Generally if you bring up price point in any form (not exclusively limited to what an LGS would have to charge) in their public discord, the CEO will respond to you and repeat the mantra: "Cheap armies comparatively to other game systems" and then the true believers will emotionally react like football hooligans - dogpile, and sycophantly go on about how you have no idea what you're talking about and assert they know whats reasonable and you dont because they've spent millions of dollars on plastic and have kept entire game lines alive by fostering communities built around them with their bare hands. And that every single thing Archon does is mathematically dialed in to the perfect number already so no changes can be made (followed immediately by the CEO lowering the price despite this assumption). Oh and any concerns you may have - if they were true - would mean that the game is 100% doomed anyway so why are you even bringing it up? Silence infidel! Complete feast or famine black and white thinking.
"Cheap armies" is true, as mentioned in my previous post about a recent AMA. It's just hard to get curious non wargamers (one of their target demographics) to see that. Dollar per in game points is great, dollar per plastic is either on par with GW, slightly better, or slightly worse depending on which unit and whether or not you're getting some kind of discount from a multi box set or bundle. Giving army price point estimations is also awkward because you want some flex units for competitive depending on what becomes the tournament standard as countering is a core mechanic and Archon's idea of dealing with that is to build 2 lists, select 1 once you find out the faction of your opponent (but not their list). You can ignore that mechanic by building two of the same list or plan on only swapping 1 unit out for another, or have an entirely different list (In any case both lists have to share a faction) - so that's harder to calculate and speak to when someone asks if they're looking for that kind of scene. The company themselves are also more than happy to just let tournament organizers decide so who knows what the status quo will even be.
I think the game itself has a lot going for it, so clearly someone in the design chair knows what they're doing, but they are not businessmen. They dont allocate enough time to action on community feedback - something they seem to model their strategy around which makes their choices schizophrenic. They over communicate in some areas and under communicate in others. They spent very little on marketing and Blizzard themselves didn't even bother to make a short form link to the pre-order launch on Battlenet. The moment preorders started two of their websites exploded despite the game being still relatively unknown, getting in the way of orders, the only one alive was Gamefound and was charging inaccurate shipping. They didn't validate if the prices of their products outputted properly on some sites, or validated that they were accurate to each region. Testers were vaguely promised "Up to 80% off" very early on during the beta, and didn't get new info on that till the day of pre-orders, or whether or not they qualified. This ended up being a flat 10% discount on the entire order, which they then clarified "It was originally 80% the founders kits" which in some ways is a net positive depending on the size of the order, but still handled very sloppily. Complete shit show overall.
