This is just a little update on our previous post regarding PatchKit.net and their service.
It would appear, when we posted this news post regarding pricing, rather than our friends over at PatchKit deciding to review their pricing structure or maybe even call us out on why their pricing is so high, they decided to take the unprofessional route and cause all sorts of ‘havoc’.
The same day we posted this article, we received 2/3 orders of Game Launcher Creator from suspicious customers, who immediately went on the attack with our support channels. They constantly smashed our Live Chat with ridiculous questions over our product and support, they then proceeded to cause absolute havoc in our Discord server and then went on a further rage of even trying to inject our website with particular malicious scripts.
Professional Standards
Here in the UK, where we are primarily based, it’s absolutely plausible to call out a competitor or someone in the same market over their pricing, if you are providing the same or a similar product. We called out PatchKit (Upsoft) in that blog post above because, their pricing is absolutely shocking in comparison to what developers can afford, especially Indie Developers.
Independent developers are always looking for cheaper (or free) game development tools because they don’t develop games as a full time job. Majority are hobbyists and a select, further few are in it for the long haul.
It seems our friends over at Upsoft want to charge for every tiny little ‘add on’, for example, to remove their Logo from your ‘custom launcher’ it costs $100 a MONTH. That’s $1200 a year. Our software Game Launcher Creator, literally costs $50 one-off payment and contains NO mention of you using our software nor our logos. This is literally just one example of why we wanted to highlight the comparison between GLC V2 and PatchKit’s service.
Surely these things should come as standard?
If an Indie Developer has to pay $100 a month just to remove their logo from your “custom launcher” then what is the final bill going to end up as?
Don’t retaliate… Learn!
We posted our original article because competition is good, competition is healthy, especially in such a niche market like ours. There is little to no competition and we are not afraid to call out PatchKit on their pricing. It seems to us, maybe they are afraid, as the retaliation expresses… the malicious scripts imposed on our servers, the countless attacks on our Discord server, our support staff, emails… the list goes on, and they did all of this publicly.
Rather than retaliating in such an irresponsible and child-like manor, how about taking heed of what was written and doing something about it? One good thing did come along, they managed to create a new “Indie” and “Student” plan, offering “free” stuff, albeit mostly ghost-wrapped services that should be free anyway.
A month later, our post allowed them to then further retaliate with this blog post here.
Breaking down the post
Let’s break it down and see what they have learned, if anything.
So apparently, we are targeting the ‘low-budget segment’ of game development (way to put down your potential customers, already)! Yes, we do offer a pay-once-use-forever model.
We are unsure what is meant by ‘Free Support based on some unspoken rules.’
They then proceed to specify how they are different to other companies…
This is true up until the last sentence. PatchKit are implying, if you use Game Launcher Creator, you will also have to rely upon 3rd party services to get everything up and running. This is false.
Again, this is really unnecessary to put and it’s making their overall argument look weak. How hard is it to design a game launcher? It can be hard, that’s why we offer a WYSIWYG Editor tool, you simply drag and drop your artwork, buttons and other components onto the live editor. It really doesn’t get any easier than this and you can completely customize it however you see fit (oh and our logo isn’t forcibly shown anywhere on your custom game launcher).
There is more… they then write a whole section on PatchKit vs Other Standalone Launcher costs. Now this is what we’ve been waiting for isn’t it? Considering our original post about them was all to do with their pricing and absolutely nothing to do with their service?
We won’t quote it all, just have a read yourself. If you don’t want to read it, here’s the tldr – It’s pernickety.
First of all, their pricing is way-over inflated in their examples, and secondly they are literally trying to offset their argument by baffling you with numbers, such as $0.085 per GB of bandwidth etc.
Finally, this is the bit we DO want to quote…
A “Cheap” VPS is not ‘around’ $40 per month at all. We have users of our software that use private VPS` from just $6 per month. Then they talk about data costs, as if it’s a separate component. IT IS NOT A SEPARATE COMPONENT! When you rent a VPS server, bandwidth is included in the price. You would never find a host provider, offering a VPS without including bandwidth in the price.
It seems this company are adamant that every little component is separate in the eCommerce land, but this simply isn’t true.
Even if you wanted a more professional structure of having several server locations, you would never need to pay $40 x 6 = $440 a month, you could pickup an unlimited bandwidth vps server with a 100MBPS or 1GBPS burst connection for around $6 a month.
The Bottom Line
We expect more retaliation once PatchKit see this new post, we expect all the immature responses similar to last time, but we have no issues in publicly shaming this company if they want to retaliate this way. We have all IPs logged, all the chat logs, all the Discord logs and all the server logs.
Hey PatchKit, if you’re reading this, try to be a little more professional and realise that competition is good and healthy for our market. We are encouraging you here, and if you read our original article again, you will also see we never once said a bad word about the service nor the company or their product. We simply stated facts, facts that you display on your website and those facts are… your prices.
To boot, they also created an AdWords campaign that tried to take over every single Google search for terms like “Game Launcher Creator” but what they failed to realise was, anyone who was already familiar with GLC, already knew our price, because it’s just one price, on our site, for everyone to see, no catches 🙂
