Humble Bundle Pros and Cons for the Publisher

[Uta-napishti]

A major thing keeping Roll20 VTT stuff out of bundles is that Roll20 had / (has?) a policy that a paid product cannot have a regular price less than $5. That keeps their Module ecosystem prices higher than the PDF ecosystem, and out of bundle territory. The other factor keeping them out of bundles is them running DriveThru themselves now. Why pay a cut to sell things elsewhere? I have seen one or two bundles of PDFs including a R20 module at the higher tiers, but not bundles of R20 VTT content.

 

[kronovan]

...I think part of the problem is in deciding which VTT to support. I've seen some here and there for Shard or Fantasy Grounds, but I use Foundry. I don't want to have to buy and/or subscribe to ANOTHER VTT just for some HB content that I would maybe run.

I own both Fantasy Grounds and Foundry VTT - enjoy the challenge of learning to navigate and create for a VTT. I like both for different reasons, but the main driver for me is the availability, stability and how feature-rich a TTRPG adaptation is. An official WH40k Imperium Maledictum and The Dark Eye are only available for FVTT, so that's my choice for those. Meanwhile, I tried the freebie Star Trek Adventures on FVTT, but it lacked features, content and a beneficial, fan-made add-on module couldn't be used due to being dormant and now incompatible. Whereas the FG ruleset/modules for STA is official, has far more features, is consistently updated and well worth the cost. So FG is where I run it.

I also think it's tougher to do because most of the VTT modules are subcontracted out. Neither Paizo nor Kobold Press make theirs. Based on what I have inferred from some Foundry blog posts - WotC doesn't make theirs either - they subcontract it out to the Foundry Devs. Maybe that doesn't matter, but it probably has some kind of effect on it.

That's true for Fantasy Grounds too. From my observance of the retailing of VTT content, I've gotten the impression that some revenue for official content funnels back to the FG and FVTT stores. That seems to be the case even when a publisher sells the conent on their own webstore; i.e. Paizo, Kobold Press, Cubicle 7, One Book Shelf, Ulisses Spiele, etc. If that tranaction path tracks back to the VTT stores, it should be possible to ensure content creators get paid their cut. Whether that always happens...

I supsect the bigger challenge with offering a VTT bundle, is that it's still a smaller market than the PDF market - maybe book market too. So, while bundles may be attractive to the developer of a VTT (Roll20-One Book Shelf, Smitheworks, Foundry Gaming, etc.), it's probably less than attractive to the content creator. Unless the VTT developers eat the entire loss in revenue, but somehow it's hard for me to imagine them doing that.