The cost of Cubase?

[elementary]

A thought occured to me today and I'm sure its probably come up before, but if Steinberg charged about 30 or 40 quid for Cubase do you think they might actually make more money?

Every kid who wants to record his/her band goes and grabs a dodgy copy of cubase because realistically, only people who are very serious about recording will be willing or able to spend 400 quid on something with no resale value which will go out of date in a year or two. Most students could stretch to £40 and Steinberg would definitely sell a lot more copies if they drastically lowered their prices.

With people I know, being a young student who knows lots of bands, I would say there is about a 12-1 ratio of illegitimate copies to legit copies and if cubase charged £40 a copy compared to £400ish, with my small sample Steinberg would stand to make more money if they lowered their prices and the pirates bought copies (which I know a lot of people would do).

Is the high price a purely prestige thing?

I am in no way advocating piracy here, its just an interesting point.

 

[TelePaul]

Cubase already use price discrimination: LE and SE. But I'm sure they have a break-even analysis implemented, and there products must be sold for x amount of money to ensure they recover their costs.

 

[scrubs]

I agree with Tele -- there are lower priced versions of Cubase that are very usable. Since the pirates aren't buying those, either, we can presume that they are just criminals and have no worth to society.

Perhaps upstart applications, like Reaper, will force Steinberg, Cakewalk, Digi, Sony, etc. to rethink their pricing, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.

 

[tnjazz]

I use Cubase 4 and Cubase SX3 at home (both bought and legal by the way) but before I had them I was using the $99 version of Cubase SE and it was just fine for most everything.

The interface wasn't quite as flashy, and there were fewer plugins (but some that I actually preferred to the new ones!) but it behaved just like the big prother programs and is more than enough for most any home recordist.

So I would agree - there is absolutely no reason for anyone to use a pirated copy of Cubase these days (unless they really are a worthless individual with no moral compass... )