Premium subscription price update (June 1st)

[itsdawsontime]

I don’t care about the price increase considering it’s the cost difference of a beer and a half over a years time, the cost of a used board game, OR half a sandwich at a Jersey Mike’s.

Even though my price is increasing from $24/yr to $36/yr - that’s the cost of buying ONE board game period. So if it helps me enjoy gaming with my friends when I couldn’t otherwise - cool. I’ll turn off auto-renew for now since mine just renewed, but for the volume of the games, number of users, and quality UI I love this site.

[spamymaps]

Why does the gift card buying page say the gift card won't work on your own account? Why can't we pre-buy annual memberships this way? I can do that at Nintendo or Xbox for instance.

[Duterte]

you may want to stop calling it a "subscription" if you're going to raise the price every year, or in this case, multiple times a year

[Tisaac]

I have to wonder if the reason for this price increase has anything to do with the number of premium subscribers who have cancelled their membership because of the decision to end "No Time Limit, Turn Based, Friends Only" games. One of the most active threads on this site has been asking the site admins to change this back, so that we can play NTL-TB-FO games, and the few responses we've seen from the site admins have been thoroughly debated on this discussion forum:

https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... &start=240

250 replies and counting, thousands of views, and almost no response from the site admins.

Please bring back No Time Limit, Turn Based, Friends Only games and I'll be happy to renew, even at the increased price. But without that feature, which was turned off without discussion, I really don't feel good about the customer service or community we find at this site.

I only have access to the audience, not the number of premium people, but the figures for audience show no such effect. It's rather stable, or maybe slightly increasing overall (hard to tell because lot of variability).

[lordalx]

Interestingly my email says increase from £27 to £33 however I just checked and I only pay £22.5 a year.

The email you received mentionned the current price and the new price, so you can know what is the amount of the increase for the annual and monthly subscribtion.
You had a better deal until now by having subscribed before november 2021 which was great! The discount of a yearly subscribtion versus monthly one is still great while we did'nt change the monthly one.

So with changes to the payment system will we now be able to change our payment details without unsubscribing and resubscribing?

This is something we are currently working on with our payment system partner

Sadly in my country the increase is more than 100%... I'm going from R$96 to R$215, what the hell ?!
[...]

In BRL the increase is way more important than in the other currencies because of the EUR/BRL exchange rates (as you know). Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about this, as we have to keep our prices coherent in the different countries/currencies.

Same here. Previous announcement made it sound like existing subscriptions would remain unchanged.

We stuck to previous announcement until now, more than a year and a half, keeping reduced price from 2016 for earlier subscribers.
Again: the old price is not meant to go on indefinitely.

The email to me was wrong (it didn't reflect how much I currently pay annually or monthly yet presented it as though it did and the link to support didn't work) and I do hope it wasn't the "dedicated email" that those who were locked in will be receiving.

The mail don't tell how much you paid, but what is the increase for yearly and monthly subscribtion, for each country/currency. That what was expected by the dedicated email.
Thanks for reporting the wrong link to support, this should have been fixed in some way by now.

I have to wonder if the reason for this price increase has anything to do with the number of premium subscribers who have cancelled their membership because of the decision to end "No Time Limit, Turn Based, Friends Only" games. One of the most active threads on this site has been asking the site admins to change this back, so that we can play NTL-TB-FO games, and the few responses we've seen from the site admins have been thoroughly debated on this discussion forum
[...]

This is definitively not linked, neither do I want to compete against this thread to bring more answers or visibility here
It was answered and further explanation and discussions did not change our perception about it: you can still play no time limit, turn based with friends. The ELO issue is really something we are concerned about.

[Issity]

I agree that the price is still very good, but this is from your previous FAQ about the last raise:

You will subscribe with the current price (24$ annually, or 4$ each month), and you will keep these prices after the November 1st price update, as long as you do not cancel your membership.

as long as you do not cancel your membership

+1

I'm very disappointed with this change. The reason is not the new price but the broken promise.

