What's Your Price Limit?

[Jfdlsjfd]

I also don't care for formats other than PDFs, for the exact reason you mentionned: there is no guarantee with onlline good that the service will exist in 10 years. While PDF, if I am careful enough with my saves, will.

 

[Distracted DM]

I'm right there with you - game sounds fabulous, but is just sitting on the shelf mocking me. Then when v2 comes out, I just have to hang my head in shame....and then buy it.

Yup- if I'm lucky I'll think to pull some shelfware down rarely and give it a read-through... but more often they just sit on the shelf waiting to be read- some day. Definitely some day. Soon.

Question for folks, but do people buy books to play with a group, or do they talk with players, and buy books together? Put another way - if you've been playing with a group for awhile - is one person responsible for the supplies for a game everyone plays?

The only TTRPG stuff that my group "went in on" was DnDBeyond content, the legendary bundle back in the 2010s. I think my players saw the value in it, and saw the big price tag of ~$200+, and thought "oh hey we could all chip in on that." The discussion on physical books never comes up though, though my players would often buy their own copies of the PHB and rarely they'd get me gifts of miniatures etc. (very kind of them).

It's interesting that the DDB chip-in came up unasked, but the other books I use never do. I don't complain, I buy them because I'm a collector even if I don't think of myself as one... just an interesting difference to consider.

 

[Weiley31]

More than $400 is the cap for me if I'm being honest.

 

[Velderan]

TTRPG books are massively undervalued. The profit margins are non-existent, and creators get paid less than minimum wage for a book which took many people months or years to make, and which you can get months or years of use out of.

So, yeah, $70 doesn't pay for a hardcover TTRPG book.

WotC sells its core rules -- three books -- for, what $30 each? Depending on where you are in the world. But it's Hasbro and can print hundreds of thousands of them at a time, and so pays pittance for each book. And in doing so, trains the market what a hardcover TTRPG book is worth.

(This, incidentally, is why monopolies are generally prevented through regulation--unfortunately our little corner of the gaming industry is too tiny to qualify for notice, but make no mistake we are operating in the contrails of a monopoly, and the industry problems that causes are apparent).

The rest of the industry sells 0.1% of what Hasbro does if they're really lucky, and pays 10 times or more per book printed. And doesn't have worldwide distribution deals, if at all. And if they do have distribution deals, they're on much worse terms--like, 60% of the cover price is gone right there.

So a hardcover book? Really? For a non global-corp with massive economies of scale? It costs $100. That's minimum wage for the labour.

If you are paying less than $100 (and you are, because every company prices its books at $60 or so), it's because the company is not paying itself or its creators a living wage. Because they literally can't. And this is why the entire TTRPG entire industry is mainly people in their spare bedroom as a side job.

Sure, maybe the books aren't worth $100 to you. Maybe TTRPGs are not a viable business if you're not Hasbro. I'm not telling you what a TTRPG hardcover is worth to you... you spend your money how you want. Your priorities are yours. But I am telling you what it costs if people are paid fairly. And that's $100 for minimum wage.

Going back to this post, what do you think a publisher would need to charge for a typical 192 page TTRPG book in PDF format in a direct sale to fairly pay the folks who worked on it?

I know a lot of people seem to severely undervalue a PDF because they typically seem to only look at the costs to generate the file and distribute it while seemingly ignoring all the costs of a physical hardcover that went into actually creating it (writers, artists, editors, etc). And that’s assuming you’re not losing whatever percent sites like DriveThruRPG take for the sale.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I think one of my problems with expensive Pdfs is the art costs. I like lush display books as physical artifacts - but the artwork on pdfs is something I find mostly annoying (especially if I want to read on my old black and white kindle). They make the books bigger, slower to download and load, and make the text less readable.

So it might be a fair cost to make and to pay the artists - but if I'm reading on a Kindle much of that art is only making the product worse and you're still getting me to pay for it

 

[Velderan]

I think one of my problems with expensive Pdfs is the art costs. I like lush display books as physical artifacts - but the artwork on pdfs is something I find mostly annoying (especially if I want to read on my old black and white kindle). They make the books bigger, slower to download and load, and make the text less readable.

So it might be a fair cost to make and to pay the artists - but if I'm reading on a Kindle much of that art is only making the product worse and you're still getting me to pay for it

I really dislike PDFs and always buy print books when it's an option, so to me the value of a PDF is basically zero. But the thing is I am not going to complain if a publisher decides they need to sell a PDF for $40 to make it a viable product to sell, because simply put I am not the target audience for that specific product just like I don't have an opinion on what Darrington Press sells Daggerheart for in whatever format it is sold in; I wasn't going to buy it whether it was $100 or $5.

