Spugnort Commercial Guide Updates and Upgrades

I want to address a question that has been repeatedly asked over the course of the last few months. One of our customers’ biggest concerns is the possibility of an increased cost for Wrath of the Litch King guide updates. While some of our guides will have an upgrade cost associated with them, there will be a discount offered to anyone with an existing guide.

The guides most likely to see an cost for upgrade will be the Leveling Guide and the Instance Guide. This is due to the fact the changes are not simply updates to existing content but rather massive amounts of new content. The 70-80 leveling paths are nearly as large and complex as the entire 1-70 paths.

As for the discounts, assuming the current price of a product is $30 and we were to raise it to $40 to include the new content; anyone with an existing copy of the guide would be charged the difference in price for the upgrade, not the cost of the entire product. We have no intention of double-billing anyone of the same content.

We are also actively working on an in-game versions of our leveling guides, complete horde leveling guide, and an a set of recommended add-ons which will likely include an auto-update application to keep them current.

All of our guide content is scheduled to be updated and we are working hard to get it updated as quickly as possible. So far we have several hundred man-hours tied up in the WotLK changes and expect to have several hundred more before they are completed. I want to assure everyone that we are not neglecting the products and will have them fully updated just as quickly as we can.

Finally, to address the reason we will be charging for major content additions. Spugnort’s World and SWGN are both small businesses not unlike any other. We have direct costs and overhead associated with running the business. While some guides may be hobby projects for the author, ours are not. Our full time dedication to the business is the reason we have a multitude of our own, in-house written guides and can offer the level of customer service that we do. In addition, I personally write the software for our primary web site, the swgn.com billing and account management portal, and the member site software used to deliver content for the other guide sites on our network. This combined with the massive hardware and bandwidth costs associated with establishing the gaming network and sales/affiliate tracking systems requires us to maintain profitability or it all gets shut down. We can no more afford to spend hundreds of hours working for free than any other small business.

For those interested, I will make another post shortly with some pictures and details of what goes into the technology used by spugnort.com/swgn.com.