King_Stannis said:
do you think about the 12 year old chinese girl who assembles your shirts in a sweatshop under what we would call barbaric conditions? of course you don't. so why the hell do i have to worry about your employees?
Do you also dismiss the 12-year-old Chinese girl as "playing games" for a living, and advise her to get another job if she doesn't like it?
if you want to charge more for your product, go right ahead.
Thanks, I think I'll give it a try. ;-)
but don't think that i'm going to automatically go along with it.
I understand. Look -- if publishers don't offer value to you for your dollar, they'll lose.
But in an earlier example, someone postulated buying only two books for $90 rather than three for $115. The thing is, the former may actually be better for the game publisher, even if all three are his books. Fewer units for the same gross dollars most likely means better gross margins. Similarly, selling fewer different items for the same gross dollars means economy of scale -- again, better gross margins. (I make WAY more profit selling 10,000 of 1 book instead of 1,000 each of 10 different books! And enormously more selling 5,000 of 1 book that has twice the price...)
what's your point? do you think the rpg industry is any different than any other industry?
It was your point, actually -- you said that there had not been any significant designers drawn away by better-paying lines of work. You were factually in error. (Unless your definition of premiere game designers circularly means only people now designing games.)
i might not know what i'm missing because of the talent drain. but i sure as hell know what i got....clark peterson, gary gygax, fiery dragon to name a few. and i didn't have them a few years ago.
Gary is, um, sui generis. At the least you can argue he has more staying power because of his seminal role in the whole field. He has certainly tried to make money in other fields (like novels). Perhaps he did well enough to return to game writing as a pasttime.
With respect to the Necromancer and Fiery Dragon guys, it's just too soon. They've done GREAT stuff, but they've really only been in business for what, two years? They both grabbed crest of the D20 phenomenon, boldly and impressively, before a lot of the existing game companies were willing to risk it -- and they reaped the rewards. I've gotta respect the heck out of that! But are any of them full-time? James from FDP was saying they all hold down day jobs. I know Clark is a lawyer (but Necromancer has done so well, maybe he's put his servitude to the Dark Side on the back burner for now... ;-) You didn't have them a few years ago -- will you have them a few years from now, if they come to find that they're designing games is a charitable activity but without the tax breaks due to loss limitations? Do you care, or will you just be happy with whatever new and idealistic young faces will take their place to be crushed under the soulless boot of game industry financial realities?
Yeah, ok, now THAT got a little too melodramatic!!
On the bright side, if your argument is that game industry folk work in sweatshop-like conditions and that's A-OK with you -- well, that probably is good news for my side of the argument, because most people would come to a different conclusion. And the issue with pricing isn't to get everyone to pay a higher price -- it's to get enough people to pay a higher price to generate more dollars in the end. In the age of eBay, indeed, you can buy almost anything for less used in a few months (if not the day of release), so there will continue to be avenues for the budget-conscious to acquire what they want.
Frankly, I'd rather see a market with both higher prices on the newest-and-bestest, and more of a market for the discounted liquidation of older items, used items, etc.
Let me postulate an odd thought for folks to chew on: Game consumers are paying higher prices overall because prices are too low. If the prices were higher on the front end, there would be more demand and volume in lower-volume closeouts/remainders/liquidations (like you see in, for example, sports cards, CCGs, computer games, and hardcovers in the regular book trade). If prices were not uniformly low, there would be more point in looking for the bargains -- which would lead more people to specialize in the bargains, which in turn would mean more publishers would have a way to liquidate excess inventory each December rather than just having it picked up by the local recyclers.
(Yes, it's true. Game companies destroy THOUSANDS of game books every year -- most in brand new condition. There's nothing else to do with them. There's no avenue to sell them. If you discount them enough to be appealing in the economics of liquidation, it won't pay for the transactional costs of liquidating them. The result is it's cheaper to pay $35 for Weyerhouser to send over a truck to pick up, in our case this last year, three full skids of games -- something on the order of 5,000 pounds of gaming goodness destined to be tomorrow's toilet paper.)
If SRPs were higher across the board, thus, it would be easier for more gamers to get their games cheap in the end. (The prices of the really good stuff high in demand would stay high -- but then, everyone seems to agree that they'd be willing to pay up for that stuff anyhow.)
