price-points
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How much should an expansion cost?
We've talked about this briefly in a recent Breakfast Topic, but that's not the same as actually standing up and taking a position on an issue, and I (specifically, I, Matthew Rossi, not all of WoW Insider) do have a position on this one - namely, that this expansion will likely contain as much if not more gameplay, art assets, and overall design work as any game coming out, and that frankly the last couple of expansions have been under what they should have cost. I didn't come to this decision in a vacuum, either - I come to it as someone who does not want to pay the price as established. I'm extremely penurious. almost outright parsimonious when it comes to money. I don't like spending it. So when I heard how much the expansion was going to cost (the day the pre-orders became available) I immediately balked at it. It's only ten bucks more to buy Titanfall, I said to myself, and that's a completely new game. And then I read this post by Kim Acuff (who often comments here at WoW Insider as Ember Dione) a developer on Skylanders, and I started to rethink my position on the relative cost of the expansion, how much it should cost, and the validity of the whole "as expensive as a new game" discussion. Because here's the fact - each WoW expansion has effectively been a new game.
Nokia CEO: cheap Windows Phones can come 'very quickly'
We'd raised our own concerns in interviews with both Stephen Elop and Microsoft's Aaron Woodman in the past week that Nokia could have difficulty pushing the Windows Phone platform low enough to fill the holes left by Symbian's departure in the bottom rungs of the market, but the Nokia CEO is making it very clear that he thinks that won't be a problem. In a talk with Finnish journalists on Friday, Elop said that it has become "convinced" that it can hit "a very low price point" and do it "very quickly," a strategy that will be key to converting significant swaths of Symbian market share into Windows Phone market share without losing it to other manufacturers or platforms. Of course, something tells us the leaked design concept (pictured right) doesn't represent the types of hardware Nokia has in mind for those low price points -- but no single device or market segment is going to take Espoo to the promised land here.
