Hah, yeah. Some people will try to sell anything. Forums can actually be kinda complex to write (I wrote my own and they're still a work in progress with bugs popping up almost a year later after they went into use), but sometimes you see all sorts of software on sites like C|Net saying it's $30 or whatever for some text editor it must've taken an intermediate-skilled VB coder all of 30 mins to write...

...then compare that with modern games that often employ 30+ people over tens of months of hardcore work to write, that charge only 2-3 times that!

There's definitely some HUGE discrepencies out there with software pricing.

Hopefully simple laws of economics will keep things in check though. So long as there's competition, people just won't buy the more expensive option unless they have a really good reason to.

I don't know about the specific forum you're talking about, but many forums that cost money are 'industrial strength' so to speak and have features you wouldn't find in the free forums. For example, PHPBB doesn't handle nested forums or post attachments AFAICT, but I'd bet the one you have to buy probably does. Also, many forums that cost have better interfaces for adding links and quotes and all those forum-tag type things.

I'm also writing my own forum, and I plan to package it for anybody to use, but I'm also fairly certain nobody will want to use it because of the unique feature set.

Quote:Original post by Dmytry
200$ it's strange - many really complex rendering packages is cheaper. example
i think any forum and it have incomparable complexity.

The real software on that site is $250. The cheaper programs don't look like anything impressive at all.

Also, you can't compare a renderer with a forum, since they do extremely different kinds of processing. 3D rendering isn't really that difficult if you understand the math, since all the algorithms you need are documented in tons of books specifically about rendering. I can't think of any books on making forums, and obviously people think they're worth paying for because those companies that sell forums do make some money.

The $199 price on the invision forum(I'm guessing that is what you're talking about since google doesn't know of any invasion fourm software) is for a lifetime license, which means you get all versions of the software forever! You'll never have to pay again next time they release a new version, like you would with microsoft office for example. In addition, if I understand their pages correctly, the $199 includes having their techs install the forum on your server for you, and such 'tech support' services are often extremely costly.
Overall, the $199 isn't so bad if you want a (presumably) professional forum that has been tested and is already finished.

Just imagine how much time it'd take you to make some nice forum software with all the same features. US minimum wage is around $5.25/hr or so, so it would have to take you under ~37.91 hours (less than one week of full-time work!) for it to be 'worth the time'(and I'm betting you could get paid quite a bit more doing web design, so that it would probably have to take <15 hours for it to be worth it). You might be up to that kind of challenge, but I don't think I am.

Of course, PHPBB is fine for my needs because I don't need all the fancy features of the more expensive forums. Not to mention that my forums' heavy use means two users on at once =-P

[Edited by - Extrarius on September 18, 2004 4:39:10 AM]

Quote:Original post by Dmytry

Quote:Original post by Extrarius

Quote:Original post by Dmytry
200$ it's strange - many really complex rendering packages is cheaper. example
i think any forum and it have incomparable complexity.

The real software on that site is $250. The cheaper programs don't look like anything impressive at all.

Also, you can't compare a renderer with a forum, since they do extremely different kinds of processing. 3D rendering isn't really that difficult if you understand the math, since all the algorithms you need are documented in tons of books specifically about rendering. I can't think of any books on making forums, and obviously people think they're worth paying for because those companies that sell forums do make some money.

but, hmm, that renderer is not less complex than game, and have not as many users as game. I just meant to add 2 cents to "games versus forums" discussions.

Also there's really many programmers that can develop ordinary forum, and alot less programmers that more-or-less understand math and can do something innovative in graphics. (well, everyone from US when asking simple questions says something like "i'm are mathematically-challenged because i'm are from [insert US state]" (i don't get it too) )

Renderers are MUCH less comples than games because all they have to handle is the displaying graphics part, while games have to worry about the speed of graphics (and use all kinds of data structures and algorithms to achieve that) and also worry about collision detection, sound, various inputs, gameplay, and things like networking and cheat prevention.

Also, games (these days anyways) only serve their purpose(entertainment) for a week or so generally (at least IMO), while a forum can last forever. The only time you really need to upgrade is when a major security problem is discovered, which seems to happen less often all the time.

I'd say the number of programmers that can make a basic forum with good coding standards and code design and stuff like that is about equal to the number of programmers that can make a basic game with equal parameters. You don't have to do innovative graphics to make a renderer or a game, any more than you have to innovate to make a forum. The difference is, game making and graphics rendering are very well documented, while as far as I can tell forum desing and creation are not.

Believe it or not, you don't need to know differential equations or calculus 3 level math to make a basic game, any more than you need to know how to make a database in order to create a basic forum. You only need the advanced knowledge to make the advanced versions.

[Edited by - Extrarius on September 18, 2004 7:12:36 AM]