D&D 5E Are hardback AP's a waste?

[Sailor Moon]

This actually came up in another thread and so I figured it would be a great topic to discuss.

Do you think big hardback AP's are a waste of money?

I do because of the following reasons. I feel like Wizards could save a lot of money in printing costs by going either paperback or digital format. Let's be honest here. How many of you run the same AP repeatedly? I play with the same group of people so it wouldn't be plausible to run the same AP again because the group already knows what to do. The mystery has gone out of the AP. It basically just becomes this shiny book sitting on my shelf.

If you have to have something physical, then why not just go with a paperback? You could print it for a lot cheaper price and sell it for less. I think what would be best are for these things to go digital. It would be a hell of a lot cheaper and you could charge people 2 or 3 quid per adventure and maybe a fiver for an AP. After you are finished with it, you would then feel like you got your money's worth out of it and just leave it sitting there on your hardrive without it taking up really any space.

I just think hardback adventures are a bit much and could be dealt with a lot better.

 

[DEFCON 1]

You do realize they aren't making things for YOUR wallet, right? Making it cheap FOR YOU is not their goal? They're actually trying to make money FOR THEMSELVES.

And if a hardcover book can sell for more money because people are willing to pay for it... then that's what works better FOR THEM. Because they're the ones wanting to make the money.

If you want cheap adventure material, you have it. It's called 'websites'. And you acquire them through a wonderful cheap service called 'Google'. Wherein there are thousands of adventures available right at your fingertips for the wonderful price of $0.

 

[Sailor Moon]

You do realize they aren't making things for YOUR wallet, right? Making it cheap FOR YOU is not their goal? They're actually trying to make money FOR THEMSELVES.

And if a hardcover book can sell for more money because people are willing to pay for it... then that's what works better FOR THEM. Because they're the ones wanting to make the money.

If you want cheap adventure material, you have it. It's called 'websites'. And you acquire them through a wonderful cheap service called 'Google'. Wherein there are thousands of adventures available right at your fingertips for the wonderful price of $0.

My method would actually make them more money. More people would drop less money on a paperback than they would a hardback, especially something that most likely won't be used more than once.

How much does it cost to make multiple digital copies of something?

Oh yeah, zero. So it costs you zero to make 100 copies of a PDF and sell them for a fiver each. That's 500 quid right there.

 

[Zardnaar]

I think the idea is they can charge a premium for a hard back and get more money than the difference between the hard cover and soft cover. Soft cover B&W is dirt cheap AFAIK.

 

[Staffan]

You say that as if the primary cost of getting a printed module to the public lies in actually printing it. That's pretty far from the truth. Long before the book gets to the printer, there are people like the writers, artists, editors, layout people, and so on who do work on the book and would like to get paid for that work.

That said, the marginal cost for making more digital copies is zero, or as close to it as makes no difference. So basically it becomes a question of maximizing the equation "cost per copy * copies sold."

 

[Sailor Moon]

I think the idea is they can charge a premium for a hard back and get more money than the difference between the hard cover and soft cover. Soft cover B&W is dirt cheap AFAIK.

If that were true then that's what Paizo would be doing but they don't.

 

[Zardnaar]

If that were true then that's what Paizo would be doing but they don't.

Paizo charges a bit for a glorified Dungeon magazine. Compare the $8 price tag of the old Dungeon to the early Paizo APs. Paizo already charged a premium. I have played around 5 or 6 Paizo APs, have not completed a single one. The WoTC APs are similar in price to 2 Paizo APs and are hard cover as well. Content wise Paizo are 60 odd pages of adventure+fluff, the WotC ones are larger and are 100% adventure form the look of it. HotDQ was just bad for other reasons it was a reasonable price.

Good reading though.

 

[Rhenny]

It is an interesting question. My gut says you are correct, but if they are only publishing 1 or 2 books a year, they are going with quality (hard cover and heavy paper stock) to make the books more appealing to collectors as well as DMs that will use them. I just bought HoDQ and Rise of Tiamat and the sturdiness of the books actually surprised me.

Personally I would like PDFs or cheaper books because I like to highlight them and annotate them before running them. But, the collector in me was impressed by the hard cover products.

 

[Staffan]

Paizo charges a bit for a glorified Dungeon magazine. Compare the $8 price tag of the old Dungeon to the early Paizo APs. Paizo already charged a premium.

There's a very simple reason for APs costing way more than Dungeon did: ads. Dungeon had them, modules don't (except possibly a page or two at the end advertising the company's own product).

 

[Morrus]

WotC sees itself in the "premium" product market - it sells big, lavish, hardcover, colourful books. In that way it distinguishes itself from companies that sell in other formats, prince ranges, or production quality. There's a thousand companies you can buy PDFs or b/w books or softcovers from, but not so many who can sell the really pretty stuff. That's their branding.

Well, with Kickstarter, everybody can, but that's a different story.