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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cergorach" data-source="post: 427097" data-attributes="member: 725">Re: Re: Higher prices?Ohhh! Greg speaks wise words he does! (Greg just has to be a small green old balding fellow ;-)It's true that there are now so many products that customers have a wide range of choices and only so much cash to spend. You really have to jump out with quality products or something really eye catching (Dragon Star for example). For some reason the publishers that are in it for the love of it are often more succesfull than publishers who aren't. Sometimes love pays off in business...What i do hope is that some of the publishers out there finally get the hint that there's no huge pile of money to be had in the RPG industry. Eventually we will en up with an industry that is made up of publishers who are in for it for the love and not for the money. That's when thing will get interesting, a smaller fragmentation of the market, no more two dozen variations of the same theme, only a couple. That should mean that publishers would sell more, have larger printruns and generally make a larger profit. Which in turn would then be infested in better products, would mean better quality writing, better quality writing => higher paid writer (atleast that's how it should be IMHO)...Actually, it's not that black and white. I knew a lot of people in my student years that weren't as fortunate as i was (money wise). They had access to copy and print facilities at the university (for free) and would make copies of the PHB, etc. (for free). These guys brew their own beer (which is rather cheap, even when done in large quantaties), had sucky and small dorm rooms and already had to work rather hard and long at lousy wages (this money went mostly into living and school expenses). These same guys now hold excellent jobs and are paid very good wages, these folks buy now a sn<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />e load of D20 material because they can. I also started the same way at a vey young age (11), i saved my allowance to buy the PHB, that was my allowance for 2 months (AD&D books here rather expensive those days in The Netherlands). I wasn't allowed to work at that age, so working was out of the question, thus i borrowed a couple of interesting books from my friends and copied the most interesting parts from them at my fathers workplace. Now i invest over 70% of my income in Game material (mostly D20) and all profits are inveted again. Would i still have the same amount of enthausiasm (probably not correctly spelled) if i hadn't? I don't know? But i do know that in the last fifteen years i spent a whole lot of money on RPG material and it actually didn't cost the industry a penny that i 'coppied'  interesting parts from some books. Does that make me a low-life, i certainly hope not!I really think that the 'low-live pirates' you are talking about are NOT your target audience and wheter or not your products where available over the internet 'illegally' would matter one way or the other in terms of sales. The thing you should worry about are the 'borderline' casses, those who do feel that the product does not fit in their budget at it's current price and are content enough to print it out at work/college. Calling people noughty names, won't help (it might even alienate some people) a bit. But making products that have a high production quality value compared to price will. Making a book hardcover, color, high quality paper (glossy), high pagecount, competative price, posters, etc. will make the line a lot lower for people to actually buy a product. If after all that people still are content to copy your product rather than buy it, than these people where never your target audience and any effort to combat them is a waste of effort, time and money.</blockquote>

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