Subscribe to Impact Soundworks newsletter then unsubscribe for an 80% off discount code.

[Niky Serrano]

23 minutes ago, Wallace Ng said:

Seems like they are working to kill the code...

Now it shows this on my end

Edit: Glad I missed this by a margin, or else I'll be spending for their Tokyo Series 😂

Yes!
This coupon has expired

[Niky Serrano]

17 minutes ago, Andrew Aversa said:

Hey guys - owner of ISW here. This is abusing our system. Period. This year and the last have been difficult for us with a general pullback across the music gear industry in demand. We've implemented various discounts for our customers as a gesture of a good will and to help people enjoy our instruments through rocky economic times. At the same time, despite that pullback in demand, we've created new jobs (with benefits) in the last 2 years and I'm personally committed to avoiding layoffs at all costs. In 2022 I took a 75% pay cut to ensure the well-being of my employees.

Because of the behavior here, we have to disable this discount entirely, so nobody will get it, and we may have to disable others as well.

I'll now have to spend my time (currently on my one vacation I get per year) and money researching how to solve a problem that folks here created. These are resources that could have been spent on product updates or developing new instruments, that we now have to spend preventing abuse.

Please think about your actions next time you do something like this to a tiny business like us.

Completely agree Andrew

In fact, I said that I wanted to buy Ventus Winds Duduk for 18€, but finally I didn't do it

My apologies for this

The best of lucks

[Niky Serrano]

Anyway, one point more here @Andrew Aversa

In a constructive point of view

I appreciate your work in this difficult market, but take into account that this type of mistakes is not a customer responsibility

I understand perfectly the history behind this and that you are sharing with us (thanks a lot to give the other point of view from the other side!), your worries and the problems for your company and your employees, and you are right with this, but take into account the self-criticism about your mistakes in the campaign

I think that no one want to hurt you, but I understand that we did it
Sorry about that and as I said, best of lucks!

Edited June 22, 2023 by Niky Serrano

[trager]

54 minutes ago, Andrew Aversa said:

Hey guys - owner of ISW here. This is abusing our system. Period. This year and the last have been difficult for us with a general pullback across the music gear industry in demand. We've implemented various discounts for our customers as a gesture of a good will and to help people enjoy our instruments through rocky economic times. At the same time, despite that pullback in demand, we've created new jobs (with benefits) in the last 2 years and I'm personally committed to avoiding layoffs at all costs. In 2022 I took a 75% pay cut to ensure the well-being of my employees.

Because of the behavior here, we have to disable this discount entirely, so nobody will get it, and we may have to disable others as well.

I'll now have to spend my time (currently on my one vacation I get per year) and money researching how to solve a problem that folks here created. These are resources that could have been spent on product updates or developing new instruments, that we now have to spend preventing abuse.

Please think about your actions next time you do something like this to a tiny business like us.

I think you've got some nerve. Your company takes part in an industry-wide scam every day. Extremely inflated list prices intended to give a perception of value while conveniently tricking unsuspecting customers. Your company in particular bamboozles users with all kinds of obscure codes that can sometimes lead to products being free for anyone lucky enough to learn your arcane system, while others pay up in good faith.

If you offer an (absurd) 80% off code for anyone unsubscribing, and users find out about this, there is absolutely nothing illegitimate about those users unsubscribing specifically in order to benefit from the discount. It's your stupid system that users are attempting to negotiate. If it looks perverse that's because you created it that way.

I didn't try this unsubscribe trick, but I find your poor-me poor-us moralising hard to stomach. If anyone's the bad guys here it's you. We just do our best to avoid getting shafted. That's why this sub-forum exists. 

[audioschmaudio]

1 hour ago, Andrew Aversa said:

Hey guys - owner of ISW here. This is abusing our system. Period. This year and the last have been difficult for us with a general pullback across the music gear industry in demand. We've implemented various discounts for our customers as a gesture of a good will and to help people enjoy our instruments through rocky economic times. At the same time, despite that pullback in demand, we've created new jobs (with benefits) in the last 2 years and I'm personally committed to avoiding layoffs at all costs. In 2022 I took a 75% pay cut to ensure the well-being of my employees.

