Cost of Core Books PDFs

[Haffrung Helleyes]

PDFs

I am still playing 3E, but if I switch to 4E, I will pick up the PDFs.

I am really glad to hear that they enabled copy/paste. That's a huge win for me -- I can make monster cards and do all kinds of other cool stuff with that.

Also, I am currently living the life of a techno-nomad -- I travelled to 17 countries last year, while doing software development over the internet. I play in a D&D game using MapTools online, but I certainly can't lug around my gaming books! So I bought a lot of the 3.X PDFs at full price.

So from my perspective, the fact that they're discounting the 4E books is an improvement.

Ken

 

[Destil]

I just don't 'get' the market for a 317 page, full color PDF...

Clearly it's not someone who wants to print their own copy. Far too cost it's prohibitive.

Clearly it's not someone who's interested in a digital form of the book. PDF is terrible for everything but printing (not that it's good for that, but justifiable at least). If I'm buying a 'book' to read on a PC it should be in XML or similar.

If their going digital go friggin' digital. PDF seems to just be a half-assed wave in the general direction of digital distribution with no real understanding of why they should bother... I suppose some free money for the minimal effort of dealing with the credit card swipe and some bandwidth.

 

[jdrakeh]

I just don't 'get' the market for a 317 page, full color PDF...

Clearly it's not someone who wants to print their own copy. Far too cost it's prohibitive.

Nothing prevents one from printing a full-color PDF in greyscale, thus, it's not at all cost prohibitive. As I mention above, color rarely performs any real function past 'looking pretty' in RPG books, thus printing in greyscale does not dillute the utility of such products.

 

[Glyfair]

Really!? Do you think WotC cares one whit about game stores?

Yes, I do. They do realize they are still a significant part of their ability to reach their customers. They are becoming less important (and WotC is paying them less attention) but are still important. You can see that WotC agrees by their overall policies and direct comments to that effect.

 

[jdrakeh]

You can see that WotC agrees by their overall policies and direct comments to that effect.

I have to admit that I've rarely heard game store owners complain about WotC -- not like they complain about, say, Games Workshop, anyhow. GW should probably never send live reps out to game stores in the future, lest they mysteriously disappear

 

[mechascorpio]

$15 would be my upper limit to even consider them. And yet, WotC would still be making close to 100% profit.

Not picking at you specifically, just quoting it as an example. It is a complete misconception to think that the only cost of sale in this industry is paper and distribution. Period.

Price minus paper does not equal profit.

Price minus marketing minus development minus administrative payroll minus rent minus lawyers minus utilities minus everything else that goes into running a business and developing a game over a period of years... well, that gets closer to equalling profit.

 

[Scribe Ineti]

Hmm... Anyone have a comment about the layout quality of copy-pasting various powers into power cards? I know that those sorts of operations often run into loss of formatting. If not, then I'm somewhat more tempted, though probably not $25 tempted.

I tried cutting and pasting; the text cuts and pastes fine, but the unique symbols in some of the stat blocks didn't carry over right, and of course the fonts are off. But, the text is there for me to play with as I see fit.

The real benefit the monster manual PDF provides me, though, is the ability to pull up a stat block I need for my game, screenshot it, crop it down, and save the image as a jpeg. I can then dump that jpeg into my session notes and bingo, I have a reference sheet with all the stat blocks I need, and I don't have to lug the physical MM or a laptop with me to the game table. For the convenience of being able to pull those stat blocks electronically without having to futz with a scanner is worth the purchase price for me.

 

[Shadeydm]

It's funny, really, because there was almost no complaining about WotC charging full cover price for PDFs of their entire 3x line, but now that they've discounted the 4e core books to sell them for far less than their typical going rate, a bunch of people are suddenly up in arms.

Some people are trying awfully hard to be outraged, I think.

I seem to recall plenty of complaining, personally the pricing was a turn off both then and now for me. Some people are trying awfully hard to see ulterior motives.

 

[Kzach]

Nothing prevents one from printing a full-color PDF in greyscale, thus, it's not at all cost prohibitive. As I mention above, color rarely performs any real function past 'looking pretty' in RPG books, thus printing in greyscale does not dillute the utility of such products.

Yeah, not like there's a colour code to the powers...

Price minus marketing minus development minus administrative payroll minus rent minus lawyers minus utilities minus everything else that goes into running a business and developing a game over a period of years... well, that gets closer to equalling profit.

All of which is irrelevant.

If the PDF was the only version, then this would be a factor. However, it's not. PDF sales never came into the purview of their budget for this project. They were going to give the damn things away.

All the production costs associated with 4e are based on a return from sales of the hard copies. Not only that, but the effort they have put into the PDF is close to nil. They haven't entered errata, they haven't provided bookmarks, they haven't included hyperlinks or embedded media of any kind. They've just hit "Print to PDF" from an InDesign file and emailed it to a friggin' online distributor.

The distributor is doing all the hard work. It's their advertising that's up on EN World here. It's their administrative costs going into the distribution method. It's their server bandwidth.

No, I stand by what I said. For WotC, this PDF is almost 100% profit to them and they should be ashamed for charging those prices.

 

[charlesatan]

I just don't 'get' the market for a 317 page, full color PDF...

Clearly it's not someone who's interested in a digital form of the book. PDF is terrible for everything but printing (not that it's good for that, but justifiable at least). If I'm buying a 'book' to read on a PC it should be in XML or similar.

If their going digital go friggin' digital. PDF seems to just be a half-assed wave in the general direction of digital distribution with no real understanding of why they should bother... I suppose some free money for the minimal effort of dealing with the credit card swipe and some bandwidth.

Why XML in particular?

For me, PDF is the way to go. If it was as novel or a short story, sure, the optimum format might have been .RTF or .DOC. But RPG books are complex things. You have tables. And artwork.

PDFs at least have usable search functions and bookmarks. And at this point in time, is a competent transition model for people who've grown accustomed to print.

A wiki-format or d20srd.org -type format might in the long run be more efficient but that involves significant work on their part.

And yes, some people do print out the PDFs.