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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mouseferatu" data-source="post: 1855419" data-attributes="member: 1288">There are several problems with this assessment, though.First, yes, companies deal in bulk. All the costs I've discussed above take that into account. Most RPG companies have to very carefully toe the line, though. The more you order at once, the better your bulk discount, but if you over-order, you wind up with product that doesn't sell. The only reason many companies can do business at all is that they order in bulk, and they're still barely making it.Second, market research has shown, time and again, that lowering book costs enough to drastically increase sales is impossible without lowering the costs so much that the books can't make money no matter how many copies sell. As Ace said, the only to do it is to actually cut out an entire step of the process, and at the moment, that's simply not feasible. So your theory about "More people will buy if the prices go down," while sound on the surface, simply doesn't hold up in practice. The numbers don't match.Online retailers don't have the costs of a brick-and-mortar store, so they can afford to earn less profit. But you know something? They aren't doing that well. Amazon has been in the red almost since the day they started.But you're talking about end-user cost here, not the monies received by the publisher. If I'm not mistaken, WotC (or White Wolf, or whoever) gets about the same dollar amount per book sold on Amazon that they do from Barnes & Noble. It's the retailer who eats the difference.In other words, people going to Amazon instead of their local FLGS are hurting the FLGS, but they're not hurting the RPG companies. (At least not directly. An argument could be made that RPG expansion requires the survival of the FLGS, but that's a discussion for another thread.)Keep your opinion all you like. I'm not telling you that you can't. I'm just letting you know that it's based on factually incorrect premises. Nor did I argue that it was impossible to get around paying full price. Of course there are ways around it. What I said is that it's impossible, in the current market, for the RPG companies themselves to lower the price from their end.</blockquote>

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