As many of you will be aware TGC has had to put a brake on Free stuff in the Store due to massive download bandwidth figures. I feel I may be one of the culprits that caused this as my Free To Purchase ratio was high with over 29% of my stuff offered for free. The maximum the Store now allows is 10%.
Therefore I have in accordance with the extended discussions that have gone on both on Steam and the official GameGuru forums decided to set a low price on my free models. It seems the lowest that will work is around 10 cents so that is what I am setting mine at.
This process is taking place now and I can tell you it is very time consuming. At the time of this post I am about half way through it. As all changes have to be approved by the Store these models are not at the time of this post available for download. As some of my packs also contain some free models these are also not at this time available to purchase. Hopefully the Store staff will be able to approve these items quickly but we shall see. The rule is if you can se it in the Store then its available.
I will pack the 10 cent originally free models into packs for downloading at around $1 a pack which should offset the bandwidth costs a bit. To keep matters fair for the consumer I will add up to ten extra new models in the same theme as the pack to them. All my original free models will be converted to 10 cent prices as this will allow me some room to upload new free models for the community.
Finally I fully understand and support the Store and TGC in their actions in this matter as free downloads of up to 1.5 Tbit a month is just too expensive for any small to medium sized company to afford.
Edit: You will notice my Store Items shown on the left has reduced dramatically. That is because until they are approved they are not recorded so hopefully the Store people will get them back up asap
