Do you sincerely think that it has that much impact? Or, rather, that the impact of freely-available OGC extract, 1 year after product release, would even approach the impact of illegally-available scan, 1 month after product release? If someone wants it for free rather than pay for it, they can already get it. It is a matter of speculation how many of those peolpe would knuckle under and pay (grumbling teh whole time), if there were no free alternative, legal or otherwise. If someone is willing to wait a year (in a market that has demonstrated most sales occur right away] to get the content for free, i'm not convinced they'd ever buy the book. [I'm ignoring those who both buy the book and download the OGC extract, because they are immaterial when judging impact on sales.] Or, more specifically, i don't think they'd buy it through first sale. More likely, they'd wait for a cheap copy to come up used somewhere. (About half of my D20 System stuff was bought used for dirt-cheap, because i was only willing to spend half or less of the cover price, because that was what it was worth to me, but i also think that the producers are charging a reasonable price, given their costs, so i'm not gonna undercut them or retailers by going to places like Amazon. IOW, if the producer's price is higher than i'm willing to pay, i'll do without rather than buy it for less. And then, if i'm lucky, i'll get it for less anyway, later, from a secondary source.)philreed said:
Unless you have data i don't, i think you're mistaken (or being disingenuous). From everything i've heard, a given print product sells upwards of 90% of it's lifetime sales inside of 3mo. So, if you print an appropriate size print run, it'll sell out 90% within 3mo, and by a year later, sales will be essentially nil. Your example 2500 print run sells 1300 the first month, 650 the second month, 300 the third month, 100 the fourth, and, let's say, 25 each month after that, so it'll be all gone in 10 mo. [And, btw, while these specific numbers are made up, the rough trend is intended to model the general curve as i've had it described to me by someone who runs a distributor (or is the proper term fulfillment house?--I'm fuzzy on the exact distinction), and thus sees sales numbers for dozens of game companies. And the few public examples we have--such as some of the GoO products that have now gone to PDF, demonstrate that reasonably-sized print runs are selling through 100% in 10-14mo. Based on another thread, i believe we also just saw the sell-out of the Fantasy Bestiary, after roughly 16mo.]
So, now, our fans wait a year to release the OGC. The print product has been out of print for 2mo, and may even have sold through all the retail channels (though, realistically, there're almost certainly a few copies still sitting on store shelves). From the publisher's standpoint, the OGC release has zero impact. The distributors and/or retailers *might* notice the release--it might take a little longer to sell those last 25-50 copies. But it's also quite possible that the, say, 10% decrease in sales is pretty much lost in the noise of random fluctuations.
What if they go with the oft-proposed 6mo delay for releasing OGC? Well, now our game has sold 2400 of its 2500 copies. Let's be generous and assume a 20% hit on sales from then on out. It now takes 5 more months, instead of 4, for the product to sell out. Yes, that makes a difference--but we're talking about waring housing less than 4 boxes (probably) to start with, and only one extra month for that last box. Even in the aggregate, that's not gonna break the bank. And if it is, you're underpricing your goods. Moreover, all of this assumes a near-perfect match between supply and demand, something that i doubt ever happens. What happens if you print 3000 copies and demand is unchanged? Now your monthly warehousing costs past the 6mo mark go from 100-75-50-25 copies to 600-575-550-525-500-475-450-425-400-375-350-325-300-275-250-225-200-175-150-125-100-75-50-25 copies. And that's assuming sales don't just plain stop after 2500 copies, and you're sitting on those last 500 copies 'til the cows come home. IOW, dwarfing any impact that diminished sales from free content are likely to have--your product is already basically done selling, and while a 20% decrease in those last few months might be noticable, we're talking about a 20% decrease in sales of 4% of your total sales--IOW, roughly a 1% overall loss in sales. Again, much less than, i'll wager, the typical misestimation of demand.
Anyway, regardless of whose figures are correct, the point stands: if you wait until sales are done, or all-but-done, releasing the OGC for free is going to have little-to-no effect. That's pretty much a truism. The question becomes: when do we reach that point, and is there any reasonable way of estimating ahead of time what that point will be? I believe the answer to the latter question is 'no', which is why most have proposed taking the most-generous estimate out there (6mo) and doubling it, just to be safe. That strikes me as emminently reasonable. And, even if the number is wrong, it still comes from fans trying to take exactly what you've said into account: wait until sales won't be undercut before releasing. Which implies that, if they are apprised of the real situation, they'd adjust their delay accordingly, too.
