Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="jgbrowning" data-source="post: 1736961" data-attributes="member: 5724">They were profitable early on because they were selling in the 1000s. The really early modules had sales into the 10,000s. We have a completely different market now. If I knew I could print 2000 modules and sell 2000, I'd be making modules.The only thing PDF saves on is printing, shipping, and warehousing. It's unlikey that a module PDF will recoup the $500 or so needed to produce a low-end 32 page module.Although this is a cool idea, one of the problems with this is that a lot of the people who buy modules like collecting them. Ie. They buy them but don't really use them. People who like to collect aren't terribly interested in cheap production quality. Beside that point, as a publisher, I'm not really selling to you the consumer, I'm selling to my distributor who only buys if he thinks his customers (the retailers) will buy my product. A product that's bare-bones containing the d20 logo right now is going to have to have an awesomely low price-point to get a retailer to notice because they only take about %30 MSRP for their efforts. But the problem with that is that a low price point means less profit for the retailer as well. They'll have to take stocking risks (ie many copies) to get the same level of profit for a lesser risk (ie one copy) of a beautifully produced supplement. They also will know how to guage a beautiful supplement's potential sales at their store, while the bare-bones module is more of an unknown when making their purchasing decisions.The market is influenced by much more than what consumers want and it's a reflection of the impact of all of these influences. As a publisher, I have to look at every product from multiple viewpoints.This shares similiar concerns to the above.It comes down to this: Were you offered the same job (writing), but one offer paid $10 an hour (supplement) and the other paid $5 (module) an hour, which one would you chose? Small, hard-earned, profit can be made with a module, but it is effectively not-profitable when compared with the return a supplement would have made for the same amount of effort. In situations where manufactorers have a strong cash flow, it's beneficial to produce a variaty of products to help capture larger market share, prevent additional competion and other things of that sort. Over all, the rpg market isn't in this situation.joe b.</blockquote>

Verification