Product Pricing, the Human Factor, and Blueprint:Home
by Terra_Cide, HSM Managing Editor
The pricing of Home commodities can be quite the crapshoot at times. A developer may have reams of data pertaining to their own products’ performance, but to get a broader, clearer picture of a particular product segment – take companions or full-body outfits, for example – ideally, they’d have to have some data as to how the competition is also performing in those areas. Now, the chances of them having much knowledge about what is going on with the products from other developers – outside of what the monthly top ten lists provide – is very slim. This isn’t too surprising, what with the need to keep certain proprietary trade secrets under wraps. However, even with the data that is available pointing in a certain direction, and all the good intentions a developer may have imaginable, there is always the one thing that cannot be quantified and predicted upon: the human factor.
Let me to tell you a story.
About a decade ago, I found myself managing two fairly well-heeled galleries in the Sarasota area of Florida. Amongst our collection, we had pieces whose provenance was better researched than most royal family trees. While the verified authenticity, as well as the artists attached to these select pieces more than justified their prices – the average which was the same as the last new car you purchased – there were always customers who would scoff at the price. No way would they ever spend “that much money” on a piece of art. Although we had other pieces that were considerably less in value by comparison, there was always this puzzling preoccupation with these other works, regardless if some – or all – of them were even in the style of art the customer liked or not.
Cute, rare, and not exactly cheap.
Then there were the people who came in, and it was quite clear within the first five seconds that, if they were in fact looking for a piece of art, ours wasn’t the gallery they’d find it in. The dead giveaway? The well-meaning women who would produce color and cloth swatches from purses, or men with paint chip samples in hand. I even had – and I kid you not, because you can’t make this stuff up – someone bring a plastic grocery bag containing their throw pillows into the gallery.
I had all I could do to keep my early twentysomething self from screaming when that happened.
Instead, I found myself quietly suggesting – after humoring them and their good intentions – that they would probably be more successful in their search by going to another gallery in town, or the nearest Michael’s craft store. Because let’s be honest here; what they were looking for wasn’t art in the conventional sense. What they were looking for was color-coordinating wall furniture; something that they would likely be trading out in five years when they would redecorate once again, and what I was selling was for those who wanted something that was more than just a pretty picture to hang on a wall. Different courses for different horses, as it were.
Why do I bring all this up? Blueprint:Home, of course.
By now you have probably heard of nDreams’ game-changing contribution to Home’s dizzying collection of personal spaces. You’ve also no doubt have read the highlights from their community meet-up this weekend in Home’s European region, where they revealed pricing and what you’ll get for that initial investment.
Blueprint – which has a tentative release date for the end of the month – is expected to sell for $7.99. This will include two style packs, which will offer up to thirty different room style variations, two environments, two skies, three feature items and six ceiling and floor textures. On top of that, there will be five save slots where you can save your creations. No doubt there will also be more add-ons available to purchase.
The current market of personal spaces in Home are reaching the point where supply is exceeding demand. Unless you bring something truly superlative to the market, and give it a price that can’t be resisted, the law of diminishing returns is going to treat a sales of that space like a dog treats his chew toy. All too often, we see the pattern repeat itself: a space is released to market and it creates a great buzz, but only for that first week. Thereafter it descends into also-ran obscurity as the next hot space gets released.
A big deal. Literally.
This is not to say that a personal space with a high price – provided it gives its purchaser a decent feeling of ROI – will stop doing well once Blueprint goes live. When LOOT and Lockwood introduced the Space Station and Dream Yacht personal spaces respectively, both at the price of $9.99, they were widely lauded as the last personal space anyone would want to buy. Even though their near-ten-dollar price tags placed them at the higher end of the personal space price spectrum, they were combined with an array of features and freebies, and to this day are still two of the best values you can find as far as personal spaces go. However, it’s a fairly easy argument to say that of the two, the Space Station is far more innovative than the Dream Yacht, and yet it is the yacht that won AlphaZone4’s 2011 award for Best Personal Space. And let’s not forget spaces like the Cutteridge Estate, which at $6.99, is filled with all sorts of surprises, and Juggernaut updates it frequently.
That said, not everyone is going to want to own a space station, and not everyone is going to want to own a gigantic yacht or a haunted Victorian mansion, either. The human factor of aesthetics trumps both price and features. And this is where the customization Blueprint offers is so brilliant, as it fulfills all three factors.
There is no ignoring the fact that Blueprint‘s entry price is going to make it a very irresistible commodity. Everyone in the Home community who has been clamoring for more customization is going to snatch it up – along with any future add-ons – with barely a second thought, and those who are just generally curious as to what they can do with the product will also pick it up, if only for the sake of experimentation. Blueprint is a product which, for just shy of eight dollars, you are essentially getting five spaces out of. Tack on the fact that you can add the furniture you already own to the space, and it’s easy see how people are claiming it just may very well be the new last personal space you will ever buy.