Because of the behavior here, we have to disable this discount entirely, so nobody will get it, and we may have to disable others as well.

I'll now have to spend my time (currently on my one vacation I get per year) and money researching how to solve a problem that folks here created. These are resources that could have been spent on product updates or developing new instruments, that we now have to spend preventing abuse.

Please think about your actions next time you do something like this to a tiny business like us.

I'm sorry to hear that you're having a hard time with your company. Once again I'm stunned to find out that one of the companies that I consider to be a big player in the music industry turns out to be a small business.

In defense of this community I must say that giving people a generic 80% discount for all newsletter-unsubscribers was a desaster waiting to happen. One can't expect such a thing to remain a secret for very long. If it hadn't happened here, it would have happened elsewhere sooner or later. But I did in fact keep myself from posting it on mydealz.de as I imagined that it could be harmful to your business.

Hopefully, on the bright side, you might have gotten some money from people who would normally never have spent money on your shop, like me (I don't earn money with music, I just do it for fun and my budget is quite limited).

I wish you all the best. May the shock settle quickly, the financial damage not be too bad and your remaining vacation nice and enjoyable.

Edited June 22, 2023 by audioschmaudio

[MrFigg]

31 minutes ago, audioschmaudio said:

I'm sorry to hear that you're having a hard time with your company. Once again I'm stunned to find out that one of the companies that I consider to be a big player in the music industry turns out to be a small business.

In defense of this community I must say that giving people a generic 80% discount for all newsletter-unsubscribers was a desaster waiting to happen. One can't expect such a thing to remain a secret for very long. If it hadn't happened here, it would have happened elsewhere sooner or later. But I did in fact keep myself from posting it on mydealz.de as I imagined that it could be harmful to your business.

Hopefully, on the bright side, you might have gotten some money from people who would normally never have spent money on your shop, like me (I don't earn money with music, I just do it for fun and my budget is quite limited).

I wish you all the best. May the shock settle quickly, the financial damage not be too bad and your remaining vacation nice and enjoyable.

Nicely put. Of course we don’t want to see small businesses damaged.  And yes, saying there’s an 80% off code for anyone trying to unsubscribe isn’t  exactly cheating the company when it’s the company themselves who are trying to keep customers. I’d also agree that there’s probably been a lot of €90 purchases from people who wouldn’t have paid €400 or whatever they cost. 
 

Edited June 22, 2023 by MrFigg

[Anxiousmofo]

I didn't use this code and I sympathize/relate with everyone who is trying to get by, but it would seem to me that profits from customer sales that otherwise might not have occurred at the list price are still profits-- not losses.

[Andrew Aversa]

45 minutes ago, Anxiousmofo said:

I didn't use this code and I sympathize/relate with everyone who is trying to get by, but it would seem to me that profits from customer sales that otherwise might not have occurred at the list price are still profits-- not losses.

If we had no overhead per product this would be true, but depending on the purchase, it may be a loss for us. For example, we pay a per-unit serial cost for any Kontakt Player product, which scales to MSRP and not the discounted price; we have royalty arrangements on various products including the Tokyo Scoring series, so that the musicians are compensated for every sale; we pay for bandwidth used (which isn't trivial on 60gb+ downloads!); we also pay a % of MSRP for product delivery when using Pulse.

So why did we do it then? One of our core company values is being honest and straightforward so I'll explain the context and thinking behind this deal.

The majority of people on our email list are folks who downloaded a free instrument like Shreddage 3 Stratus Free or Super Audio Boy, but have not purchased anything. Our observation is that these free customers typically take years to become paid customers, and a minority of them EVER do, which makes sense... I've downloaded free plugins and not purchased other plugins from that developer's catalog.

But we also noticed that even if someone took years to go from free -> paid product, they typically became lifelong customers, which is reassuring because we put a lot of time & effort into our instruments (and their updates.)

Hence why we aimed to offer this deal. IF we had the opportunity to reach these folks when they were leaving, maybe we'd have one more chance to show them the value of our instruments.

