10:1 illegal downloads

[Dice4Hire]

Everything I've seen from them says they simply don't want to out-compete their retail sales (and thereby potentially harming their bookstore & hobby store sales).

That's a pretty big difference from "priced not to sell them." Unless you have some better evidence for your supposition?

-O

If they want to help hobby stores, the simplest and most effective option would be to stop selling them on Amazon. I know this will not happen, and I would be unhappy with this as Amazon is my only avenue of getting the books in a timely manner, but cutting out Amazon would help hobby stores a huge amount.

 

[AllisterH]

Everything I've seen from them says they simply don't want to out-compete their retail sales (and thereby potentially harming their bookstore & hobby store sales).

That's a pretty big difference from "priced not to sell them." Unless you have some better evidence for your supposition?

-O

It's also the same reason why M:TGonline prices its packs at the same price as the cardboard version.

WOTC seems to be the ONLY company that actually seems to want to support the FLGS. Paizo et al don't really seem to care whether or not their is an actual retail section of the hobby.

 

[Wicht]

It's also the same reason why M:TGonline prices its packs at the same price as the cardboard version.

WOTC seems to be the ONLY company that actually seems to want to support the FLGS. Paizo et al don't really seem to care whether or not their is an actual retail section of the hobby.

I think thats a bit unfair. As Erik Mona pointed out just recently, until two years ago Paizo was basically just a magazine company. They have had a lot of growth in the last two years, brand wise, but they are just now getting a retailer plan into place. Give them another year before making that judgment.

 

[thormagni]

What I won't do is spend an outrageous amount on them. $20 for a $35 dollar book? No thank you. The intention of sales of PDF 4E products was largely to give access to the books to people who couldn't get them in other ways. If WotC had put the price at a lower point (say $10) I would have purchased each and every book they put out.

I agree with the point you are making here. With my own home laser printer, it still costs me about 3 cents per page to print a given book, or about $3 for every hundred pages, plus another $5 or so to get it spiral bound.

I bought Reallty Deviants "Technothrillers: Revised Edition" for True 20 a while back in PDF. The total cost for me to have a game-ready book was about $15. Which I thought was reasonable.

Similarly, I bought Green Ronin's Mutants and Masterminds Instant Superheroes for $15 in PDF. The total cost for a game-ready book was about $23, again very close to the $18 (Amazon) to $23 (local bookstore) cost to me to buy it new in hard copy. This was a borderline PDF purchase bargain-wise, but I wanted the ability to hand out pages from the book at the table, so I made the purchase.

If I bought, say, the D&D 4e Player's Handbook 320-page PDF, the printing and binding costs for it would be around $14. Since I can buy the full-color, printed and bound book for $23 (Amazon) to $35 (local bookstore), it would have to sell for $9 to $21 in PDF for it to be worth my while. My impression was that Wizards' prices were much higher than this.

I wonder if there is an market research on how many people actually print their PDFs, versus using them on a laptop.

 

[SteveC]

Everything I've seen from them says they simply don't want to out-compete their retail sales (and thereby potentially harming their bookstore & hobby store sales).

That's a pretty big difference from "priced not to sell them." Unless you have some better evidence for your supposition?

-O

...Right, that's a different way of saying the same thing. They didn't want PDFs to compete with their physical sales, so they priced them so that they wouldn't. That's pricing them not to sell. More accurately they didn't want to give the appearance of competing with book sales to their distributors, since only a relatively small percentage of WotC's total customer base even knows about places like RPGNow.

If WotC wanted to sell more PDFs they could have: they just needed to set the price point to where it was attractive to buy them, or offered real support for them, preferably both. At the prices they were charging, it's hardly surprising that the market wasn't overly interested. The pirates on the other hand were, and will continue to be.

--Steve

 

[Obryn]

...Right, that's a different way of saying the same thing. They didn't want PDFs to compete with their physical sales, so they priced them so that they wouldn't. That's pricing them not to sell.

I don't really think that's the same thing at all.

If they priced them at $150, that's pricing them not to sell. No reasonable person would buy this.

If they price them at the same level as the physical books in hobby stores, it means that reasonable people could buy them instead of a physical book. Basically, if I want the PHB2 in any format, I'm paying somewhere around $26-$35.

If they priced them at $5, the PDF is dramatically undercutting the physical book. Which may be fair, and would definitely lead to more sales. But it's also more likely to leech off sales of hardcovers.

-O

 

[Treebore]

WOTC obviously doesn't want to support LGS', if they did they wouldn't sell through an outlet that undersells LGS' by about 34%, but they do. Because Amazon is what gets WOTC big sales numbers.

Now if people want to delude themselves into thinking WOTC supports LGS' go ahead, but as a business owner if one of my suppliers told me they were supporting me by supplying a competitor who undersells me by 34% I would call them a liar.

 

[Asmor]

WOTC obviously doesn't want to support LGS', if they did they wouldn't sell through an outlet that undersells LGS' by about 34%, but they do. Because Amazon is what gets WOTC big sales numbers.

Now if people want to delude themselves into thinking WOTC supports LGS' go ahead, but as a business owner if one of my suppliers told me they were supporting me by supplying a competitor who undersells me by 34% I would call them a liar.

In that respect, Amazon is similar to Wal-mart. You may not want to sell through them, but you really don't have a whole lot of choice. You can either sell through them or sell vastly lower quantities.

 

[Alaxk Knight of Galt]

WOTC obviously doesn't want to support LGS', if they did they wouldn't sell through an outlet that undersells LGS' by about 34%, but they do. Because Amazon is what gets WOTC big sales numbers.

Now if people want to delude themselves into thinking WOTC supports LGS' go ahead, but as a business owner if one of my suppliers told me they were supporting me by supplying a competitor who undersells me by 34% I would call them a liar.

I agree with this point. I purchase my books from Amazon for one reason, I save money on them. I payed just under $21 bucks for PHBII (with shipping canceling sales tax). Retail cost on the book is $35. Selling your book for $14 less on-line will drive people on-line to buy the book.

I never understood WotC and Magic the Gathering Online where they charged people the same amount for a digital pack of cards as a physical pack of cards. I never looked at the pdf sales for 4E books, but assuming they charged the same amount for the pdf as the book ($35) why would I skip out on Amazon selling it for $14 less.

I'm still waiting for my nominal fee PDFs...

 

[Voadam]

I agree with this point. I purchase my books from Amazon for one reason, I save money on them. I payed just under $21 bucks for PHBII (with shipping canceling sales tax). Retail cost on the book is $35. Selling your book for $14 less on-line will drive people on-line to buy the book.

I never understood WotC and Magic the Gathering Online where they charged people the same amount for a digital pack of cards as a physical pack of cards. I never looked at the pdf sales for 4E books, but assuming they charged the same amount for the pdf as the book ($35) why would I skip out on Amazon selling it for $14 less.

I'm still waiting for my nominal fee PDFs...

4e PDF core books were $25 each. The other 4e books were at a similar discount. I forget if that was 25% or 30% or 35% off the cover price. It came out to about just a little more than Amazon prices, before you added in printing costs for printing your own pdfs.

3e PDFs were full cover price.

Older edition pdfs ranged from $5 to $6.

4e pdfs were just a bit too expensive to tempt me to take the plunge on them.

3e pdfs I only bought a handful when they were on sale for 30% off, and then decided they were still too expensive for my tastes even if they went on similar sale again.

I bought lots and lots of the old edition pdfs.