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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6397688" data-attributes="member: 37579">I don't recall say "the world has changed", I said "You should never be expected to pay *more* for a digital product". Ideally you should pay less, but there's some price fixing and other factors involved.  But I should have been more careful with my words to emphasise that I was only talking about the RPG industry on an RPG forum rather than all industries everywhere. Getting beyond our little circle always gets makes prices seem screwy. It'd be irrelevant bringing the price of prepainted plastic miniatures bought at a Michael's craft store into a discussion of fantasy minis. It has no bearing on what WizKids can charge for their minis.(But, if you can get some bases, that's an amazing place for some lesser seen creatures. I have some horses, dinosaurs, dragons, "dire" animals, and a tortoise that served as a gargantuan dragon turtle in a Dragonlance game.)WotC should follow the model of market leaders in the RPG hobby. They should follow the industry standard for their industry to the best of their ability. They shouldn't price their products like, say, textbooks. Or Stephen King bestsellers. Or Scholastic Book Fair books. They should price them like other RPG books, albeit ones likely to sell an order of magnitude more copies than most RPG companies. Obviously, there will be some changes. Since they do not deal in direct sales, they cannot sell "hardcopy + PDF" bundles like, oh, every other major publisher (and most small publishers). And they will have DungeonScape offering a paid app experience. But they can't just ignore the rest of the industry and price PDFs however they want. If they charge too much people just won't buy. I'd argue the 4e PDFs emphasised this, where many more people pirated the PHB2 than bought legal copies. ---edit---WotC CEO Greg Leeds claims here that 10x as many people pirated the PHB2 that purchased a legal PDF. <a href="http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/14726.html" target="_blank">http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/14726.html</a>That's what charging full price for PDFs does to sales. Because, at that time, you could get the physical copy from amazon with one day shipping for significantly less than the PDF. ---end edit---If I own a CD but the song gets screwy on my iPod, I have no hesitation about hitting a torrent site to get a fresh copy rather than unearthing the disk from whatever storage box it's buried in: I paid my money for a legal copy. It's very clear that, when the price is too high, gamers will simply "steal" their backup/portable copies of books. It's easy to justify if they've already bought their dead tree copy.If WotC releases a cheap PDF then it will sell. Even people who've "stolen" a PDF might buy one, opting to trade their money for a better scan. Especially if it's a good PDF with bookmarks and hyperlinks. I'll happily buy a PDF for as much as $15 for a decent copy or even $20 for one that has some extra work put into its usability. $30? Not a chance.</blockquote>

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