1 hour ago, trager said:

I think you've got some nerve. Your company takes part in an industry-wide scam every day. Extremely inflated list prices intended to give a perception of value while conveniently tricking unsuspecting customers. Your company in particular bamboozles users with all kinds of obscure codes that can sometimes lead to products being free for anyone lucky enough to learn your arcane system, while others pay up in good faith.

If you offer an (absurd) 80% off code for anyone unsubscribing, and users find out about this, there is absolutely nothing illegitimate about those users unsubscribing specifically in order to benefit from the discount. It's your stupid system that users are attempting to negotiate. If it looks perverse that's because you created it that way.

I didn't try this unsubscribe trick, but I find your poor-me poor-us moralising hard to stomach. If anyone's the bad guys here it's you. We just do our best to avoid getting shafted. That's why this sub-forum exists. 

We do not inflate our list prices. In fact, when we released Shreddage 2 back in 2012 it was $149. Most of our modern Shreddage 3 instruments are still that price over a decade later despite many free updates and improvements. If you look across our catalog, our prices are middle-of-the-road relative to industry peers. You will certainly find more expensive amp sims, tape sims, virtual guitars, virtual basses, orchestral strings, etc. elsewhere.

We also intentionally do not run frequent (or deep) sales/flash sales because we don't want to partake in the kind of behavior you're describing, where we list something at $300 but try to make all of our sales at, say, $200. This is different than some other companies in the industry who seem to do monthly or even weekly sales and deep discounts on large swathes of their catalog.

Our internal sales reports reflect this approach - the majority of sales of any given product are at list price.

I think we also put quite a bit into maintaining and improving our software. This year alone we've published dozens of free updates, including some for products over 5 years old.

There are customers who purchased from us when we first launched back in 2007 (imagine that - before the smartphone era!) whom we still support and provide free updates to. I'm proud of that. Anecdotally as someone who has been buying software since 2004, more than half of what I've purchased over a decade ago is either unavailable or not updated.

Edited June 22, 2023 by Andrew Aversa

[audioschmaudio]

@Andrew Aversa thank you very much for taking the time to shed some light on the financial intricacies of running an audio software business. That was very insightful. I appreciate that you don't inflate your prices to make sales look more attractive, unlike many of your competitors. Your price policy sounds reasonable. You're on my good guys list.

[PavlovsCat]

1 hour ago, Andrew Aversa said:

If we had no overhead per product this would be true, but depending on the purchase, it may be a loss for us. For example, we pay a per-unit serial cost for any Kontakt Player product, which scales to MSRP and not the discounted price; we have royalty arrangements on various products including the Tokyo Scoring series, so that the musicians are compensated for every sale; we pay for bandwidth used (which isn't trivial on 60gb+ downloads!); we also pay a % of MSRP for product delivery when using Pulse.

So why did we do it then? One of our core company values is being honest and straightforward so I'll explain the context and thinking behind this deal.

The majority of people on our email list are folks who downloaded a free instrument like Shreddage 3 Stratus Free or Super Audio Boy, but have not purchased anything. Our observation is that these free customers typically take years to become paid customers, and a minority of them EVER do, which makes sense... I've downloaded free plugins and not purchased other plugins from that developer's catalog.

But we also noticed that even if someone took years to go from free -> paid product, they typically became lifelong customers, which is reassuring because we put a lot of time & effort into our instruments (and their updates.)

Hence why we aimed to offer this deal. IF we had the opportunity to reach these folks when they were leaving, maybe we'd have one more chance to show them the value of our instruments.

We do not inflate our list prices. In fact, when we released Shreddage 2 back in 2012 it was $149. Most of our modern Shreddage 3 instruments are still that price over a decade later despite many free updates and improvements. If you look across our catalog, our prices are middle-of-the-road relative to industry peers. You will certainly find more expensive amp sims, tape sims, virtual guitars, virtual basses, orchestral strings, etc. elsewhere.

We also intentionally do not run frequent (or deep) sales/flash sales because we don't want to partake in the kind of behavior you're describing, where we list something at $300 but try to make all of our sales at, say, $200. This is different than some other companies in the industry who seem to do monthly or even weekly sales and deep discounts on large swathes of their catalog.

