I apologize for taking a little while to respond to this topic, but as you can imagine we're pretty busy trying to roll everything out. I am sorry if that has meant that communication with the user community was not the best.
That being said I'm a bit saddened by the reactions here so far. Here are the bullet points of the announcement which will hopefully put it in perspective:
- For the next 30 days pricing on TG2 Deep and Deep + Animation is the same as it always was. This is the "grace period" we promised for those who wanted to see the final prices before buying, and still wanted to get in on the pre-purchase price. I think this is fairly generous.
- The price after the 30th is going up $100 for each of Planetside's products. So for TG2 Deep, it's going to be $299 and $399 for Deep+Animation. This is a pretty reasonable price increase, not too much, but definitely a decent discount for those who purchased early.
- The Xfrog bundle includes *all* of Xfrog's 1300 plants. As far as I know there is no other bundle like this available anywhere, and the price is excellent. If you were to buy those plants in XFrog's own separate bundles you would spend
$2000! Granted they are only in TGO format, so for those who use multiple apps it is less appealing, but for a TG2 user it's an extremely good price. I understand it's still out of reach of many people and that's unfortunate, but there is no doubt it is a great discount.
- For those who already purchased TG2 there is a coupon discount off the bundle equivalent to your original purchase price. So pre-purchasers are at no disadvantage for this bundle purchase.
- Xfrog is responsible for any additional product options they might make available, like individual plant sales. I do know that they are interested in doing this, but beyond that I don't know any details about whether this is coming soon or not. I think it would be a great option, but keep in mind that per-plant the prices would necessarily be much higher than the bundle (which works out to 45 *cents* per plant variation). Of course for those people who only need a few specific plants, the "a la carte" option would be more interesting, and I hope that does become available.
- I can't give any information or update on any additional free Xfrog resources that may be coming as those are of course Xfrog's responsibility. I know Stewart did talk about that previously so I will try to have him come and give an update about that, but he's quite busy today (understandably) so it may not be immediately. However Planetside does have a few additional free models we will make available soon.
- The website is still being finalized, some of the content from the old site that was useful will need to be added. We have launched the site for the product announcement today, and we will continue to improve it. One thing of note is we haven't been able to add image credits to all images, but we will definitely be doing that, and a *big* thank you goes out to everyone who allowed us to use their fantastic images! In the meantime if you find any broken links, formatting problems, etc. feel free to email them directly to me at oshyan AT
planetside.co.ukI hope you can see now that the $699 option is specific to the Xfrog bundle deal (and it's a good deal), and that the prices of TG2 as a standalone product remain reasonable and within reach of the hobbyist. We are happy to be working with Xfrog and I think the arrangement we have worked out is a great option for certain customers. But Planetside is still only a software developer, not a content provider, so it's up to other vendors to provide other options for the hobbyist. We do the best we can for our own products (e.g. free version of TG2).
- Oshyan