Will this mean there will no longer be a market for the cheaper, less feature-filled spaces in Home? To be sure, the trend Sony has been following of producing cookie-cutter empty boxes does appear to be an exercise in futility, and their near-as-makes-no-difference five dollar price tags makes it hard to justify the memory they will take up on your PS3’s hard drive, simply because there is nothing to do in them or with them. Their earlier offerings of a similar price – the original log cabin, for example – have a lot more interesting design cues by comparison. As the number of spaces with extra features increases, the consumer expectation that they should get more for their money than just a pretty box will also increase. Yet there is little doubt that there are also people out there who, regardless of how extraordinary a space or its accouterments are, see spending more then five dollars on a space to be quite unnecessary.
There is just no denying the fact that the personal space market has reached a crucial saturation point in the past few months. That doesn’t mean that Blueprint will be the only end-all and be-all in Home spaces from this point forward – if a developer is willing to think beyond what is commonly found in personal space design.
This is where the human factor plays another crucial part. Just as not everyone will want a yacht or a space station, not everyone will want a space that consists of the traditional design elements of a personal space. The pricing strategy will no doubt be closely watched by other developers, and it is the developers who study Blueprint closely, take what they learn from it, and apply it to their own projects that will keep the private space market from stagnating.
Will there ever be a time when all the people will be satisfied all the time regarding the price of an item? Heavens no, and nor will the well-priced items ever completely eclipse the fixation people have with items that are perceived to have exorbitant prices. However, if the creation of private spaces are to remain a viable commodity for Home developers, innovation in design combined with clever pricing and marketing strategies to make their product stand out and make an impression that lasts longer than a week is a must. And even then, there are times when there is no accounting for personal taste.
When it’s all said and done, Blueprint:Home just may be that next generation of personal spaces that will revitalize a flooded market.
July 12th, 2012 by Terra_Cide | 10 comments
Terra _Cide is the former Community Manager for Lockwood Publishing and Editor Emeritus for HomeStation Magazine.
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I actually don’t see the Blueprint: Home release as a deal-changer in the personal space market. Judging from the promo videos, the spaces it can produce will be one story tall, with fairly simple room shapes and wall textures. It’s a game rather than a personal space, a sort of Sims Lite set in Home. But it won’t let you build a Space Station, a Gothic Cathedral, a Dream Yacht, a Silicon Lounge, a Cutteridge Estate, an Aurora Island, or indeed any of the more distinctive Home properties. For depth of detail and superb design, we will still buy the products of professional designers.
I’m hoping that nDreams will sponsor contests for the most innovative Blueprint spaces, and will issue new upgrade packs on the basis of what people come up with or suggest. And I’m also hoping that Blueprint will be available as a clubhouse skin. In that role it would be truly awesome — you could redesign your club depending on what was planned for a particular meeting — as a lecture all, discussion circle, movie theater (once portable EOD is available), game room, maze, or whatever you like.
Blueprint: Home is incredibly exciting. But it won’t drive personal space developers out of business. Not the good ones, anyhow. It’s like posters vs. fine art. There will always be a market for “the real thing.”
From what was announced at the EU meet-and-greet about Blueprint (because that’s all I can say about it currently) is that they are looking into the possibility of creating a Blueprint for clubhouses, as well as adding a second floor. And there will definitely be more detailed wall structures and styles made available.
What I would like to see in pre-designed personal spaces is more… ephemeral. A step beyond the “known structures” as it were. Forget ships, or castles, or space stations, or any other easily recognizable structure, be it on land, air or under the sea. Why not create a structure that resembles living in a large soap bubble? Or colorful toadstool, and unlike the treehouse, have the ability to step outside the inner confines, so you can see it.
Everything -- be it Blueprint or prefab -- has the same basic elements of a space, with few notable exceptions like the Midnight Glade. In order to compete with a space a consumer can design themselves, a developer will have to look almost quite literally outside the box. Although, as mentioned, I doubt the market for private spaces in the $5 range will ever dry up completely. It’s the handful of consumers that drive 95% of all sales in Home to whom a pretty box will seem underwhelming.
I agree with you Seal as long as they come up with new ideas and don’t throw remakes at us there will always be a market for other types of spaces. I would love a club skin with this ability as well, that would be awesome and very fun for the owners to come up with new events to create for their members.
