indeed people will always vote for anything to be free. that’s not equitable, and everyone knows, but still, free is better, right? ;] DAWs are comparatively dirt cheap, relative to what can be achieved with them. i’d be gladly willing to pay multiples of the asking price if they were bug-free. in a completely utopic scenario, i’d pay, say, $2k, and have $1 reimbursed for each crash of the DAW – as a form of incentive, of sorts – to the devs. :-]
Im pretty sure the next time i wont be upgrading as soon as it comes, will wait this time and see if all the bugs get ironed out as i couldn’t be dealing with any issues like the mixer the last time
Whatever, us Australian will pay 50% more than everyone else, which is galling as it doesn’t cost them any more for us download it to here.
Several years ago, BY (before Yamaha), an upgrade was to be 50% more than anywhere else. Australian users, en masse, took to the forums to register their disapproval, basically dismissing dismal justifications from the then distributors about how much it cost to promote, demonstrate and support Cubase, because, as anyone in Australia knows, distributors don’t do much to earn their keep and are almost irrelevant in relation to upgrades.
Software is very cheap in the USA, but in Europe we pay like crazy, and not only because we are burdened with VAT… a US citizen can get, for example, Reason 7 for EUR 240,-while a European, like me, has to pay a staggering EUR 369,- for the same product.
This is a very discriminatory practice.
And who needs distributors anyway? What we need is a big download server, because the Internet is worldwide, it’s just the “manager” guys who still live in the 19th century where we had stupid borders.
No sane product owner (a role in SCRUM based development) would allow a product with so many bugs to be released, so I guess it was a terribad management decision.
We use Corel’s PaintShop Pro and VideoStudio Pro. While online prices seem to be better now, a couple of years ago, just putting in Australia as the currency would jack up the price substantialy, even though the download was served by the same servers.
All this stuff is to ‘protect’ local suppliers who handle the retail boxed product.