Blocks partnership ....where it's at ??

When I look at the fee structure, I notice that the risk is transferred to the seller of the Blocks.

The seller has to pay up an EUR / USD 1k fixed fee upfront for encoding.
Then, the seller has to do the initial order of serials without having an exact idea how much units will be sold in the future, or how it log it takes to sell them. You can do your research well, but it is a guesstimate.
The tariff is decreasing from 9 to 1.5 percent with more licences ordered, but you have to pay the full initial order upfront I.e. MSRP * fee % * ordered licences. You have to make an estimate how long it takes to get your money back and if you can miss that money for such a period of time. Borrowing costs eat your profit / increase your loss, given that the bank is willing to give you credit.

I do not say that the price is high / low as NI provides assistance in multiple ways in the process and they take care of serial management, protection and so on.

With this fee structure you have to take the leap to a software startup company as a Block builder. I think more builders would be boarding the partnership as no initial load fee has to be paid.

NI has issued bundles of Blocks Base and Blocks Primes when this started. Why not sell 3rd party blocks via the same channel and agree a share of profit with the builder?

No estimates of expected sales needed. No initial payments for the builder. It speaks for itself that NI takes a larger fee than the current one since the builder only has to take care of building and maintaining the product.

 

I see nothing irregular here. It is the same for any business. One has to invest and there is often an element of risk. Also, imagine if NI offered the Serial on pay as you go basis. They would be inundated with requests for serial for projects that never see the light of day. NI have set the cost at a level where the developer is motivated to continue and to provide high quality solutions that sell.

 

That's not to say that they couldn't also have a revenue-based pricing scheme as an option, that would greatly reduce up-front costs for the 3rd party and also doesn't make it such a gamble for smaller devs (which would be the case with most if not all Reaktor developers).

 

I agree - something more in line with Apple's $99/year + 30% of sales would make more sense to me.

 

I'll post some more info tomorrow, but I wanted to let people know that I met with NI employees at namm this year and I directly suggested this same thing, the main reason being promotional power, I don't really have the power or resources to reach out and contact millions of users in a day the way they do.

If there was a Reaktor store on the NI site with a monthly email regarding new releases we would all sell a lot better, and I would have no problem with a %30 share going to them for that reason, there was no yes or no answer given as that's not a decision the people I spoke to would be making on their own, I just wanted to let everyone know that the conversation was had and I think it's being discussed.

 

Actually, a tiered revenue based system would be more inclusive. Reaper's pricing system is very popular amongst it's user base, but would that work for a much larger outfit like NI. I simply do not know.