Comment Regarding Handling of Bundled PDFS

[ravenfish]

I note that, having purchased the "Twenty Years of GURPS" bundle, the pages for the books included therein contain no notice that I have effectively purchased them, and (as far as I can tell) would allow me to waste my money purchasing them again with no warning or hindrance. Contrast DrivethruRPG, where, when books are bought in a bundle at a discount, the individual components of that bundle are properly marked. In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor problem, but, since SJGames seems determined to encourage people to use its own online sales system, it would well not to make that system, if not better than the competition, at least not demonstrably worse.

While on the subject, the product appears on the downloads page as a single ZIP file, without the ability to download the component files separately. My preference would be to have the option of separate download, in case individual files get deleted and so forth. This second point is minor (modern download speeds being what they are, it's a difference of a few minutes at most, probably much less), but, since I am already creating a thread, I thought I would mention it.

[Refplace]

If you log into your account (assuming you bought them with an account) it should say you already own this file at the top of the page.
Does it not? I can see where they may have had a problem coding it (Extra server overhead and coding time/money) and I suspect that would be taken care of after the sale ends by a batch file program.

[ravenfish]

Originally Posted by Refplace

If you log into your account (assuming you bought them with an account) it should say you already own this file at the top of the page.
Does it not? I can see where they may have had a problem coding it (Extra server overhead and coding time/money) and I suspect that would be taken care of after the sale ends by a batch file program.

Checking Celtic Myth, All Star Jam, and Psionic Campaigns (all of which were indeed included in the download) under the same account which has access to the bundle, none of the bear such a message. I will check again after the sale ends.

[cptbutton]

I haven't bought the bundle. But see my comments on other non-warning cases here.

tl;dr: It also happens with the core books together vs separately, the GURPS Traveller books, and the Vorkosigan book.

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by cptbutton

tl;dr: It also happens with the core books together vs separately, the GURPS Traveller books, and the Vorkosigan book.

For Traveller and Vorkosigan, I suspect it's because the products were deactivated after the licenses expired and when a new deal was reached they were put up effectively as new products with no connection to the old ones. The Basic Set Bundle is far more akin to the GURPS 20th Bundle.

One other nicety that Drive-Thru has is that if you already own items in a bundle it will discount those items from the bundle, allowing you to take full advantage of a sale or special bundle price on the remaining items that you don't have. They have a lot more bundled items there, but one of the nice perks of this is that you can buy a small item from a bundle to check it out and decide if you want to purchase the entire bundle or not and all it costs you is the discount on the one item you purchased.

Such a bundle discount, taking into account items already purchased, can incentivize people into buying all the remaining items in a product line.