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Why would Garmin charge for Connect + for customers who paid over $1000 for a watch?

Abishai_Reborn
6 months ago

Just a whiny question. I can see charging extra for a customer that bought a $100 beginner watch at Walmart, but the fenix 8 is supposed to be the highest end watch with the latest, best, and most sensors to give you the MOST data. I have the 51 mm AMOLED, and at $1150, (I caught a sale,) I had assumed I would get MORE than a beginner level customer... but just a few months after I buy the watch, they roll out Connect+, and offer an exciting 30 day free trial? Crap, even Apple gives 6 months of their workout plan for free when you buy a new device...

  • 0 5 months ago in reply to 2529455
    2529455 said:
    None of it matters now anyway. A Garmin is about to be 2x more expensive for the next several years if the tariffs are reinstated. No ones going to be buying a new watch for quite some time

    The proposed new tariffs on goods from Taiwan (excluding semiconductors) are only 32%.  Even if enacted in full (doubtful), the tariffs would only be applied to the import value (roughly 30% of retail) so even if passed 100% on to the end user, prices would only increase by less than 10% due to tariffs.

    I don't think your "2x more expensive" analysis is anywhere close to being accurate.

    HTH

  • 0 5 months ago in reply to pgrey
    WatchIt said:

    Look at e.g. PlayStation and XBox.

    At first it was a few «free» things. Now you need it to play online.

    To be fair, PS and Xbox never had *real* online play before Xbox Live and Playstation Network were launched.

    So it's not like online play for consoles used to be free and became paid. (You can't compare the very limited and rare online play for consoles that predated those services to to ubiquitous and well-supported online play that those services provide.)

    pgrey said:
    The game console comparison is a bit different, in that these started as primarily local-data devices, and moved to cloud-based play, in the long run.

    "play online" ≠ "cloud-based play"

    - "play online" simply refers to playing a game with online multiplayer, even if the game itself is run locally. For playstation and xbox, this requires a basic Playstation Network or Xbox Live subscription, respectively. Notably, online multiplayer has always been free on PC, maybe because of the open nature of PCs and maybe because online gaming took off before PCs could be locked into a single platform for gaming distribution. Perhaps relevant to this discussion, to this day, no PC gaming platform (e.g. Steam, Epic Games) has found a way to make PC customers directly pay a subscription for online gaming features after they had become used to "free" online gaming. (Then again the big difference is that PCs are open, so if one platform tried to strongarm customers, they could just go to a different platform, disregarding certain platform exclusives.)

    - "cloud-based play" refers to literally streaming games from the cloud. This requires a *more expensive* PSN or Xbox Live subscription.

    Yes, the *future* long run goal may be for everything to run in the cloud, but most ppl still play games that run locally. Ever heard of onLive or Google Stadia? Both of those were 100%-online / cloud gaming services which no longer exist.

    What's probably much more common than running games in the cloud is using your premium Playstation Plus or Xbox Game Pass subscription to acquire "free" games that are offered through the service, kind of like the Netflix of games. As long as you keep paying the subscription fee, you get to "keep" those games. (But they're still mostly run locally, not streamed through the cloud.)

    The analogy with Garmin Connect+ and PS/Xbox online play would work if the core Garmin functionality was "local" (as in the meat and potatoes of the functionality happens on the device which you pay for once), but there's some "value-added" functionality which everyone wants and is only available when you have an online subscription (like Connect+). Hmm, this seems like a pretty good analogy after all, except maybe the "everyone wants" it part isn't true for Connect+.

    (To be fair, another consideration is that a lot of the most popular games are either online-only or mostly online with token single player content.)