Hacker News Reader

Comment by Keyframe | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea, and other courses seem solid in overview too. However, I'm put off by not being able to download the course. I understand it's my old-man mentality kicking in, but I just have this bug in my mind "what if it goes down", "I wanna watch this offline", "what if dude disappears"..). I also understand why there's no option for that.

I don't know, anyone else have feelings like these in general? I'd have no issue if it was way cheaper, and I'd have no problem if it was somewhat more expensive if I could download. It's a weird feeling like that that ultimately did affect me not purchasing it.

edit: I realized I wouldn't mind it if it was on a big platform like I don't know what would support it, steam? appstore? I know those won't go away and I have stuff there.

View on HN

Hi! Creator of the course here. This is a really good point, and I honestly did not consider someone's fear of a platform "disappearing" as a potential friction to buy before I read your comment. It makes total sense.

I have been doing this for a while, so disappearing was not even in my thoughts. :)

But I'll need to think about that and how to make it clear for everyone that visits the school.

Thanks!

Release the videos as lower quality; maybe make the downloadable content not as nice to browse?

> I have been doing this for a while, so disappearing was not even in my thoughts. :)

To be frank, this is not very re-assuring. Every platform that has ever gone offline has at one point told their customers something similar.

It's also possible you may go offline for reasons outside of your control.

> It's also possible you may go offline for reasons outside of your control.

I see. I've just discussed about this with other people at the school. I guess if something like that ever happens, the course content will probably be made available in full to all students.

One thing is that I am personally always updating the course and adding new examples and lectures to it. If students simply download the content once there will be different versions of it. This was one of the reasons I've decided to record lectures instead of simply writing a book, for example.

Thanks for consideration. Maybe easiest path would be to go through one of the bigger platforms but maybe more expensive and also offer same but cheaper on your own.

I've read through your FAQ, but one more thing to consider is to offer a bundle discount, like for buy all or similar.

I also am in the camp of people who want to be able to download (although I know that increases the risk of people pirating the videos)

Partially because the video player doesn't work very well on tablets, and partially because after you changed the game engine course, I still wanted to refer to the original version

> I don't know, anyone else have feelings like these in general? I'd have no issue if it was way cheaper, and I'd have no problem if it was somewhat more expensive if I could download. It's a weird feeling like that that ultimately did affect me not purchasing it.

Yeah, I'm the same. These courses sound and look right up my alley, but I try to only support DRM-Free material where I can for the reasons your described. The Pragmatic Studio [1] is a good example of an online school that offers DRM-Free downloads for customers.

[1] https://pragmaticstudio.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com