Our internal sales reports reflect this approach - the majority of sales of any given product are at list price.

I think we also put quite a bit into maintaining and improving our software. This year alone we've published dozens of free updates, including some for products over 5 years old.

There are customers who purchased from us when we first launched back in 2007 (imagine that - before the smartphone era!) whom we still support and provide free updates to. I'm proud of that. Anecdotally as someone who has been buying software since 2004, more than half of what I've purchased over a decade ago is either unavailable or not updated.

I think Andrew is being very upfront and candid in his posts. 

It costs a business a lot of money to (1) acquire new customers and (2) to retain existing customers. Every competent business attempts to manage these areas and develop and maintain direct communications channels with their customers. That  is what ISW's email to their prospects and customers represents (AKA email marketing). Companies pay a price to establish these kind of communications channels (e.g., money spent on advertising, sponsorships, influencers, developing content, incentives for current customers to tell other customers about their brand, PR, etc.).  Let's say ISW has determined that it costs an average of $150 USD to acquire each new customer, there's also a cost/value to establishing a direct communications channel with prospects and customers and ISW may have determined that email subscribers average a certain amount of purchases over time as compared to non-subscribers. By the time a prospect or customer has subscribed to an email, they've jumped through a lot of hoops that cost ISW $$$ that many other folks that ISW spent money on did not make it through, and ISW doesn't want to lose them / blow that investment. So ISW offers these folks a fantastic deal to stay connected -- to remain subscribed; an 80% discount, in this case. Why? Because it cost a lot of money to get them to that point and if they unsubscribe that investment is basically lost and it would be difficult  (AKA costly) to attempt to bring them back after they unsubscribe. So ISW put's out a killer -- some might say, irresistible --  offer to keep them subscribed. That's all there is to it. It's not unethical and it's not stupid or irresponsible. 

Of course, any company doesn't want that discount abused by folks scamming the system and spread around as a trick to be used in a completely unintended manner. Why? Think of how it impacts the company's revenues. Yes, to someone's arguments, it does result in some people buying who otherwise would not have. Certainly, some of the people who bought at 80% off would have bought at full price or at a less extreme discount, so it does absolutely impact a company's revenue. What occurs when a discount of this kind is used by a wider, unintended audience is that it's simply unsustainable for ISW. It's at a price where they can't adequately pay their employees, bills or pay a reasonable amount to the independent contractors who worked on a sample library or plugin (depending on the pay arrangement) .

Another criticism made upon ISW regarded pricing and discounting practices. That criticism was entirely baseless. 

There are a lot of companies in the sample development and plugin market that engage in unethical pricing practices; I have never seen ISW engage in those kinds of practices and I have known of them since their earliest days.  I have consulted in this space  -- including to some of ISW's competitors (FTR,I have not consulted to ISW), so I am pretty familiar with ISW and own some of their string libraries. I've also been an outspoken critic of companies that do engage in inflating list prices as a tactic to claim outrageous discount percentages on sales. I've recently called out Waves and Rigid Audio for doing so to the point that their tactics violate regulatory agency rules in various countries  (some people will refer to these as laws, and technically, that's not what they are, but they are somewhat similar; where I'm from, our regulatory agency is called the FTC; other countries have similar regulatory bodies for this area that create and enforce these rules, but the reality is, the sample and plugin industry is small enough that these folks fly under the radar of these agencies). ISW is not even close to violating the FTC or other countries regulations from any behavior I've ever observed. They really don't even come close to any ethically problematic pricing practices, so if we're going to be completely honest here, that attack made on ISW was not based in any version of reality. 

