumably there's more new stuff that will come up by the time I'm ready to buy an old set, so I'll put my money towards a new set. If I subscribed and had open access to all the old sets, that part of the subscription would have value for about 5 minutes, after which I'll have downloaded the entire collection and not need access anymore. If I got a coupon good towards some dollar amount of old product, and was able to get other stuff at a discount price, I might want to keep my subscription going for that.

There are plenty of people who already own a massive pile of the catalog - I thought I owned a lot until I started listing the non-TLX stuff I wouldn't mind playing with - those people might not benefit at all from access to the older catalog stuff. So, hopefully there are some other perks that would make a subscription worth-while.

Maybe a subscription doesn't involve the old products at all. Maybe there are other things that make the subscription interesting (exclusives and what-nots) and there's some other clever store trick that would encourage people into the older sets.

For example, maybe each purchase you make earns you some WWG bucks (Denny Dollars?) that can be applied to other sets. Maybe new AND old sets can have a WWG bucks values, though the newer sets may have a higher value than old sets. This way, I might buy two new TLX sets and a props set, and have enough bucks to pick up something from the old catalog.

I dunno. I'm just throwing stuff out there.