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.

 

[Vaalingrade]

When in doubt, assume corporations are evil tbh

And even the good ones are myopic and prone to heavy collateral damage.

Like Kaiju made of money and a dirth of personal liability.

 

[Parmandur]

The discourse on Twitter among third party developers is interesting: for example, Jason Buhlman of Paizo is simultaneously glad that WotC is upping prices which will allow others to raise their prices as well, but also sad thst in his view RPG books will still be underpriced, affecting people like him who work on them for a living.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

People generally expect to pay the same amount for a product as they always have, and often get upset when the price increases. If inflation forces you to raise the price of your product, then you may as well raise it a bit extra to pad your margins, since the damage has already been done.

 

[teitan]

...? The MSRP for a hardcover is $59.95 now, , my FLGS has it available for $54 with a preorder sale. Amazon will be cheaper. There is no $20 increase.

Yeah I was confused, working third shift and mama goblin works days. It was our overlap day so... my bad man. Apologies.

 

[teitan]

I'm afraid that you didn't understand my post.

I pay my employees more than Amazon does, but that's another story.

I work for Amazon... if you pay more than they pay me, I would like a job because I make good money and my insurance is insanely good. A starting Amazon associate makes slightly less than a starting teacher in most places and has better benefits. A tenured associate makes just as much. But that should tell you more about what teachers make than what Amazon pays. I will note that I am not a base Amazon employee but Amazon does pay a living wage and the insurance I have is the same that someone who starts tomorrow has and the same as the CEO has.

 

[teitan]

They sold Curse of Strahd without the separate Tarokka deck.

Their hands are by no means tied here.

That was produced by GF9 wasn't it?

 

[TheSword]

Pricing decisions have a lot elements to them. Particularly when looking at whether or not to pass increasing costs on to the customer. Incidentally that isn’t just about the cost of printing a book, it’s about staff costs, energy, shipping, marketing, legal… illegal etc.

In essence though it comes down to a simple question. Will putting your price increase up make you more money from what you’re selling because the additional gross profit on the books is greater than the gross profit you lose from customers who can’t/wont buy at the higher price. In cases like this it’s a pretty low bar to leap.

 

[humble minion]

The discourse on Twitter among third party developers is interesting: for example, Jason Buhlman of Paizo is simultaneously glad that WotC is upping prices which will allow others to raise their prices as well, but also sad thst in his view RPG books will still be underpriced, affecting people like him who work on them for a living.

Yeah, I buy a fair bit of 3pp stuff, and they're generally significantly more expensive than WotC books for the same pagecount*. And the price difference only gets wider when you factor in shipping etc. Almost no 3pp products make it game shop shelves where i live, so you end up mail ordering and international shipping is brutal.

It'll be interesting to see which 3pps take the opportunity (or tacit permission from WotC) to raise prices, and which will keep their prices as is and hope to look more affordable by comparison.

* insert mandatory jab at WotC for recent products having low page count here

 

[Oofta]

WotC can be evil even if general inflation is real.

I never said otherwise. I just said that calling a price increase for physical products after a decade that is in line with general inflation isn't something I would consider greedflation.

I think there companies that do far more evil things out there. That doesn't mean I think they, or any large company, are saints.

 

[Remathilis]

The discourse on Twitter among third party developers is interesting: for example, Jason Buhlman of Paizo is simultaneously glad that WotC is upping prices which will allow others to raise their prices as well, but also sad thst in his view RPG books will still be underpriced, affecting people like him who work on them for a living.

The first nice thing Paizo has said about WotC all year, and it's praising them raising prices. I expect the Pathfinder remastered quadilogy will see a price hike next year as well.