Originally Posted by Treehouse_Ryan
Hi all. I work at Treehouse and was responsible for parts of this project....
First off, I just want to say that we're fans of this site and went through a lot of it during planning for the Reckoning CEs and this one. It's been fun to see what you guys have to say about what we did, and that you have such an active community for such a specialized segment of the gaming space is impressive, and really cool.
Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you, and chime in on a couple questions that seem to come up a few times, and also make myself available to you guys if you have any other specific questions. I don't want to make myself a nuisance, so I'll only post again if asked to. You guys obviously have a comfortable and good thing going without any official involvement, so I'm not trying to mess that up.
Some answers/justifications:
* There are only 5,000 made, across all configurations. Whether it includes a 360 game, PS3 game, PC game, or no game, the total of all units made is 5,000. We're going to split them up based on how they sell, but I can tell you the initial stock released was 2,000 for the set with no game and a little under 3,000 distributed between the versions with games (holding some back for Visceral folks, etc). So when someone says only 600 left and someone else says 1500 left, you're probably looking at different versions. The total adds up to 5,000, so you'd have to load up your cart with every configuration to get the full picture. To save you the time, we were at about 1700 sold this morning (total, across all versions).
* Shipping is tough. I know it's rough to pay a lot of money for something that you can't actually use or play with, but we're subsidizing our actual costs here. We spent two weeks going back and forth with different rates and timings and how much of it we could discount from one column in order to make the total at checkout less offensive. Between actual postage and the additional fees our warehousing company is charging us for some of the stuff going on here, we'll be losing money on shipping on just about every order. I still think it sucks that we have to charge you what we are, but if it makes it any easier to swallow, we're absolutely not trying to make money off you on shipping. There are some countries with a $75 rate. We were actually quoted $100 as a kind of blanket fee for "everywhere else", but I made our operations guy change it to $75. I know that's still crazy high, but if you live in one of those countries, I imagined it wouldn't be terrible for us to take a little more of a loss to send you something you might not have as much ordinary access to, and I assumed we would be talking about a fairly small segment of interested parties. (If I'm way off base and you live in a country that is being charged $75 and you don't normally pay near that much for large boxes, message me and tell me if there's a shipping method that works better for you that we've not explored and we'll look into it for the future.)
* The $99 international shipping with the game is meant to be a deterrent, and $56 extra for shipping the game later is obviously not based on real ship rates. There are contractual issues with shipping Region 1 games outside of Region 1, so we opted for disincentivizing people with higher shipping fees, rather than throwing a nondescript error at checkout (which was our only other option given the limitiations of our platform and the time we had to work out something custom). If you're in a country that is seeing $99 for shipping, you should be buying the Add-On and getting your game from someone else.
* The Tins are arriving at our warehouse pre-packaged. There are some printed cardboard inserts to keep things in place and everything is nested pretty solidly. Damage during shipping is always a risk, but missing items is [hopefully] unlikely, and damage to multiple items is very unlikely (barring some freak forklift puncture, etc). We're doing our best to make sure it shows up intact and is nicer than you're expecting. I know a lot of the items themselves are sealed, but I don't recall if the tin itself is. I'll double check on that....
* We based the price-point off the great Borderlands 2 edition with the loot chest, but we thought our stuff was a little nicer made (but, we would, I suppose). The marker is really nice in person, and the journal feels like something special. And the flip-book is difficult to describe or picture accurately, but is probably the most expensive item we produced. We tried to pack in as much production value as possible, and hopefully you'll be really impressed when you get it. Also, regarding other comparisons, keep in mind that most of those were dealing with radically different economies of scale. Making 150,000 of something is really a whole lot cheaper per item than making only 5,000 of something.
* We work with EA (and other companies) to make official products, and the store we run and host is under their domain, but we are not EA. I know it sounds like marketing nonsense, but we really are just a handful of gaming nerds that like working on video game stuff. We made something we thought we could be proud of, and while we have to make enough money to keep the lights on and keep making things, we didn't do it for the money. Yes, it's more expensive than the $20 extra a lot of CEs cost, but we didn't want to make a few bucks worth of uninteresting stuff. I personally think it's a pretty good value (the unfortunate realities of international shipping aside), and really like how everything came out. It's more than a casual fan should be expected to pay, for sure, but we didn't make it for the casual fan....
* Payment will be charged at time of purchase. This sucks, and we're actively looking into better ways of handling this, but for limited items with long lead times, it's a sticky situation. If we don't collect the money up front, it's easy to have someone just tie up all the inventory and not intend to actually pay for it, etc. Plus, we have to pay for the items up front, so if we get X orders of something, and order accordingly, we're stuck with a bunch of dead inventory if half of them cancel. It's partly to protect people that want limited items, and it's partly to protect ourselves, but it still kind of sucks and we're looking into better ways all the time.
* Please note that the picture of the bottle posted above is our prototype. We're photographing the final one properly early this week, but you can see a less-fancy photo of it on the single-page site. The molding looks like that photo, but the final materials are less blatantly plastic-looking.
Alright, I've disrupted this thread enough. If anyone wants any other details, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer you. Thanks again for caring so much about collector's editions, and thanks especially to everyone that picked up one of ours. We're really interested in making more and better editions this year, so we'll be paying attention to what you all say.
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01-13-2013, 02:49 AM
Re: Dead Space III Dev Team Edition
Melbourne, Australia
Texas
United Kingdom
Linear Mode