So, before someone attacks me for this post, I'm not moralizing regarding the two ISW threads on this forum with schemes to trick their system. Obviously, no one who participated in those threads had the understanding that they were using the system as intended, they were opportunistically trying to take advantage of the system to get something in a manner that was unintended. I'll leave it up to everyone's personal consciences to decide whether or not they find that is ethical or not. But what I do want to address, as a community member, is that it is wrong for Andrew Aversa to be attacked for his post or for him to be falsely accused of unethical pricing practices. The irony also isn't lost of someone attacking him for moralizing in their post while they're moralizing. We don't need to be another VI-Control with hostile posts of people attacking one another, mob action and a perverse group think sense of what constitutes ethics. Let's shelf that one and just respect that a developer, in this case, Andrew, took the time to communicate with this community, and I think he did so in an upfront and honest manner. I don't think he deserves to be attacked. I think we can do better than that. His bottom line point is that what was going on here was clearly not operating in a manner that was intended by his company, and I think everyone is well aware of that fact. To those who took advantage of the system, you got your deal, he's not taking it away. What he's clearly hoping is that people have enough ethics and empathy to understand the perspective of a developer / business they buy from on why these little schemes can be harmful to companies. You may not agree with everything he says, but I haven't seen him state anything that wasn't reasonable and fair. and I at least think he deserves our respect for coming here and engaging in civil dialogue. Most developers would have quietly removed the code with no communications whatsoever. 

Edited June 22, 2023 by PavlovsCat

[MrFigg]

Hope my 80% off code still works. That’s what made me want to stay and become a life long customer. 

[kitekrazy]

3 hours ago, trager said:

I think you've got some nerve. Your company takes part in an industry-wide scam every day. Extremely inflated list prices intended to give a perception of value while conveniently tricking unsuspecting customers. Your company in particular bamboozles users with all kinds of obscure codes that can sometimes lead to products being free for anyone lucky enough to learn your arcane system, while others pay up in good faith.

If you offer an (absurd) 80% off code for anyone unsubscribing, and users find out about this, there is absolutely nothing illegitimate about those users unsubscribing specifically in order to benefit from the discount. It's your stupid system that users are attempting to negotiate. If it looks perverse that's because you created it that way.

I didn't try this unsubscribe trick, but I find your poor-me poor-us moralising hard to stomach. If anyone's the bad guys here it's you. We just do our best to avoid getting shafted. That's why this sub-forum exists. 

  Pretty lousy opening statement by ISW.   They coulda said we fixed the glitch, congrats to those who had a remarkable deal.  There's plenty of us who are struggling so spare the poor me.  

  Sometimes developers need to test the sites for glitches or the person responsible for creating them.  Shame on you not us.

 Developers need a sense of diplomacy in these situations and some forums are less forgiving.

I'm glad they fixed it since I would have spend $90 on something I didn't really need and forget I have.

I wouldn't want to be a library developer.  It's to hard to reinvent the wheel and try to make a living at it.

But don't bad mouth us for your mistake and spare us the pitty party.  BTW I've never had a real vacation in a long time.

My biggest request is not to go to a proprietary player.  I guess there's some advantages to using NI as a developer.  It could be worse where Reason RE/NNXT developers pay up to 50%

BTW I think the only time the price inflated is when they are offered on APD.  Tokyo Strings would be $1500 MSRP. 

Edited June 22, 2023 by kitekrazy

[Niky Serrano]

@PavlovsCat 

I understand your thoughts, but a little comment about it, and to share with Andrew

In my case, after login at ISW, I went to the url to abandone ISW and I received a code. And yes, I confirmed that it was the same code that was shared here, so it was a generic code (big mistake)

I don't know if all people had my same experience, but I didn't use the code finally
And if i had used it, it was legal in my case as other people in the same situation

[MrFigg]

Abuse of the system they say. They say that lots of people only take the free stuff and then never buy a paid product so they give the code in order to encourage people to become paying and returning customer. They gave me the code to keep me as a paying and returning customer and then they took it away from me before I could use it. Hahahahahaha. Great!!!

 

Edited June 22, 2023 by MrFigg

[kitekrazy]

5 minutes ago, MrFigg said:

Abuse of the system they say. They gave me the code in order to keep me as a paying and returning customer. Then they took it away from me before I could use it. Hahahahahaha. Great!!!

 

There was a known developer who found his product greatly reduced on MF and was not going to honor the licenses.  There was enough negative feedback on KVR to where that changed his mind plus it was a player license.  I guess he didn't understand that the reduction was when boxed software was being outdated. 

 

 Hey but we need more DAW drama.

