Hello again!

We hope that you’ve been enjoying the holiday season, be your interests religious, spiritual, commercial, social, or homicidal.

Well, a new pricing system was promised and new pricing system shall you receive. Allow us to tell you about it:

(Individually break down to $3 for one hour, $10 for four hours, and $20 for ten.)

These prices are pretty much comparable to our current membership prices, but also allow more for all of the hour quantities in-between the ones mentioned. Rather than our previous system of predetermined set quantities at set price points, we’ve tried to simplify in a way that will just let you buy as many hours as you want, and the number of hours you want to purchase just determines how much you pay for each one.

This will also make much easier those occasions when people purchase [x]-many hours and then end up sticking around longer than they originally thought. At that point, you can just pick up where you left off that day and add additional hours at your previous rate.

So, on the whole, hours cost less than they used to, start a bit cheaper, and are much more available for convenient on-the-fly pricing. Naturally, we stand by our NON-EXPIRY standard for normal pricing, which means that you can buy as many or as few hours as you like and they WILL NOT DEPLETE until you actively log in and use them.

Moving right along, we’d still very much like to keep the idea of bulk pricing but at a slimmer price:

This is basically one big lump of LAN time and not a “this-many-hours-and-up” price point. Those who used to purchase our bulk hours will find it comparable to/cheaper than the hourly rate of most of our current bulk prices, only without requiring that you drop anywhere between $55-80 a pop to take advantage of it.

Due to the overall drops in pricing, day passes are also getting a bit of a nip and tuck:

Once our new pricing goes live, we’ll have a sexy little chart on the LAN rates page making apparent the value of the day passes (e.g. how much you save versus non-expiry hours, what the cost would be in those terms, what time of day the pass is no longer a better deal, etc.). Also, in the case of Monday and Wednesday, their pricing is based more on an idea of daily specials that we’ll soon be implementing, as well as the possibility that we’ll be opening later on those days at some point in the future.

(We did keep in mind that some of you guys really liked the “$10 weekday passes” and “12 hours for $20″ promotions we’ve been running this month, which is why we really tried to keep some things as close to that as possible.)

Bear with us, folks, this is a healthy piece of real estate that we’re paying for each and every month, and utilities sure ain’t cheap either. Combine that with investing in games, licenses, hardware, and normal wear-and-tear maintenance/replacements, and things run pretty steep. If we could afford it, our going rates would be as nexter-to-nothinger as possibler. Help us keep this place energized and spirited and hoppin’, and we’ll turn that around as best we can into better hardware, better services, better events, and better prices.

Back on topic:

This is one we’re just going to try on for size and then see how well it fits. The logistics of it are pretty simple – it’s EXPIRY time (i.e. must be used when purchased, expires three hours after) that’s available on Monday through Saturday anytime before 4:00PM. That’s all there is to it.

On that abrupt note, memberships are being dissolved. The original idea was that they’d provide greater value to folks who come around more often and spend enough to want to save more, but most people never really took a look at the value, so memberships have always been thin. So we figure, why not pretty much treat everybody like a member from the start, eh?

At the moment, we’re evaluating how we want to fold in what used to be membership benefits into the normal fray. You can be sure we’ll have something to say on that sometime in the next few weeks. Rest assured, we want to keep things like birthday free time, membership referrals, what have you.

And for those of you who ARE currently members, we sure-as-got-damn-hell appreciate your love and loyalty, and thank you so hard, and have every intention of cashing out the cost of your membership in LAN hours once this noise takes effect.

Speaking of noise, these prices are officially going live on Monday, January 2nd.

There you have it. We’ll make everything neat and intuitive and freshlike when we post it on the LAN rates page, so you don’t have to read an entire wall-of-text newspost just to translate how it all works. Thanks for sticking with us, you attractive people.

Love always,
Game On!