Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteveC" data-source="post: 2110709" data-attributes="member: 9053">To answer Joe's initial question, I'd say yes they are. At this point in my life I've been pretty successful, and have a decent disposable income. I have enough money to easily spend $50 to $100 a week on luxury items without affecting my savings and long-term goals at all.  The prices of games haven't made me change my buying plans for the things I really want one bit. I picked up the Black Company book a couple months ago at my FLGS for full retail and didn't think about it a bit (that's $45). What it has affected is the purchase of things that are borderline purchases for me, the kind of things I might think are interesting but will basically read and likely file away. It's pretty much cut those purchases out entirely. What it means in the end is that you'd better somehow target me very specifically with an expensive product or I'm just not going to buy it. Once you put that into context with the fact that my tastes aren't universal (much as I wish they would be, sigh<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />) a game company has to produce something that will have a very broad appeal if they make something past a certain price point. The problem with that is that broadly appealing books lose an edge that can make them more interesting.  Oh, and I also have much higher expectations in terms of quality for a game that's $45 than one that's $20. One way to get me to never buy one of your products again is to charge $40+ for something and have bad art, bad production values and no editing. I'm pretty forgiving of a PDF or a low-cost product in this area but expensive products need to be well-produced. I guess what I'm ultimately saying is, even if your product is priced "reasonably" given the cost of inflation, the cost of paper, and the cost of the tea in China, it doesn't necessarily mean it's priced at the point where the majority of gamers can and will afford it. Companies are having some success with producing "deluxe" rulebooks and charging premium prices for them, but I wonder how much of that is a one-time thing. I think a lot of gamers can and will purchase a deluxe book once in a blue moon, but I wonder how they'll do month in and month out. I'm getting the impression that RPGs are heading the way of some other marginal hobbies that are extremely expensive because they have such a small fan-base. Ah, but PDFs and POD might ultimately be our redemption, I suppose, but this doesn't sound like a good long-term solution for a growing hobby. Grumble, grumble, I suppost...that's what the Internet is for, though... --Steve</blockquote>

Verification