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.

 

[Retreater]

Honestly, while in some ways it would be better if they increased prices more slowly over a longer period of time, it's not like people wouldn't complain about a $2 increase every 2 years just as much.

And honestly, I wouldn't complain if they made $60 books I liked, just as I wouldn't be happy to buy a book with little use for $20.
It's just ... this isn't a good time to be drastically increasing prices. Some goodwill has been lost. They are in-between rules printings (and those books tend to get ignored as is). I'd argue that they haven't been knocking recent releases out of the park in a quality or customer satisfaction sense. The D&D movie didn't exactly catch the box office on fire.
If anything, I'd be cutting prices and scaling back in preparation for the 2024 releases.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And honestly, I wouldn't complain if they made $60 books I liked, just as I wouldn't be happy to buy a book with little use for $20.
It's just ... this isn't a good time to be drastically increasing prices. Some goodwill has been lost. They are in-between rules printings (and those books tend to get ignored as is). I'd argue that they haven't been knocking recent releases out of the park in a quality or customer satisfaction sense. The D&D movie didn't exactly catch the box office on fire.
If anything, I'd be cutting prices and scaling back in preparation for the 2024 releases.

Why back off when you double down, I guess?

 

[Digdude]

The price increase feels like a slimy way to get us all to go dnd beyond digital only with the intent to stop doing physical copies down the road. I wouldnt put it past wotc based on recent events.

 

[DEFCON 1]

The price increase feels like a slimy way to get us all to go dnd beyond digital only with the intent to stop doing physical copies down the road. I wouldnt put it past wotc based on recent events.

So I guess all those years of them NOT raising their prices was their slimy way of getting players to split the difference and buy both book AND digital, huh?

 

[Oofta]

Again, there is no way Hasbro isn't making a profit as it is.

Has anyone said or even implied differently? I don't know why you continue harping on this. Companies that don't make a profit go out of business.

 

[Morrus]

Citation needed.

While I have no insight into WotC’s business, I do publish similar hardcover books. He’s correct. It costs very little to print each hardcover book when done at scale. It costs us about $4, and it gets cheaper as your print run size increases, and their print runs are a thousand times ours.

Printing is only one of a thousand costs when producing a book, of course. (Not counting the 50% of retail you immediately lose to the distributor). So in isolation it’s not really a useful data point when deciding whether a company is making a decent profit or not.

 

[SteveC]

Has anyone said or even implied differently? I don't know why you continue harping on this. Companies that don't make a profit go out of business.

I think this in response to the notion that "WotC had to do this! Inflation!" WotC is still making money on every book they sell, and would make money without this price increase. Now this is the end of the edition, and they've had a lot of bad press, so there's no doubt they are selling fewer books than before so I'd say that may be a more likely culprit, which may (and I said may) result in fewer sales still.

 

[Mark Plemmons]

D&D 5R: "We're going to streamline the game!"

Also D&D 5R: "Enjoy your 48 PHB subclasses!"

Personally, I'd be okay if they keep the core book prices down a bit by sticking to the 'core of the core', and moving some of the extraneous material to player's option books.

 

[LordEntrails]

Sadly I am not surprised at all. But we should remember there are other games whose books give more page with the same prize.

And in my nation the adquisitive level is lower, worse in the last years.

That's why Steam regional pricing is so incredibly powerful and it amazes me that more people in countries/regions like yours don't take advantage of it. Go log onto steam, look at the Fantasy Grounds version of the PHB. How does the price of the FG version compare to the printed version? I'm guessing you could be saving a lot of money if a VTT version was an option for you.

FLGS get screwed because WotC can't be bothered to add a few people to their staff, take orders, and give FLGS the same price per unit.

Yea... no. Not the way costs work. Every order costs a relatively fixed price for WotC to process. An FLGS that orders ten books cost in resources almost the same as Amazon ordering 10,000 copies. And then WotC has to have somebody package up and individually ship those 10 books via UPS or such. Where as Amazon they just drop ship directly from the printer and send a whole truck of books.

Sure, the total cost of shipping 10 books is less than a truck load, but PER book, doing business with Amazon is much less expensive for WotC.

 

[DarkCrisis]

Save money, only buy the core 3 for 5.5. Easy peasy. They all you need anyways.