Edited June 22, 2023 by kitekrazy

[Fleer]

Heck, I wanted to get Water Piano at 80% off but didn’t like the fuzz of unsubscribing and then re-subscribing. However, if I would have gotten the code anyway, I think I would have jumped. That said, ISW is one of the best devs around, and a breath of air compared to the likes of Native Instruments. Also, their support is second to none. Therefore, my conclusion to this interesting little intermezzo is that I’m even more fond of Impact Soundworks and will stay their happy customer. 

[PavlovsCat]

13 minutes ago, Niky Serrano said:

@PavlovsCat 

I understand your thoughts, but a little comment about it, and to share with Andrew

In my case, after login at ISW, I went to the url to abandone ISW and I received a code. And yes, I confirmed that it was the same code that was shared here, so it was a generic code (big mistake)

I don't know if all people had my same experience, but I didn't use the code finally
And if i had used it, it was legal in my case as other people in the same situation

There's absolutely nothing about using that code that was illegal. It's just what it wasn't how it was intended to be used, that's all. 

But whatever your opinion regarding the ethics of using the system and code in a way that was clearly not how it was intended, the point of my post was that we should be able to agree to respect the point of view of the developer and the employees and contractors who made those libraries and plugins. 

Edited June 22, 2023 by PavlovsCat

[MrFigg]

4 minutes ago, PavlovsCat said:

There's absolutely nothing about using that code that was illegal. It's just what it wasn't how it was intended to be used, that's all. 

But whatever your opinion regarding the ethics of using the system and code in a way that was clearly not how it was intended, the point of my post was that we should be able to agree to respect the developer's and his employees and contractors who made those libraries and plugins point of view. 

How was it intended?

[Niky Serrano]

19 minutes ago, PavlovsCat said:

There's absolutely nothing about using that code that was illegal. It's just what it wasn't how it was intended to be used, that's all. 

But whatever your opinion regarding the ethics of using the system and code in a way that was clearly not how it was intended, the point of my post was that we should be able to agree to respect the point of view of the developer and the employees and contractors who made those libraries and plugins. 

Yes sure, in my case I respect the developer vision and employees of the company like I said in my previous messages, and I appreciate the Andrew comments because help us to understand the efford and work behind a company, but I wanted to point that, I suppose that not all people that used the code, did something wrong

In fact and for me, when I went to the url to unsubscribe, the code was offered to me, without unsubscribe ( @Fleer was not necessary unsubcribe and subscribe again)

About the ethics, is important to know, that there are no absolute truths
I am sure that some people used the code by the back door, and here I am with you that the ethic is important
But some people got the code from the site directly
If you receive a code from the site, you are doing the correct things
I wanted to remark this only

Edited June 22, 2023 by Niky Serrano

[PavlovsCat]

14 minutes ago, MrFigg said:

How was it intended?

I'm pretty sure that you realize how it was intended. 

It was intended to keep a subscriber who wanted to unsubscribe from leaving. Basically, it was a company making an effort to even sell product at a loss to maintain a relationship with a customer or prospect. As I explained in the earlier post, companies calculate how much it costs to recruit and maintain a customer -- it costs a lot. A company may spend enough money acquiring a customer that the customer is not even profitable during their first year as a customer. Consequently, considering how much it costs to attain a new customer is a strong consideration and then you have a cost to RETAIN existing customers PLUS there is a value / cost for acquiring or losing a direct communications cost with a customer/prospect. What ISW was doing was saying, we'll accept that we're willing to lose money on this transaction in order to maintain a relationship with this person. 

So when someone shares that discount widely, resulting in a lot of people using it who otherwise would not be using it, it creates an unanticipated problem for the company. that negatively impacts revenue and margins and projections, which can result in things like not being able to meet projections and pay employees' salaries, various expenses,  and contractors expected payments (small developers routinely use contractors who are commonly paid a percent or some amount of revenue of the products they worked on). Andrew was being pretty transparent about this stuff in his post, something you rarely see from developers and I think that deserves the community's respect -- even if you did find aspects of his posts not to your liking. The fact that he came here and explained why this practice is a problem for his company, I think, is a respectful and civil reaction to the threads. 

 

Edited June 22, 2023 by PavlovsCat