Great points Terra. Personal spaces will just have to get more eclectic. All Blueprint is going to do is raise the bar from what we expect from a personal space (if it hasn’t been raised already).
Good read. And I have to agree with pretty much everything you said there, however, regardless of what most minds can come up with in the creative aspect, there will always be someone who breaks through the norm. Much like Home Tycoon, I think Blueprint is also likely to wow us with something spectacular dreamed up by someone who’s imagination knows no bounds.
This will be the biggest problem that the remaining professional apartment designers will face. People unrestricted by rules or company policy with free reign to create as they please, given the boundaries of Blueprint, will most likely storm ahead of the traditional design curve and produce fantastical ideas.
As for the pricing, that remains to be seen. I’ll be watching with intent as to how these “extra” packs are priced. You can be assured, it’s unlikely that I’ll be paying anything more than $10-15 for the ability to design my own dream home. Given the current texture quality I’m finding it hard to see that we as lowly consumers will be able to re-create anything as professional looking. This will lead to SealWyf’s comment becoming fact; that there will always be a market for the “real” thing.
You are absolutely correct. The designers of ready-made personal spaces from this point forward -- as well as the people who green-light such productions -- are going to have to be more liberal in their notions of what a personal space is if they want to create a commodity that has a longer life cycle than its debut week. This is something that *needs* to be done, even if Blueprint didn’t exist. Marketing can help, as Norse pointed out in his article, but that can only do so much. A static environment has to be *interesting* and remain interesting in order for it to be a viable commodity.
Seal is correct in that marketing Blueprint as a more of a game and less of a personal space would be a brilliant move on nDreams’ part. One of the biggest and oldest meta-games in Home is interior design and redesign of personal spaces, and this just takes that to a whole new level. Marketing Blueprint as a game may also soften the psychological blow when it comes to the purchasable add-ons later on.
I’ve no doubt there will still be people who will buy a ready-made space over Blueprint, or in conjunction with it. However -- and this may just be a personal quirk -- I’ve a hard time reconciling the phrase “the real thing” in the virtual world, especially when comparing one virtual item to another. To dismiss the quality of the textures just may be a bit too shortsighted. Yes, the exterior landscapes that I’ve seen from Blueprint are a bit simplistic, but I suspect that has to do with memory limitations, and the fact that it is still incomplete. As for the wall textures and the ability of free-thinking individuals to create anything professional looking… I’m just going to withhold comment.
The only spaces that really stand to suffer from Blueprint’s release are the basic ones. Function really needs to be the driving force for future personal space releases; add that, and the space can sell.
Granzella does this better than anyone, because their personal spaces are extensions of their public spaces that add value to the public space experience, or replicate the elements of it that people enjoy. Given the past success of My Private Hideaway, I expect the Fossil Museum and Another Beach spaces to be huge hits when they get here.
Even the brilliant Cutteridge Estate adds value to the Minibots game, with those little mouse holes that the player’s bot can run through.
Ultimately, I think developers that create a single, unified presence that expands across multiple content types can do better than developers who simply create a property and move on. Aurora has its loyal followers, as do Lockwood and Granzella. All three have developed very large, intricate projects within Home that offer updates and multiple opportunities for monetization.
It’s a bit like taking a disc-based game, breaking it down into is core elements, and then figuring out how to release them all. Some get sold, some are free, all of them combine to create a larger experience.
This sort of content, combined with user tools like Blueprint that offer a high level of interactivity, can provide both the deep experiences and the self expression that Home users seem to crave.
I was expecting a price a little over $8.00 for blueprint. But then again there will be the upgrades… I see the basic blueprint as the “lust leader”. nDream might be ready to loose some money on the basic set. Upgrade will generate the real profit.
… Give the razors, sell the blades
At least, Blueprint might be….well, a blueprint for future spaces. I could be interested in buying it if the features allow me customise a personal space that I’d actually enjoy using.
On the other hand, developers might be better off releasing fully imagined personal apartments with more options for customisation built-in. More spaces are including diurnal controls now. Even Harbour Studio has various wallpaper options and working light switches. How about some weather controls, sound effects, windows that open and close, etc?
I totally agree with your statements about the recent slew of big-box hack jobs. What a dreadful bore the SCEA releases have become.
And I loved your gallery story. I can surely imagine myself in your situation, trying to suppress an incredulous facial expression.
I for one can’t wait for this to hit the store. I am sick of big empty boxes with different wall paper. I would totally love to design a space of my own, and hopefully they will soon add the ability to built UP as well as OUT. I am thrilled to learn they will allow us 5 slots to save our work, that totally ROCKS! I don’t know a deco nut out there that won’t be scooping this up asap and disappearing into a new world of design as well as decor YAY!