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i amm not trolling here,just wanted to discuss this outside of the BF forums.so that we may disscuss other companies and products.
My opinion is that it is kinda crappy and GWish for them to do this and get rid of the free pdfs and updates. it may not be that bad if their is a way to print them out.
Also are we still going to get a background info?

A lot of the free PDF lists had the background and order of battle researched and submitted by members of the community, with Battlefront simply providing the points costs and final layout. Digital gives Battlefront the resources to research and create these additional lists and produce the models where necessary. The alternative is without digital, most of the digital exclusive lists would have never been made.

Is there any news on when the official Battlefront product will launch to replace EasyArmy.com ?

I haven't seen any update on that for a while.

 Pacific wrote:
Is there any news on when the official Battlefront product will launch to replace EasyArmy.com ?

I haven't seen any update on that for a while.

Forces of War has been live since December 10th, 2014.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/30/620073.page#7419739

FoW Digital is a lukewarm product to me. Not an awful offering, just lots of room for improvement. Performance is "eh" and the errors in the PDFs with quicklinks and random watermarks, while minor. are still annoying. The Preview function for books is kind of awkward and could have been done better. Updates, which have yet to occur AFAIK, need a better means of communication (which is SUCH a strong suit of BF's to begin with). The "preview picture" view at the bottom is utterly worthless and should be done away with as it keeps you from using the footers and seeing page numbers. Mostly minor niggles, but enough to keep me from saying "oh this is the best!" too.

Forces of War is good, I just wish they would have a better-published schedule of when things will be available. Especially the older stuff that is kind of limbo where if you didn't get it on EA, you can't use either (e.g. - NUTS!). No complaints about the product itself though, as things seem to work as they always did and I like the little tweaks added to the views.

Broadening to their overall digital strategy, I think their handling of Barbarossa's minor factions was laughably bad especially since the day the lists for Barbarossa were announced it was like "where are all the minor Axis lists?" Reasonably hot on their heels they come out as digital only and with a kind of horrific pricing structure, which feeds the view that they were withheld from the book whether that's fair or not. Not even a month later to a lesser extent they do they same thing with Nachtjaeger where more lists than are in the book will be digital.

It just seems like they're torpedoing their own book sales by trying to cram things into digital because it's quicker and easier than having a physical book printed. With the dramatically lower overhead, they can do these little experimental lists, but that sours people on the entire enterprise. They should likely examine what they're trying to do with these lists and perhaps divorce them from association with a book that was just released in the past 2-3 months. Or, release the lists well in advance of a book on digital; yes you'll piss off the grognards who refuse to use either FoW-D or Forces, but at the moment a higher number of people are likely annoyed by "Here's 8 lists in the book...and 15 in digital" that they're doing now.

Also, figure out a means whereby you can offer a discount if a person has purchased part of a book and now wishes to buy the whole thing.

On the price, Battlefront has noted on their forums that they choose a price band and then Apple chooses the exact price. I'm not familiar with Apple, so I'm not sure how big these price bands are or if they're even public knowledge.

As for cutting into the book sales, the books themselves are just there to drive miniature sales. I would imagine the profit margin on the books is quite small and Battlefront would be willing to forgo that if digital leads to increased sales of the real moneymakers.

I love Forces of War. I just wish they would hurry up with older lists. Seriously BF - just hire an intern and have them get to work! Its like free cash - just do it.

Haven't used (and will never use) the other digital offerings (eBooks, etc.). I'm not a big fan of digital gaming books. I like the tactile feel of the real thing.

I'll miss the free PDFs, but I know they were an extra bonus anyways.

Mez

 Ghaz wrote:
On the price, Battlefront has noted on their forums that they choose a price band and then Apple chooses the exact price. I'm not familiar with Apple, so I'm not sure how big these price bands are or if they're even public knowledge.

That's why you get weird prices in various countries; the price tiers themselves from what you can find online are actually quite flexible. They go up in dollar increments until you reach $50.

Now, this does mean they couldn't charge $2.50 for something, but with digital's lower overhead I'm not sure you can make a strong case for why it must be rounded up. Of course, there'd always be grousing about price; if it was $2, the whining would be for $1. However, there's ample room for bundles from what I can see (e.g. - all of Nation X from Digital Content Y for $15 or $18 or $22 depending). It's likely just not something they thought about doing.

Would bundles be possible with Apple's involvement?

As a newish player, never used the old easy army website, I like the online forces of war, don't have the Apple app.

It makes it easier for a new person to figure out what units in a list can be used with other ones, I.e. Where there are different divisional units in the same list. Also keeping track of points and extras are great.

I think by far the best part is that it summarizes all your special rules and unit rules for you at the end of the pdf and assemble a nice looking list with all the rules and makes it printable.

For actual at the table gaming I prefer to have a hard copy to pass around instead of digital and these printouts I love. Not having to flip back and forth to see unit stats and rules etc, makes gaming easier, faster, and more tinge is spent on rolling and moving instead of searching for stats.

Not prefect but had potential. I would like to see a little more detail before purchasing a new list online, perhaps a a list of what miniatures are used in the list instead of just showing you company structure. This would help me decide which list to purchase for instance I have several Panthers and a lot of pzIVs so I would like to know if the list contain mostly these units or if it's units I don't have yet. Also like someone mentioned earlier bundles list and books would be nice, say a purchase all German army list option.

I think it still needs a little work though I've yet to have a proper go on FoW Digital since it's Apple only ATM. SOme of the lists seem to be split into separate lists purely to charge you twice for the product such as Guards/Red Army lists. The four Armoured lists for Barbarossa Digital could easily have been a single list.

