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.

 

[Micah Sweet]

My local game store puts all their RPGs in shrink wrap. You can't flip through a darned thing. You want to see what's in the book - you buy the book!
They also shrink wrap dice sets, WizKid blisters, Citadel paint pots, and their employees.
(I don't like shopping there.)

I REALLY didn't like working there.

 

[JEB]

My local game store puts all their RPGs in shrink wrap. You can't flip through a darned thing. You want to see what's in the book - you buy the book!
They also shrink wrap dice sets, WizKid blisters, Citadel paint pots, and their employees.
(I don't like shopping there.)

My local game store in the 1990s shrink-wrapped all their products. Meanwhile, I could actually flip through the books at the bookstores in the local mall. Guess where I ultimately got more of my D&D books?

 

[Oofta]

My local game store in the 1990s shrink-wrapped all their products. Meanwhile, I could actually flip through the books at the bookstores in the local mall. Guess where I ultimately got more of my D&D books?

Amazon?

 

[teitan]

My FLGS doesn't even carry Goodman Games products, and I've wondered why: that could be part of it.

A friend of mine signed his store up for DCC day and is going all in on my recommendation. He actually likes the shrink wrap but a lot of the Warhammer he sells is shrinked.

 

[Mistwell]

Please do go on...

If you don't understand why I didn't get something from your original post that I responded to then I suggest you go reread it. When I track back our back and forth to the original post I responded to, you only addressed pay. It's when I disagreed with your premise that you started misrepresenting my argument by piling on other issues teachers have to deal with and that is strawmanning. I never disputed that teachers were underpaid nor did I dispute that some teachers are going through horrible times, all I did was say that both make crap wages. Both the teachers I know and the Amazon warehouse employees I know agree with this.

All of the other issues you bring up regarding teachers are horrible and something that needs to be addressed by society but were not part of your original post nor something I responded to (because it wasn't there). Further just because teachers can have it incredibly bad doesn't mean that there aren't serious issues in an Amazon warehouse, this is an example of the relative privation fallacy.

Does this have anything to do with this topic anymore?

 

[Azzy]

Marvel has the solution printed in (nearly) every comic book, so I assume it's not that expensive to do (Marvel wouldn't do anything if it was AT ALL expensive!):

They cover the code with a peel-off sticker. SURE, a crafty code-thief could peel off the sticker while pretending to flip-through the comic and, what, take a picture with their phone? It's possible, but I've never seen it happen. It would be pretty easy to get caught doing it.

Doing that on a D&D book would be akin to stealing the poster-map out of the back of the hardcover. Possible, but not really worth worrying about for retailers. At that point, you might as well just steal the whole book. It would be easier.

Could also cover the code with scratch-off material. Then it'd be easy to tell if the code in the book was stolen.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Could also cover the code with scratch-off material. Then it'd be easy to tell if the code in the book was stolen.

Yeah, they could - it's a good suggestion - but the reason I think that version is less likely than Marvel's peel-off-sticker (and why Marvel doesn't use it) is 1) I expect that it's more expensive; 2) It's kind of a pain-in-the-butt. It either rubs off by accident, or is so hard to get off that you can accidently scratch-away a number in your vigour to get it off; & 3) The peel-off sticker won't go back on, so you'd be able to tell that way too.

But yeah, better than no code. Smarter than polybagging.

 

[Hex08]

Does this have anything to do with this topic anymore?

Thread drift happens, as do disagreements.

 

[Stormonu]

My local game store puts all their RPGs in shrink wrap. You can't flip through a darned thing. You want to see what's in the book - you buy the book!
They also shrink wrap dice sets, WizKid blisters, Citadel paint pots, and their employees.
(I don't like shopping there.)

Yeah, starting to see that at my FLGS. GW has been doing their books in shrinkwrap for years now, but I'm seeing it appear for other books as well - and in my local Books-A-Million (and don't get me started about all the electronics going into locked cases at stores with no staff in the department...).

Many other publishers have done some form of buy the book, get the digital copy for years. I remember in (3.5E?)/4E for a while you could buy the digital PDFs, but they got pulled on claims of piracy. I'd really like 5E PDFs, the Beyond stuff is okay at a PC away from a game, but it's terrible on a tablet or trying to access in-game on a laptop via public wi-fi.

 

[Velderan]

Yeah, starting to see that at my FLGS. GW has been doing their books in shrinkwrap for years now, but I'm seeing it appear for other books as well - and in my local Books-A-Million (and don't get me started about all the electronics going into locked cases at stores with no staff in the department...).

Many other publishers have done some form of buy the book, get the digital copy for years. I remember in (3.5E?)/4E for a while you could buy the digital PDFs, but they got pulled on claims of piracy. I'd really like 5E PDFs, the Beyond stuff is okay at a PC away from a game, but it's terrible on a tablet or trying to access in-game on a laptop via public wi-fi.

DDB on an iPad isn't any different than a PDF in requiring you to think ahead enough to load what you need. If you download the book in the app, it's available offline with no issue. You can still search through your downloaded books without an internet connection. You really just have to plan ahead enough to make sure you've downloaded the books you want but that's not any different than making sure you have a PDF loaded on to the tablet. I'm not sure about other platforms like Android or Windows tablets, so that may be a problem if those are your tablet platforms of choice.

I just checked and I can even download a book that I haven't purchased but have access to through a campaign share.