It seems like your opinions about how much an online version should cost are based on some gut feeling about how much your work is worth.
I have not expressed an opinion there other than "not $1 for Adventures" and "I'm not in that world and don't know what prices are reasonable."
Obv. the online version can be looked at from my perspective as just extra money on top of the rest, provided that it doesn't lower demand for the physical product; except, work is put into it too, and that work has to be paid for or it isn't worth doing (except of course for the love of doing that work).
Why Making Fun thinks that hiking the price will increase their revenues is beyond me.
I don't know that they do. They may for example be hoping people will subscribe but preserving a non-subscription option, while not actually having added the ability to subscribe yet.
Funsockets initially had prices twice as high. That was their guess, based on who knows what. And f.ds said no and they cut the prices in half. Then died. Dunno how related that is. The point was that MF isn't the first entity to arrive at these prices.
Catan: $4.99
We are talking about intellectual property. As opposed to, say, chairs. A chair has a particular cost to producing it - materials, work, shipping. You have to pay at least that much or it isn't worth it to sell you the chair. If we can produce in volume we can get the cost down but only to a point. I am not trying to be patronizing, I'm just saying all the words that make the point.
Intellectual property is much different. The costs are almost all just the up-front cost of time spent making the thing. The cost of one-time bandwidth use is very small. At some point it's worth selling someone, who won't pay more, access to that intellectual property for almost nothing. This is in the sans-servers situation; I don't know what servers cost but that's a continual cost, such that the sensible thing to an outsider like me is to charge for it continually. In practice maybe the cost is so small that you don't have to, I don't know.
So then, a big thing about intellectual property is, how popular is it. The base cost of a copy of Super Mario Galaxy is small; they are charging for the huge amount of work that went into it, the people who put in the hours. At some point that work is paid for and the rest is profit. But it all depends on popularity. If no-one wants Super Mario Galaxy, it has no way to recoup its costs. At some point it's expensive and breaks even. But if it's massively popular it can be cheap and still rake in cash.
I always think of being a songwriter in the Star Wars universe. Instead of an audience of millions or billions of people, it's, you know, some larger number. You put in just as much work but there's this huge audience and it's intellectual property.
Intellectual property should not work like this. Just an aside.
So anyway, you want to compare Settlers to Dominion, well Settlers is massively more popular and so can be cheaper. You also aren't showing me there if they are losing money on these products but using them as promotion or what.
From my perspective, I am seeing the hours that went into the product, the hours that aren't mine (though I have sure wasted some time on the online versions) and the low demand for the product. And when someone says "they should cost $1" and I say "no" that's not me saying "therefore $10 is the perfect price" or any such thing. The internet isn't good at seeing that but there it is.