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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 7001450" data-attributes="member: 85870">I see what you're saying about the time/money commitment level. Just from my experience, I'm highly skeptical that there's enough interest in that nebulous "middle ground" between spending $30 for a product, and spending $75-100 on a product to do digital mapping. Someone who's willing to spend $30 on a digital mapping program is probably willing to spend a little bit more than that if they're trying to reach a certain level of quality. There's three basic reasons to want to do digital mapping: 1. You want to produce products of sufficient quality to sell them professionally and make money off of them.2. For your own satisfaction. You want to create something beyond simple sketches, something that reaches a certain level of quality that's important to you, even if you don't end up selling your maps for money. 3. You don't particularly care about the quality of drawing / final product, you just want your maps in a digital format to use more efficiently in game. People in Category 1 aren't going to be in the market for an inexpensive map drawing tool; they're already using professional graphic / drawing programs. The bottom end of Category 2 is where your market is most likely to reside. This is where I was back in 2009 when I first purchased Campaign Cartographer. The problem I had was, even though the output was "better" than what I was capable of producing by hand, it still didn't meet my desired level of quality, took waaaaaay too long, and none of the skills were transferable. I was awed by the stuff I saw on cartographersguild.com, but to get ANYWHERE NEAR that level of quality, you're going to end up having to use professional drawing tools.And truthfully, you don't really have to pay a dime if you're in this category either if you're willing to deal with the limitations of the popular open-source graphic programs (Inkscape and GIMP). I personally think GIMP's UI and workflow is a train wreck, so I spent money on tools I knew would do what I needed. I more than made up for the $80 I spent for Affinity Photo and Designer (I got a 20% discount on both apps for being a beta tester) by a factor of 10x-15x in saved time. Once I understood how to set up nozzle brushes in Affinity Photo properly, it made using Campaign Cartographer for city design look like a unicycle compared to my Ferrari. Even if there weren't excellent, relatively inexpensive professional tools available for this category of user, you're also already having to deal with existing competitors for these people's time and money too, with Campaign Cartographer and Fractal Mapper already on the scene. But again---why even go the route of CC or Fractal Mapper or New Product X in the first place when there's excellent professional drawing tools available for not much more?Category 3 might also be in your market, but there's already lots of free options out there for users who TRULY don't care about quality. Maptool works. GIMP and Inkscape work. Paint.NET works. Microsoft Expression Designer works. Heck, even LibreOffice Draw or Google Drawings could work in a pinch in certain situations. For someone who truly doesn't care about quality AT ALL, but really just wants to create their own maps and have them in some kind of digital format, your value proposition here has to be saving time. If you're not saving someone enough time and they don't care about the quality of output, at what point does even a $25 or $30 investment seem steep?Your market then is those who fluctuate between Categories 2 and 3. How much does someone in the market for a map drawing program really care about the quality of output? Even if they buy your program, are they still going to have to buy a professional drawing program anyway to get the end results they want? If so, does it make sense to spend $25 or $30 to add your program to their toolbox, rather than just going straight to the "professional" tools? Because to get anything above a certain level of quality, they're going to have to go there anyway.You have to convince people that your program is a better value at $30, and will produce a "good enough" quality of output, and do so faster and more easily, than taking that $30 and applying it toward purchasing Affinity Photo (I keep using Affinity Photo as the standard because it is hands down the best-in-class software of its kind at its price point; nothing else even comes close). If you can build a product at that price point that actually can do all that, great! I'm not trying to rain on your parade, I'm just saying that like our current RPG market, you're trying to enter a market that is already exceptionally well-served. Your proposed product would truly have to be mind-blowingly awesome to make a dent in this market.</blockquote>

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