$1 for a one week trial?

| Tuesday, October 12, 2010
This might be a new record, third paragraph before I actually say what I'm talking about.

It seems to me that $1 for a shorter than normal trial is a terrible marketing technique. That symbolic dollar, as they call it, is very symbolic. It's me giving them money for what might be a total waste of time. Whether it's a dollar or fifty, I prefer to poke around a bit before I hand over my money. Or at least I want something more than a week for that dollar.

It's not merely that I'm cheap. After all, I've bought games off Steam that I hadn't played or demoed before. And they were a crazy five times the price (I love $5 games on Steam). But they were also more permanent than one week. A day can come when the game that I don't quite enjoy is just what I want. I don't have that time in a one week trial.

Or maybe it's brilliant. Maybe that keeps out people who don't really want to play. Maybe it's best to only 'let in' those who are predisposed to want to play Darkfall. Or maybe they rely on people who are loss-adverse and cannot bear to see that dollar wasted and their long week of progress lost.

Compared to the usual $15 a month, $1 a week is quite cheap, and the constant resetting would discourage anything that isn't fun. Why, could it be? Could the Darkfall trial be the casual-friendly game that people have been searching for? No grinds! No reputation! Nothing except whatever is most fun in a given week. Then start all over again fresh!

Yes this is months, years behind, well too bad. At least I've not yet started my weekly feature "Reviews of games that you stopped playing five years ago". And no mention of vanilla WoW. Oops.

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