I'm not entirely keen on the idea that they're essentially rented either.

The FoaN lists are particularly bad for being vague about what's in them.

 Ghaz wrote:
Would bundles be possible with Apple's involvement?

In a roundabout fashion; they cannot directly bundle List A, B and C through Apple. They could create another product that included A, B and C together and sell that at a "bundle" price though that's obviously more work on BF and they clearly haven't gotten their strategy worked out yet. In that situation I can understand their reluctance to commit the energy to put together a whole bunch of products without knowing what kind of things would be desirable (e.g. - All Romanian Lists...is there a market or not?). Not doing the obvious "all of the lists from Barbarossa Digital" was worthy of the dunce cap though.

What BF could do and almost be clever to do it is to create a "living" bundle wherein new lists are added as they qualify for whatever the bundle's subject is. For example, a Hungarian or Finnish bundle that will include all the lists made for those minor powers currently AND going forward. Someone puts together a new Finnish list, you can download the new version of your bundle product and the new list is there (obviously this would entail them getting a more functional update mechanism into the app). There's more logistical hurdles with how to approach the major powers, of course, as you can't make a "All US lists forever!" bundle without making it far too expensive/huge for anyone to want. There are likely to be options there as well though such as breaking it down by era/year or "type" or...something.

That approach though accomplishes a few things, some good for us and some good for BF. As consumers, we get new lists without having to pay more, that's pretty straight-forward and obviously good if you liked the idea enough to buy it in the first place. From BF's perspective, they have now shifted the nature of the relationship between consumer and vendor from that of a "sale" to that of "subscription". If you pay me money and I hand you a product and that's the end of a transaction, I can call it a "license" all I want but the courts in the US usually view that as a "sale" which confers upon the consumer certain rights (exactly what rights and how I can exercise them is still murky last I looked though). However, ongoing updates is continued interaction between vendor and customer and the addition of more than was included in the original transaction shifts it to be a subscription. Yes, it's not a renewing subscription so I don't pay an additional amount of money, but the addition of more things in the future does muddy the legal rights of the consumer more because the transaction doesn't end, and thus cannot be easily considered a "sale" the way other transactions are. Not entirely awesome for us if BF decides to be jerks, but it is a benefit that they would appreciate. They could do an actual subscription too I believe, but then they have to come up with enough content to justify it which is a burden. This model side-steps having to show the customer that the on-going cost of a recurring subscription is worthwhile, because it's a one-time cost.

Apple's mechanisms (can't speak to Android) appear to allow you adjust pricing tiers based on timing for things such as sales, but they could also notch the price of the bundle up a couple bucks on a permanent basis when a new list is added without impacting the people who have already paid for it. Provides a balance for BF that they aren't stuck at $10 for all French lists forever; they can move the price to $20 if they added a dozen lists. In this hypothetical they just don't get the $10 from the people who already paid, which itself would be an inducement to take up the bundle if you like the nation/era involved.

Obviously they would need to be thoughtful in how they broke things down for such bundles, as trying to merge things together would be ugly as would splitting them apart. Assuming they can find such themes though, and if BF could stick to their word to not play hair-splitting games later to try to get more money AND provide regular updates to lists as appropriate, it would be an interesting option for them to explore. An awful lot of caveats though, and I'm not sure BF has the digital world in mind enough to really plan that out successfully.

 Ghaz wrote:

 Pacific wrote:
Is there any news on when the official Battlefront product will launch to replace EasyArmy.com ?

I haven't seen any update on that for a while.

Forces of War has been live since December 10th, 2014.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/30/620073.page#7419739

Ah, thanks for that! You can tell I don't check the FoW website regularly, I was looking at EasyArmy.com which still lists it as a work in progress.

Great to see the program is now running on the site!

Are we talking about the army builder? Or are we talking about the iOS app?

The former is handy, and can be quite useful, imo. The latter strikes me as useless, and a waste of time with poor production values. I expected something slightly more useful than what is essentially a PDF reader.

Forces of War = the online replacement for EasyArmy

Flames of War Digital = the (currently) iPad only app for Flames of War intelligence briefings that has no army building capability.

Just found out (the hard way, I might add...), that Battlefront is *NOT* in fact including the additional digital-only lists in the book purchase. This is bad for two reasons.

First, these are the lists that Battlefront used to release for free. Forcing people to pay above and beyond the book cost to get their hands on them is only going to annoy the veteran players.
Second, the FoW Digital browser that's used as a store front doesn't currently differentiate between which lists are in the book, and which ones are not (i.e. which lists are digital only). So if you want a particular list, you have no way of knowing whether or not it's in the book unless you purchase the book (or skim through a hard copy of the book).

The second item is correctable, and needs to be fixed asap. The first item is, unfortunately, not likely to be changed.

Eumerin wrote:
First, these are the lists that Battlefront used to release for free.

Actually these are lists that would never have been released or even created without digital. Battlefront has never released more than a PDF or three for a book as far as I know.

 Ghaz wrote:

Eumerin wrote:
First, these are the lists that Battlefront used to release for free.

Actually these are lists that would never have been released or even created without digital. Battlefront has never released more than a PDF or three for a book as far as I know.

Given that these are the Eastern Front Italian/Romanian/Hungarian lists, they would have been released one way or another. Of course, in the past, Battlefront had the decency to release them in complete products instead of as adjuncts to blatantly incomplete books like Barbarossa.

Further, when we were first informed that the lists weren't going to be included in Barbarossa, we were told that they would be available later on as free PDFs.

So yes, in this case they still would have been free.

The Digital only Soviet Tank lists only exist in their present form because the Barbarossa tank list(s) are rediculously over restrictive.