Monkey Sale?
Monkey Archive Forums/Monkey Discussion/Monkey Sale?
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| For those frugal fannies out there lurking in the shadows of the forum, clutching their wallets for such a long time (as I did) ... Monkey is now $99 USD. Hey I want my $20 back! j/k j/k I'm loving the language and it's well worth it! |
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| $99 is grate deal!, even when I bought it for $120 I still thought it was cheap for what it offers. |
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| i bought it for 130$ (converted from euro to dollar) the price is a bit high... but i hope i get bit back from sellig apps O_o |
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| Monkey is the most fun you can have with your clothes off. Or is that just me. :) |
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| $99 is a STEAL for this tool / language. I paid $120, but would have paid $200 after trying it. And that was back at around version 49. When I see people fiddling directly with Java and Eclipse, or XCode, or some of these other single-platform languages, I just can't figure out why they are wasting their time. Monkey has changed my life. I've never had this much fun making games. |
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| For such a great tool, $99 is an absolute bargain. This software is worth a lot more. |
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| 99$ is really cheap. I mean you can write Android, iOS and PS Vita games in a basic like language. That alone for me would be enough buying it. |
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| It is a great deal. And remember, this is a one time payment. No yearly subscription or pay by update so far! |
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| 99$ i cool! I know a lot of young students in the german forum want to try monkey, but the price is to high for them. This will help. If you earn your money with programming, also the old price was very cheap compared to other products. We could voluntary buy a second monkey, if we have success with monkey based game to support the Blitz Research. Let's say every returned 10.000$ one new purchase. I did this with BMax as a tribut to his excellent work. At the moment I use monkey only for experimental purposes. But we will see... I'm very interested in Android target and IPhone. And I like the fact to code there with BASIC!!! |
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| Well luckily it's NOT Basic. ;) If you LOVE Basic you'd check out GLBasic. |
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| it's basic.. it's comfortable.. so it's basic! do something in java or php and alwas forget this fu... semikolon at the end! And get a error message, that "there is an error 3 lines later"... Or why this leading $ in front of a each variable? Or think about "If a=b" without two "==".... Basic is, when the compiler knows what I want. Thats what basic is for me: Basic is a "human" language, where the compiler supports me. And I see this tradition also in monkey. |
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| You can't argue with free updates for life, well worth the money, but I do wonder how Mr Sibly earns his money in the future. If I ever create a game that makes money I will definately donate a percentage to Blitz Research. |
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| @TeaBoy - I hope simple maths will help Mr Sibly.. Clearly, he has a passion and skill (understatement of the year) for developing these kinds of programming languages. Right now we have 700-odd people who have bought Monkey. With a price reduction, publicity, and positive word-of-mouth, maybe that could become 2000, or 7000. That would start paying Mark some $$$. Certainly, everyone I've mentioned Monkey to (or demonstrated it to) has been impressed - most have asked: "if it can do all this, how come everyone's not using it?". A good question! |
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| I must agree... A time ago i designed my own language that should convert code to C++ But it was not finished: it can only read files and split into tokens, check for blocks, round/square brackets And my language look very similar to Monkey: SUB foo (i32 a, f32 z)
i32 i
FOR i=1 TO 10
IF i=2 OR i=4 THEN i+1
END
ENDNo semikolons, no brackets, |
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| I thought Monkey was a good deal at $120 and would have been still at $150. This is a really fun language to code in. I think Blitz Research has been lacking in self-promotion so hopefully Mr. Sibley will get in touch with some marketing folks to get the word out. I thought he was going to do that from some post I read a while back, but maybe I'm making that up? People at my work (software devs) are tired of me talking about Monkey so I'm just going to have to try to make some games to show them what it's about and turn them into potential customers. |
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| I personally believe that if a product is good enough it will market itself, Monkey doesn't necessarily need a marketing pro. The features of a product will speak for itself and gain the attention of potential customers. If Mr Sibly keeps going the way he is then Monkey will turn into something much more than originally intended. @tiresius, if your work colleagues are sick of hearing about it then you should develop something that grabs their attention ;o) |
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| It is a superb product. Very open, very understandable. |
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| $99 is a steal. The price it was before was a steal. Why does the store page have such a lame URI? http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/Store/_index_.php Why doesn't this work? http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/Store Mark! I don't know the reason why you lowered the price, but you do not need to lower the price. If you are not getting the sales you want I guarantee marketing is the problem and not the price. You should post a job offer at places to find a designer to make the site better, or ask site owners of designs you like who did their sites. (Good place to find people http://dribbble.com/ ) Basically you need a page which people can go to and be absolutely clear on why they should use Monkey and be excited about it. Like others have posted above, we currently have to take our time to explain why Monkey is so great. Explain why everyone, even non-programmers would want to buy Monkey. Then raise the price back up, and open up affiliate sales (BMT Micro supports it) and give the $20+ to people who send you sales. Then other people will have the incentive to do your marketing for you. > if a product is good enough it will market itself A product being "good" is a form of marketing - the packaging, art, design, functionality, mechanics - all of those contribute to making it be sold. A product with mass appeal or social aspects built in will generate new users on its own - even if it's not a "good" product. Monkey is quite good enough already and it shouldn't have had its price lowered if the objective was only to make more sales. There are still only 664 registered users on this forum. These are not all of the sales (maybe some people are happy with the version they downloaded when buying), but still you can't think that marketing is never required if a product is good enough. There is more involved, and good marketing always helps. |
