D&D 4E 4e price increase?

[BASHMAN]

I wonder if this affects the "nominal" fee for the electronic content with each book.

And did we say $10/month for the online stuff- we meant $12/month...

Third edition was $20 per book when it came out. 75% increase in 7 years... 10.5% per year-- how much of this is inflation?

 

[SteveC]

Wow. Lots of anger going on here, and I'm not sure why.

I am fairly successful, and my job pays me a lot more money than most, which makes me very lucky and very thankful this time of year. Even with that said, $105 is a lot of money. If you make enough money that it isn't for you, you have even more to be thankful for.

The thing to remember is that for most people, that's not an inconsequential amount of money. High school students, college students, graduate students...you name it...that's a fair chunk of change. It's also a lot of money for a lot of my friends who have houses and families to care for.

Now there's the cost of paper, the cost of the artwork, the production, the soft dollar...and a hundred other reasons why it may not be, in an objective sense, an unreasonable cost, but the fact remains that it's a fair bit of change for people with limited means. And there are a lot of people of limited means that play D&D.

Frankly, it has prompted me to purchase the books through Amazon rather than my FLGS, which I'm not happy about, but there you go.

--Steve

 

[Treebore]

Its just another reason to stick with a system that works just fine.

 

[Amphimir Míriel]

Now there's the cost of paper, the cost of the artwork, the production, the soft dollar...and a hundred other reasons why it may not be, in an objective sense, an unreasonable cost, but the fact remains that it's a fair bit of change for people with limited means. And there are a lot of people of limited means that play D&D.

That's true Steve... Here in the Third World (you know, the country just south of Texas?), roleplaying games have always been an expensive hobby. Our salaries are (in average) about 30% - 80% of what a comparable professional makes in the US and imported books are (in average) 40% - 80% more expensive.
In fact, the whole "every player has his own books" is the exception rather than the rule here. Instead, either one player buys the books (which makes him, by default, the DM), or a group of players buy the books they need together, and share them (I still got a second edition DMG that was communal property 15 years ago). Homebrew systems are also very big here (not to mention pirated pdfs... or photocopied books back in the day).

Nowadays, my group uses printed and bound copies of a compiled SRD we made a couple of years ago, except for one guy who actually bought the official books.
So we do just fine in 3.5, thanks
...and as long as there is a 4.0 SRD, we'll do just fine in 4.0 too.

 

[MerricB]

$35 is not an unreasonable price. In fact, if you don't live in the USA, you may well end up paying less for the books than you did for 3.5e!

Not only that, the lack of new 3e books over the next few months should easily allow you to save up enough for them.

 

[SteveC]

That's true Steve... Here in the Third World (you know, the country just south of Texas?), roleplaying games have always been an expensive hobby. Our salaries are (in average) about 30% - 80% of what a comparable professional makes in the US and imported books are (in average) 40% - 80% more expensive.
In fact, the whole "every player has his own books" is the exception rather than the rule here. Instead, either one player buys the books (which makes him, by default, the DM), or a group of players buy the books they need together, and share them (I still got a second edition DMG that was communal property 15 years ago). Homebrew systems are also very big here (not to mention pirated pdfs... or photocopied books back in the day).

Nowadays, my group uses printed and bound copies of a compiled SRD we made a couple of years ago, except for one guy who actually bought the official books.
So we do just fine in 3.5, thanks
...and as long as there is a 4.0 SRD, we'll do just fine in 4.0 too.

There's a time very much like that in the states: college.

While I was in college (and before that, while in high school) you're describing the kind of life I lived to a T. Photocopies...one copy of the rules...house rules in a notebook were the rule of the day. We didn't have PDFs to pirate, but if we did, I'm sure they would have made the rounds too.

D&D is the price of a family meal, or a few movies, or a couple of video games so it's something trivial to buy...if you are able to routinely go and do those things. At the place where I am in my life I can afford to buy the new books, but the savings I will get from Amazon was simply too much for me to ignore.

Like it or not, D&D has a lot of players who currently buy products, who will have trouble buying the whole set of books at full price. I am imagining trying to get my parents to buy me a copy of the new edition back in the day at comparable prices to today (they bought me my first $8 copy of original D&D) and I'm seeing a big "no" coming my way.

--Steve

 

[MerricB]

Third edition was $20 per book when it came out. 75% increase in 7 years... 10.5% per year-- how much of this is inflation?

3E was artificially low for the first year. Much, much lower than its actual cost - which was $30 soon enough. Because of the big risk Wizards took with 3e, they lowered the barrier to entry significantly.

Cheers!

 

[Sammael]

$35 is not an unreasonable price. In fact, if you don't live in the USA, you may well end up paying less for the books than you did for 3.5e!

Not only that, the lack of new 3e books over the next few months should easily allow you to save up enough for them.

Except in Europe, they slap an EUR sign instead of the USD sign on all prices, which means they will end up being about 50% more expensive at the current exchange rate.

(35 EUR = 52 USD at the moment)

 

[Abstraction]

I wonder if this affects the "nominal" fee for the electronic content with each book.

And did we say $10/month for the online stuff- we meant $12/month...

Third edition was $20 per book when it came out. 75% increase in 7 years... 10.5% per year-- how much of this is inflation?

I work in printing. The cost of paper has skyrocketed in years. You'd really be amazed. When 3E came out, Wizards took the smart move to sell the PHB at a loss in order to create more players who are future customers. I believe Wizards is taking the smart money and not taking a loss on the 4E books, because we're all going to buy it now. Yes, even the people who today say they hate 4E.

 

[The Little Raven]

Third edition was $20 per book when it came out. 75% increase in 7 years... 10.5% per year-- how much of this is inflation?

1. Third Edition was intentionally underpriced at $20, since that's what the 2e books cost (talk about a sacred cow). They dropped the price so they could make it up with volume, as they were banking on bringing in tons of new/lapsed gamers.

2. The dollar is way down. In fact, my brother-in-law is finally able to give me crap since the Canadian dollar is finally higher than the American dollar (he's a Canuck).

3. The cost of doing business has increased.

4. The whole d20 explosion has died down, and that means less people to get to buy the game, and thus less chance to make up a low price on volume.