D&D General D&D Book Prices Are Going Up

WotC announced today that D&D books will be increasing in price this year.

Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants will be $59.99 as a preorder and $69.99 thereafter. These will apparently come as physical and digital bundles, so you won’t need to buy the D&D Beyond version separately.

This space is dedicated to communicating clearly and transparently with our players- even when the topic isn’t particularly fun. Since the release of the 2014 D&D core rulebooks, we’ve kept book prices stable. Unfortunately, with the cost of goods and shipping continually increasing, we’ve finally had to make the decision to increase the price of our new release print books. We're committed to creating high-quality products that deliver great value to our players and must increase our prices to accomplish that.

This will go into effect starting with Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants and new releases after Glory of the Giants. Digital pricing is unaffected by this MSRP (manufacturer's suggested retail price) increase, as digital products don’t need to be printed or shipped. The increase also doesn’t impact backlist titles. While we can’t promise that there will never be a change to the prices of digital products and backlist titles, we have no plans to increase either.

Players who purchase the Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants digital-physical bundle through Dungeons & Dragons store can get the bundle for $59.95 for the entire preorder window, which is consistent with our current digital-physical bundle pricing. After the preorder window closes, digital-physical bundle prices will go to $69.95.

 

[Velderan]

How does Paizo handle digital redemption of physical products?

The closest thing they have would be their book subscription model, where they automatically ship you a new book in the plan you're on while adding the PDF to your Paizo account for free when the book ships. I'm not aware of them having any means to offer FLGS a way to participate.

 

[Retreater]

And people wonder why WotC has absolutely refused to engage with the general public for years. An offhand comment fifteen years ago is taken as a binding contract and people still bring it up as an example of how WotC is dishonest years later.

It was during the official reveal at GenCon. Said by Chris Perkins. A part of a scripted event.
Don't believe me? Watch it.

 

[Remathilis]

The closest thing they have would be their book subscription model, where they automatically ship you a new book in the plan you're on while adding the PDF to your Paizo account for free when the book ships. I'm not aware of them having any means to offer FLGS a way to participate.

Uh huh. Just like WotC is doing. Buy directly from them, get a digital bundle. Buy from a FLGS, get only the physical product. I understand WotC has expressed interest in this, but fail to see where WotC selling digital bundles only through their store is bad but Paizo giving your a PDF for ordering through theirs is acceptable.

 

[Velderan]

Uh huh. Just like WotC is doing. Buy directly from them, get a digital bundle. Buy from a FLGS, get only the physical product. I understand WotC has expressed interest in this, but fail to see where WotC selling digital bundles only through their store is bad but Paizo giving your a PDF for ordering through theirs is acceptable.

Is anyone saying otherwise? I'm not seeing why bringing Paizo up has anything to do with WotC in this scenario. It's some nice whataboutism for sure, but I don't see anyone saying "WotC needs to be more like Paizo" or defending Paizo's digital sales model when they're basically the same here. I guess the only real difference is I'm not sure I've seen Paizo even express interest in trying to solve the "how do we sell physical books in FLGS while giving people a PDF" challenge.

 

[Oofta]

I'm sorry I thought expecting people to tell the truth was the norm. Nice bit of Hyperbole there but they've stretched and mangled the truth a bit more than that.

So there's zero allowance for plans changing, for a presenter to repeat something that turned out to be not feasible? They thought they'd have a VTT as well, did they lie because the guy running the project overpromised to everyone and then killed themselves?

You've never said that you plan on doing something and then ended up not being able to do it? You're holding them to an impossible standard.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So there's zero allowance for plans changing, for a presenter to repeat something that turned out to be not feasible? They thought they'd have a VTT as well, did they lie because the guy running the project overpromised to everyone and then killed themselves?

You've never said that you plan on doing something and then ended up not being able to do it? You're holding them to an impossible standard.

Of course plans can change. Did they ever announce that they weren't going to be able to do what they said they would, or did they just hope people would forget?

 

[Oofta]

Of course plans can change. Did they ever announce that they weren't going to be able to do what they said they would, or did they just hope people would forget?

I have no clue if they announced the change or not. I suspect it wouldn't matter to some people even if they did. I still think that everyone makes plans that they can't follow through on now and then. You have to judge the scale and importance and, in this case, it's incredibly minor. In addition, any time they give a talk like this it should be obvious that many things are aspirational, things they hope to do. They shouldn't have to repeat that for every sentence.

They didn't advertise that they would provide a PDF when they were actually selling the books. If they had, that would have been breaking a promise. Anything before that is just them relating plans and plans change.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

And people wonder why WotC has absolutely refused to engage with the general public for years. An offhand comment fifteen years ago is taken as a binding contract and people still bring it up as an example of how WotC is dishonest years later.

Obviously, some people like to label them "dishonest", but honesty is not my gripe when it comes to this promise (and promise is a word that simply means "intended to deliver"). They simply failed to deliver. That's not dishonesty, in that I'm pretty sure that they meant to have it happen. But it's still disappointing that they failed (multiple times) to deliver.

But it's more an eye-roller (for me at least) than some kind of rage-response. I know things always look like RAAAAGE on the internet, but I suspect you'd find that a lot of people are more rolling their eyes and sighing when they're complaining on the internet than actual true rage.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I'm sorry I thought expecting people to tell the truth was the norm. Nice bit of Hyperbole there but they've stretched and mangled the truth a bit more than that.

If you build a strong enough parasocial relationship, people will believe and defend everything you say and do.

 

[darjr]

Also Goodman Games sells books with a code sticker in them for the PDF from Drive Thru. However it means the books are shrink wrapped. Which it's claimed some stores do not like. However all the GS around here and abroad I've been too sell shrink wrapped books.

Note I do realized that stickers are probably not feasible for WotC just due to shear print size.

There are like six... maybe seven game stores around here.

Edit to add I meant some of the books are, the gg ones, and my assumption was gg shrink wrapped them which may be wrong.