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| I have to agree there. It is a steal if you compare this to others similar apps which you have to pay for each export module. (50-150$ each) aside the main program. |
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| It is dirt cheap. I guess that is the way mark likes it. I bought blitz basic back when it pretty much first came out. Back then you had to get the disk shipped to you, no downloads. And it was like $29 or something like that. It was so cheap, I told him to raise the price. But I think the reasonable price will drive people to monkey. I mean, products like unity charge per target, plus they basically double the cost to upgrade to a new version every year. It is quite the rip-off. That's why I think the customers, ie you and me, should try to promote the product to others if possible. It's worth it and the more people that buy it the better the product and the community will become. |
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| I believe Monkey should stay at $99 USD, if you compare this price with something like AGK from the game creators who charge $59. $99 may just entice many more customers than if you raise it. @Soap -> A product being 'good' is a form of marketing, but not the form of marketing I mentioned, I.e. paying someone/company to actively 'promote' the product. Word of mouth / conversation / is the best form of marketing, you don't need to budget for a marketing professional. The examples created by the users will also entice. |
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| >Word of mouth / conversation / is the best form of marketing, you don't need to budget for a marketing professional. This is idealistic and risky. The reality is that if you have a product people want spending money to market it will make you more money. Waiting on users to spread the word can work but it has yet to work for Monkey. There are now 666 registered users (and I purchased the last two keys - I've purchased a handful of the registered users). Maybe this many sales is how many Mark wanted to sell and he only lowered the price to be nice. Right now the Monkey pages are very programmer orientated and do not do a good job at selling the product. Look at: http://www.scirra.com/construct2 this is much more universally appealing, and their marketing works. They do an amazing job with selling their product and I've said it here before, but Monkey is a better thing to use. >$ Price does not matter as much as you think it does. Lowering the price to get more sales is dumb when traffic is the same. Long term if no effort is done to market traffic will be the same - average revenue will lower. The Scirra guys are doing it right. They raise the price every year as more features are added, and do a lot of low cost marketing to build awareness and understanding. I could say more but I don't want to waste my breath. I've done what I can to try and spread the word of the product but I have to focus on my own business too. |
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| Monkey is awesome, but you would not know unless you either tested it out for a while, came from one of the older product lines (and from that thrust make a jump of faith like me) or got someone to convince you it is awesome like I tend to do. And my educated guess on why this is so, is because this is common and especially in the game business: Mark probably wants to focus on the product, not the company development or marketing - both which require a different set of skills and would take up a lot of "boring" time. Monkey is improving fast these days and it is very much nearing a point of completeness that would probably make it substantially easier to convert users (like now it has network, async, improved custom target support). Maybe Mark is waiting for this future point to really make a larger effort in finding these new users? My suggestion instead of lowering the price for life-time membership, would be to lower the price of a part of Monkey, like a target limited version. Must be fairly simple to automatically create a html5/glfw version with each release and get more people in through the door that way without almost any extra work? One example right now that can be improved (imo) is that the demo does not update with Monkey --> so frameworks can't be used by demo-users and frameworks can't support demo users. Because to be productive in Monkey from the start you want a framework like diddy, but new users cannot experience that and as a user I can't show code like that to test users (I don't even tell people there is a demo because last I checked nothing I had compiled on it). And so they look at Monkey, find the risk to high since they will never figure out how good it is. And these are users that are directly referenced by existing users like me! Consider how big a risk random internet travelers experience. |
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| Right now the Monkey pages are very programmer orientated and do not do a good job at selling the product. Look at: http://www.scirra.com/construct2 this is much more universally appealing, and their marketing works. They do an amazing job with selling their product and I've said it here before, but Monkey is a better thing to use. I agree with this. |
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| I have purchased BlitzBasic, Blitz3D and BlitzMax and I have only ever used the applications for programming for pleasure not for producing commercial games. I have been interested in buying Monkey for quite some time but the price for me was a little too high, now that Mark has lowered the price it is now affordable so I purchased Monkey yesterday. |
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| > I have only ever used the applications for programming for pleasure not for producing commercial games. First, Welcome to Monkey! And that is a good point. There are likely to be two groups of users. Indies (commercial) and Hobby (non-profit). A good reason to have two price points to match each group maybe? |
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| I fall into the programming for pleasure camp as well. I started with Blitz 2D and moved to Max. I bought Monkey and Jungle shortly after they became available. People in this category(which I think there are a fair number) in my experience tend to have more money and aren't as worried with the price. |
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