D&D General D&D Book Prices Are Going Up

WotC announced today that D&D books will be increasing in price this year.

Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants will be $59.99 as a preorder and $69.99 thereafter. These will apparently come as physical and digital bundles, so you won’t need to buy the D&D Beyond version separately.

This space is dedicated to communicating clearly and transparently with our players- even when the topic isn’t particularly fun. Since the release of the 2014 D&D core rulebooks, we’ve kept book prices stable. Unfortunately, with the cost of goods and shipping continually increasing, we’ve finally had to make the decision to increase the price of our new release print books. We're committed to creating high-quality products that deliver great value to our players and must increase our prices to accomplish that.

This will go into effect starting with Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants and new releases after Glory of the Giants. Digital pricing is unaffected by this MSRP (manufacturer's suggested retail price) increase, as digital products don’t need to be printed or shipped. The increase also doesn’t impact backlist titles. While we can’t promise that there will never be a change to the prices of digital products and backlist titles, we have no plans to increase either.

Players who purchase the Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants digital-physical bundle through Dungeons & Dragons store can get the bundle for $59.95 for the entire preorder window, which is consistent with our current digital-physical bundle pricing. After the preorder window closes, digital-physical bundle prices will go to $69.95.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Inflation calculators are easy to find. Plug in the numbers yourself if you don't believe me, a $50 book adjusted for inflation would be $64.

The digital products haven't been for sale for long and DDB used to be a separate company. Wouldn't surprise me if they've been able to cut some costs to keep the price down.

It's actually quite surprising they haven't raised the prices before this. But sure. Beat the "evil corporation" drum. There are some great examples out there, I just don't see this as necessarily being one of them.

I don't have to lol, they didn't increase digital.

So they're fine for now.

Inflation calculators are absolute flummery unless industry specific, though, I would point out. Inflation does not remotely impact all products equally. The biggest greedflation we've seen in the US and UK (though I hear it's worse in the US, for once) has been on food prices, which have increased ridiculously more (like many times more) than the actual inflationary pressures on the industry (gas prices etc.), and in such a way that's de facto price fixing (though to be clear, I don't believe there's active communication between companies on his, or any conspiracy - rather just companies seeing other people raise prices, and instead of undercutting them, also raising prices despite fixed demand).

 

[Parmandur]

Hooray! Thanks for checking this/knowing this!

Yeah but there's a very real difference between box-setting an adventure, box-setting a setting, and randomly box-setting a magic item sourcebook with a deck that you could easily simulate with a normal deck of cards. One bad decision won't kill D&D here, but a sufficient number? Long term it might.

Don't get me wrong, I love RPG trash, I still have my Mage: The Ascension tarot deck somewhere, but like, I don't think selling stuff like that really helped TSR or White Wolf in the longer-term.

Yeah, we'll see how it goes over, but I suspect this might be a reaction to specific market research finding "why can't I buy a Deck of Many Things?" coming from customers.

And the big question mark is...what's in this 192 page book, exactly? It does seem based on the description that there will be a lot of Adventure and campaign material.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'm not going to say you are wrong to not want it, bur ni way WotC wasn't going to sell this without a deck.

They sold Curse of Strahd without the separate Tarokka deck.

Their hands are by no means tied here.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Don't get me wrong, I love RPG trash, I still have my Mage: The Ascension tarot deck somewhere, but like, I don't think selling stuff like that really helped TSR or White Wolf in the longer-term.

Emulating two RPG companies that famously ran themselves into the ground after being on top of the industry is certainly a choice.

 

[Oofta]

I don't have to lol, they didn't increase digital.

The inflationary pressures of materials, storage, shipping don't affect digital. In addition, odds are the cost of publishing to digital has likely been lowered due to their improved integration with DDB. Add in that they don't need to make much money on individual books, they make more on the subscription model.

It's a really odd thing to claim that the cost of books should stay the same for a decade while also complaining(?) that they didn't increase the price of digital.

So they're fine for now.

Inflation calculators are absolute flummery unless industry specific, though, I would point out. Inflation does not remotely impact all products equally. The biggest greedflation we've seen in the US and UK (though I hear it's worse in the US, for once) has been on food prices, which have increased ridiculously more (like many times more) than the actual inflationary pressures on the industry (gas prices etc.), and in such a way that's de facto price fixing (though to be clear, I don't believe there's active communication between companies on his, or any conspiracy - rather just companies seeing other people raise prices, and instead of undercutting them, also raising prices despite fixed demand).

 

[Bedrockgames]

Among a very very small vocal minority, sure.

.01% of the player base is still a lot of people but in the overall picture it is insignificant to D&D.

I don't think it is this small, I am not even sure it is a minority of gamers, but only time will tell I think

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It's a really odd thing to claim that the cost of books should stay the same for a decade

????

I literally didn't say that. You even quoted where I didn't say it lol.

 

[Storyteller Hero]

I think there would have been a much more positive reaction from the community if the price changes were more gradual, and if living wages (at least in the USA) weren't so fallen behind the pace of inflation over the past fifty years.

 

[Parmandur]

They sold Curse of Strahd without the separate Tarokka deck.

Their hands are by no means tied here.

They did, originally. That may be something view as a marketing mistake, in retrospect.

 

[LordEntrails]

Would they gain Massive goodwill within the hobby by doing so? Hell Yes.

No, they really wouldn't. I doubt most D&D customers have ever been to a FLGS. They certainly don't buy the majority of their RPG products there. They would gain goodwill from the FLGS owners and a few of us diehards, but that's probably less than 5% of their customer base.

They certainly have the data, and if they care they have run the numbers, and if so have decided subsidizing FLGS in that manner is not a good use of their brand budget. They chose to spend it elsewhere (such as with the Creator's Summit).

The inflationary pressures of materials, storage, shipping don't affect digital.

Not directly. But indirectly it does. Inflation affects all sectors in time. i.e. gasoline price goes up, shipping goes up, food goes up... eventually wages go up. So now every industry has to charge more. Hence why we have things like generic inflation calculators.