You do bring up an interesting point though. No idea how much effort it would take for a publisher to do a simpler layout for a PDF for use on simpler e-readers or if there would be enough demand to bother.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

I think one of my problems with expensive Pdfs is the art costs. I like lush display books as physical artifacts - but the artwork on pdfs is something I find mostly annoying (especially if I want to read on my old black and white kindle). They make the books bigger, slower to download and load, and make the text less readable.

So it might be a fair cost to make and to pay the artists - but if I'm reading on a Kindle much of that art is only making the product worse and you're still getting me to pay for it

It would be interesting to know the art price on a RPG project, compared to the cost of remaking a basic layout of the text in an art-free version.

Then, the editor would need to estimate the net gain, between the customers who would buy the art-free version at a lower cost instead of not buying anything at all, minus the reduced income coming from people who would have bought the PDF with art and decided to go with the art-free version instead when it's proposed.

Edit: I looked at a few Kickstarters offering both digital only and hardcover versions of RPGs to look at the number of backker. Cosmere 1,300 backers for 2 digital PDF and 6,500 for hardcover+digital bundle, but the relative price was 60 USD and 95 USD. Stronghold and Followers had 4,700 digital backers and 14,700 hardcover+digital backer, with price of 20 and 30 USD, The One Ring had 1,000 and 1,400 respective backers for digital and digital+hardcover backer with price of 300 SEK and 500 SEK, 7th Sea had 2,900 backers for a PDF of the 2nd edition+PDF of the 1st and 4,300 backers for the physical book of the 2nd edition + PDF of the 1sst (price 40 and 60 USD). At the other end of the notoriety spectrum, the SMORK BORG TTRPG has 108 backers for the digital edition at USD 12 and 61 backers for the hardcover+digital at USD 29, it was also the one where the PDF-only price was the lowest.

So maybe the public for digital only RPG is small enough (and the market for easy to print PDF an even smaller submarket) that they don't bother with it?

 

[John Dallman]

Question for folks, but do people buy books to play with a group, or do they talk with players, and buy books together? Put another way - if you've been playing with a group for awhile - is one person responsible for the supplies for a game everyone plays?

No fixed behaviour here. For the last two systems a group has introduced me to (Honor & Intrigue and Unknown Armies) I've bought the core book in PDF, but that hasn't been a requirement.

 

[John Dallman]

You do bring up an interesting point though. No idea how much effort it would take for a publisher to do a simpler layout for a PDF for use on simpler e-readers or if there would be enough demand to bother.

RPG books tend to need tables. And tables are tough for Kindle, ePub, and similar formats that reflow text freely. PDF has fixed pages, which means they can use the same layout as print.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Going back to this post, what do you think a publisher would need to charge for a typical 192 page TTRPG book in PDF format in a direct sale to fairly pay the folks who worked on it?

I know a lot of people seem to severely undervalue a PDF because they typically seem to only look at the costs to generate the file and distribute it while seemingly ignoring all the costs of a physical hardcover that went into actually creating it (writers, artists, editors, etc). And that’s assuming you’re not losing whatever percent sites like DriveThruRPG take for the sale.

I'm not Morrus and he's going to know more about the specifics than I ever would, but there's a couple things one should keep in mind here:

1. Not all game PDFs have hardcovers associated with them. I could point at a hundred games on DTRPG that are PDFs with options to print. As such, you don't have the upfront for printing. Yes, DTRPG is charging to host the files and set up the POD, but the printing costs, per se, aren't there.

2. That said, if you do have to still, as you say, pay for all the work needed to set up the document, and if you are doing a physical print runs, the layout issues are more than just porting over to the other format.

3. On the third hand, once you've got a PDF document properly prepared, the incremental cost for successive sales of the PDF are minimal, unlike the case with non-POD physical books where there's all kinds of both upfront and ongoing costs between printing, shipping and storage.

So its not the zero-cost process some people subconsciously think it is, but after a certain point, PDF sales approach being pure profit; the issue with a lot of publishers is how long it takes to make up the upfront costs to get there.

I'm ignoring for these purposes the rare case of writers who get ongoing payment for products they are not the primary owners of, since as far as I know that's pretty rare in the RPG field.