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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jim Butler" data-source="post: 851718" data-attributes="member: 1461">Greetings, all!First and foremost, it's true. Bastion will be going to black and white on a number of our releases. We will still be doing some color products (like Talisman Studio's imprints, plus an upcoming artbook), but overall you'll see less full-color and more black & white.Why the change? Well, it's a matter of economics, basically.Printing in full-color costs roughly 3-4 times the amount it costs to print in black & white. So, while other companies are paying their printer $2,000 for their print run, our bills to the printer run around $8,000.And the short answer is that charging a few dollars more for full-color just doesn't work unless retailers and customers are buying more of the product because it's full color. That's not the case; retailers and consumers seem to buy about the same number of our releases as other d20 companies of similar size.Remember that publishers only get around 40% of the retail price (and that money has to go to pay the printer, designer, editor, artists, typesetter, etc.). If the publisher is using a third-party company to handles its sales (like Osseum, Impressions, etc.), then drop that number to 30%. So, let's play make-believe for a second and calculate some numbers out:Product Sales: 1,500 copies @ $24.95 retail Wholesale Price (that's what we get paid): $7.49Big Check from Osseum/Impressions: $11,235.00Expenses:Designer: $2,400 (80,000 words at .03/word)Editor: $1,000Artists: $1,200.00Printer: $7,500.00Typesetter: $250.00Advertising (1 ad in Dragon): $2,500Total Expenses: $14,850.00Net Profit/Loss: (-$3,615.00) So, even if we take out all of the advertising, the product is still losing money. And we haven't even started paying for all those other little expenses that companies have to pay for (like Gen Con booths, state and local taxes, hotel and airline reservations to big shows, etc.). And what about me? Shouldn't I get paid in here somewhere? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />What it all boils down to is that I'm making changes to make sure that Bastion will be making game products for a long time to come. It doesn't mean that we're not going to be doing color products any more, only that we're going to be more selective about what we use color for. We're going to continue to be vigilant about adhering to the d20 rules and hunt down all the typo and grmmar demons that we can. So, while we'll be going to black and white, the solid rules designs you've come to expect from us will not be compromised.</blockquote>

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