[Bbugs17]

The replies from moderation on this thread say it all. It is tone-deaf reply to simply keep saying "well we didn't really mean for it to be forever!". You told us we could lock in a price and continue to pay it if we didn't change anything in our end. This was a lie and quite frankly I will no longer be paying a dime if this change goes through. I was a user who barely logged in but I loved the company and website and was happy to be a subscriber. I will cancel my subscription before June now and will never again be paying for services. The price hike isn't completely unreasonable, but the reneg on your own words and then telling the consumer that it is us who has misunderstood is flat-out corporate double-speak made to basically gaslight us into submission. Not going to happen.

Edit: I'm currently paying $24 yearly. The pay increase is for $5. But it says the new price is now $36. So not only is the team lying about their past promises, they are lying about how much it will cost those who have been supporting the longest. You are alienating your longest supporters. Why?

[paramesis]

Here is the announcement for the annual price increase from $24 to $30.
https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=97268

The quote below makes it abundantly clear that the old annual fee of $24 was never meant to be a lifetime guarantee.

What about my current Monthly/Yearly subscription? Will the prices raise too?

No.

Because we value our most loyal members, if you subscribe to the Monthly / Yearly subscription with the current price, the price will remain the same after November 1st. For the time being, there is absolutely no change for you as long as you keep your current subscription.

[fiomtec]

There are no such thing as a deal here, no contractual obligation from BGA. You kept the old price until a new increase went up, as they announced.

I don't mind that much the price increase, as I certainly get my share out of it, but this "hey, we didn't sign that with blood we can do whatever we want, sue us" is certainly not... elegant at all.

That said, and as others have mentioned, it is good that great games are being added, but there are tons of threads of bugs/suggestions with easy to implement improvements, tons of votes, and really not much seems to be done. The no time limit for friends is one. Disabling many useless popups, inviting your usual group when you create a new game, there are many many many things that would improve the site a lot.

However, every time I hit one of those bugs or think of a suggestion and I go to the bugs/features thread, I almost always I find someone that asked that years ago, a ton of people voting for it and saying what a good idea it is, and absolutely no movement from BGA. If you are asking us for more, don't just say "we added 100 games". The interface changed, and part of that was good, and part of that... wasn't. At all.

PS.- Games without undo should not leave beta. So many games can be lost with a misclick, and many don't have an undo or even a confirmation. We should be able to redo every single thing we did if no new information was displayed. That's a big problem with many games. Money should go there too.

And now that I wrote my (for now) 30€, I'll get off my soap box.

[Tisaac]

There are no such thing as a deal here, no contractual obligation from BGA. You kept the old price until a new increase went up, as they announced.

I don't mind that much the price increase, as I certainly get my share out of it, but this "hey, we didn't sign that with blood we can do whatever we want, sue us" is certainly not... elegant at all.

That said, and as others have mentioned, it is good that great games are being added, but there are tons of threads of bugs/suggestions with easy to implement improvements, tons of votes, and really not much seems to be done. The no time limit for friends is one. Disabling many useless popups, inviting your usual group when you create a new game, there are many many many things that would improve the site a lot.

However, every time I hit one of those bugs or think of a suggestion and I go to the bugs/features thread, I almost always I find someone that asked that years ago, a ton of people voting for it and saying what a good idea it is, and absolutely no movement from BGA. If you are asking us for more, don't just say "we added 100 games". The interface changed, and part of that was good, and part of that... wasn't. At all.

PS.- Games without undo should not leave beta. So many games can be lost with a misclick, and many don't have an undo or even a confirmation. We should be able to redo every single thing we did if no new information was displayed. That's a big problem with many games. Money should go there too.

And now that I wrote my (for now) 30€, I'll get off my soap box.

Cannot agree more with your points about quality standard and some missing features.
But I still dont understand how can people really think that prices would never go up forever ?? Again, you can be mad that the two increases are quite close to each other, but thinking that you can keep a steady price no matter how the service/world evolve ? That's just delusional IMO.