why are most soft synths and effects so expensive?

[james0tucson]

Probably doesn't cost as much as shipping things by transport, by still costs.

Don't be surprised if rail and road transportation turn out to be cheaper.

[stefancrs]

original flipper: Because of publishing deals I'd guess.

[LiteOn]

And many will say - why to pay THAT price - basically it's only software...

[emdot_ambient]

...This situation is kind of like car owners bitching about the cost of fuel, when, of the major costs to own a car, fuel is one of the smallest...

Actually that's not what the 2001 Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey showed. The #1 cost in owning a car is the annual car payment. Second to that is gas. Insurance was next and was only about a third the expense that fuel was. Annual maintenance was the next, at less than half the cost of gas. And that's based on 2001 fuel costs, which were almost half of what they are now.

[emdot_ambient]

Wait just a minute. It seems to me there's just as much free stuff as there is expensive stuff. Maybe a lot more free stuff.

There's a lot of free stuff. Any market where you have to compete with free is going to be a real tough slog. And I can think of a few cases where developers decided to give away something they originally had planned to sell because they simply didn't think it would rise above. Makes for a very turbulent market.

Exactly one of my points in my first response to the original thread.

Supply and demand. When there's an abundance of cheap or free product with quality that rivals commercial versions, it's not surprising that consumers will demand lower prices.

Personally, I admire and feel for the developers. Most of them are in this because they love music and electronic instruments, not because they're out to make a quick buck. They want to make a living, that's all.

[esl]

if indeed the main costs to developers are the coding and the GUI, then shouldn't new soft synths all cost around $40?

You think coding and GUI are trivial then, I take it?

I am not trying to offend anybody, I am just curious, please help me understand.

Software is not a 'tangible' product. It's not hardware, you can't pick it up and feel it. You can hear it, see it etc. You can also copy it as much as you like (protection systems allowing).

So why isn't it free. After all, it's nothing, isn't it?

Well, someone had to write it. Had to design the user interface. Had to optimise the code to make it run without flattening your host. Support it when trouble arises...

You think that's worth $50?

If they sell 5000 units, then I think $50 would be a fair end-user price. All costs would be recouped and the developers would be compensated for the code and GUI, it would seem.

Again, I think I am guessing incorrectly to the actual units sold for most soft synths. It seems to be far less than I have imagined.

[eduardo_b]

Instead of asking "why do software instruments cost so much from my perspective", the question "why should everything be cheap simply because folks want it cheap" should be aired more often.

Cheap is relative, though, isn't it? One might think a $180 synth is priced fairly unless there are synths selling for half this that are as good or better, or even free ones that totally rock. The market is a comparative one, and I can see where this is exaggerated by the presence of low cost or no cost alternatives.

That's not to say developers shouldn't recoup their investment in their products, but the rate at which they amortize the investment need not dictate the selling price. While a small percentage of sales are lost to warez, I'd say a lot more is lost to price points that make potential customers unwilling to buy. It might take longer to make back the investment plus a profit, but the larger customer base might well be worth it.

I know we've covered this any number of times. I don't think the "cheap" analysis is any more valid than the "too expensive" one. Unless, of course, you can manage to change my mind.

[Muff Wiggler]

I'm surprised the Papens and the Linplugs and the NI's out there haven't gone so far as to make an embedded computer hardware version of a VSTi. Every one of Papen's advertisements indicates the *desire* to do this, since they present their VSTis as though they were three-dimensional hardware. I think it would be awesome if they really did that. Receptor is a good start, but it has to be too many things, so it needs a big power supply, fans, disk drives, etc. A special purpose device, maybe mini-itx and flash memory based, with a specialized control surface and display... man that would be cool.

Isn't that exactly what Creamware has done?

[shamann]

...This situation is kind of like car owners bitching about the cost of fuel, when, of the major costs to own a car, fuel is one of the smallest...

Actually that's not what the 2001 Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey showed. The #1 cost in owning a car is the annual car payment. Second to that is gas. Insurance was next and was only about a third the expense that fuel was. Annual maintenance was the next, at less than half the cost of gas. And that's based on 2001 fuel costs, which were almost half of what they are now.

Fair enough, although looking at those numbers, there are obvious regional differences. The average premium in Ontario is $2,383 (CAN$) according to the Consumers' Association of Canada, which is higher as a percentage of the average household income than in most of the US. But, fair enough, I recant the gas analogy.

[SuitcaseOfLizards]

Most of the reasons have been stated.

You need to pay for: food, rent, utilities, Web bandwidth and host, compiler/software updates, transportation.. if they're making a living from it.

Let's say you need to make $50,000 a year (poverty level here in Silicon Valley) before taxes to live (this assumes you're single, no pets, no big expenses). That makes you have to sell around 334 copies at $150 each to make your required annual income! God help you if you have a morgage on a house, or a wife that's not working, or - worse - children.

How many of these products shift 335 copies in a year - especially independent devs that have no advertising budget?

I'm an embedded software engineer as my day gig, and I can tell you that I'd laugh in the face of anyone that offered me a job that only paid $50K. I'm continually amazed that an indie dev can make it! Though it seems many can't, alas.

[BONES]

On a different thread I compared your average synth with your average multiplayer online game. The synth may cost $150 or $200, but the game will cost $50 or $60 and then about $15 a month . . . if you play it a year it'll cost you $230 to $240. But I don't hear any players complaining about that.

Hardly a useful comparison. More pertinent might be the cost of s PS2 game compared to a softsynth but that is still a completely different market and almost as useless.

If the free synths can rival the commercial ones (4 or 5 free synths might easily cover most of the sounds and features of a very good commercial synth), and the supply of free synths is high, it drives down the demand for commercial product and limits what people are willing to spend for it.

If only that were the case. The reality seems to be the opposite. As freeware synths get better and better it drives commercial developers to aim even higher and charge even more. If I can get PolyIblit for free it means that somethign worth paying for has to be infinitely more complex which means it takes more and more time to develop and so the dev charges more money for it. In the sub-$100 category there really aren't many new instruments appearing these days and those that do look terribly overpriced compared to freebies like the aforementioned and Synth1.

For musicians this is a good thing, but added to that very organic market situation is the pressure that warez puts on software developers. As hard as it is to prove out the actual damage this causes, it's definitely an additional drain on the commercial developers' ability to make a decent living creating new and innovative products.

If software synths were such a lucrative market, believe me, the big synth manufacturers (Roland, Yamaha, Alesis, et. al.) would be dominating the market.

That's a pretty naive statement. The big hardware manufacturers have a lot more at stake; factories, distribution channels, etc which they could never support if they threw all their expertise away in software packages.

Wait just a minute. It seems to me there's just as much free stuff as there is expensive stuff. Maybe a lot more free stuff.

But what's missing is all the stuff in the middle. Even somethign as simple, although admitted with a good sound, as FabFilter Twin is $99. A few years ago no-one would have accepted a price like that when you could get Pentagon I for the same money. Now $99 looks cheap for a custom-coded instrument [to most people, not to me].
I just don't see the value in most commercial offerings these days as they are synths that are far too complex for my needs. I put up with that in hardware for a lot of years - instruments as immediate as an ARP Axxe or Pro-One disappeared from the market and all you could get were 5 octave+ keyboards that did 10 times more krap than I could ever need. There were notable exception like the Poly800 but even when that went on to be the biggest seller of all time the manufacturers didn't seem interested in pursuing that style of instrument. I don't need to put up with that any more because there are so many good synths out there for free. I just wish there were a few more decent ones around teh $50 mark. At $50 I would be all over FF Twin but at double that I cannot justify the expense.

[eduardo_b]

Again, I think I am guessing incorrectly to the actual units sold for most soft synths. It seems to be far less than I have imagined.

That might be because the unit price seems too high to many potential customers. Consumers are very sensitive to price points, and manufacturers and service providers spend lots of effort trying to decide where the sweet spots are for their products or services, particularly in relation to competitors.

I'd venture that many synths are now priced on a comparison with others that the developer believes to be comparable rather than on development costs. Which is why synth prices have been escalating. Of course, the developer could also be too close to the product to judge comparisons accurately.

Finally, there's a phenomenon with software synths in that people want to own lots of them, not just a few. The cumulative costs for doing this really add up when synths are closer to $200 than $50. While a $50 synth might be an impulse purchase, the same is not likely to be true for one costing four times as much.

[BONES]

Let's say you need to make $50,000 a year (poverty level here in Silicon Valley) before taxes to live

f**k! Half the people I know would be paupers. That's roughly what I earn and I know plenty of folk who don't come close to that. Moreover I live a very comfortable life on that kind of money in one of the ten most expensive cities to live in in the world.
In fact, I think the average wage in Australia is around Au$55,000 which is about US$41k.

[.jon]

In a marketing science sense, this is a very interesting industry. New, virtual product, internet marketing and distribution and lots uncertainty in the form new technology, guerrilla developers, crackers and close, even personal contact between consumers and producers.

[SuitcaseOfLizards]

Let's say you need to make $50,000 a year (poverty level here in Silicon Valley) before taxes to live

f**k! Half the people I know would be paupers. That's roughly what I earn and I know plenty of folk who don't come close to that. Moreover I live a very comfortable life on that kind of money in one of the ten most expensive cities to live in in the world.
In fact, I think the average wage in Australia is around Au$55,000 which is about US$41k.

Heh. My microscopic studio apartment is US$899 a month. I don't own a car, so that's not a big deal - my transportation costs run around US$100 a month. Utilities are another US$200 a month. Other debts run about US$400 a month. So.. for me.. that's US$1599 a month in *basic necessities*, up around US$20K a year. Taxes take close to half my income, as well.

Don't move to Silicon Valley - or the U.S.!