Price to content ratio for PDFs

[Cecil]

Some thoughts from a customer......

I seek material that will help me do my job as a GM better...quicker...easier, and am willing to pay for such material. No, I wouldn't balk at prices of 50% of print material (but would likely not pay more....of course, there is some print material out there that I would snap up quickly if it came out as a PDF)

Plug-and-play material is of less value to me, and I would pay less for it. The exception is that if I see something rather innovative, I'm likely to pick it up to see how it was done so I could apply it in my own campaign.

$7.50 for Crimson Contracts was not too much (I purchased it a few months back).

Having said that, I'm at the estreme end of your customer demographics....39 years old and with a decent job. (Now you know why I want time-savers!) Not sure this point of view works with the younger generation.


edit: yes, I would be annoyed at paying $5 for only 15 pages...unless I knew in advance that I was only purchasing the equivalent of a long article.

 

[direheroics2]

Quality Argument

With the quality argument, isn't that harder to judge with a PDF? Print stuff can be thumbed through in store and sometimes you can get a reasonable idea of whether the item is going to be decent or not (though sometimes you do get burned).

It's harder to shell out money for something only for a short blurb on the theme of the contents. And you can never tell the overall quality of an item from one or two very brief excerpts.... But then, again, if you are selling the PDF, you don't want to give away the bank either by giving everyone a look see....

The key to selling a PDF has to be a strong theme (something that folks want), good reviews (since this is someone who has seen the whole product), and a bit of the ole advertising/merchandising.

Which would you rather buy in PDF?

*A supplement on how to run your own kingdom OR another guide to fighters?

*A PDF that everyone raves about, or one that no one has ever seen or looked at?

*A PDF you see advertised on a banner somewhere (say ENWorld) or one you happen to run across on RPGNow?

dh

 

[jmucchiello]

Re: Quality Argument

With the quality argument, isn't that harder to judge with a PDF? Print stuff can be thumbed through in store and sometimes you can get a reasonable idea of whether the item is going to be decent or not (though sometimes you do get burned).

It's harder to shell out money for something only for a short blurb on the theme of the contents. And you can never tell the overall quality of an item from one or two very brief excerpts.... But then, again, if you are selling the PDF, you don't want to give away the bank either by giving everyone a look see....

I use to think this mattered but it doesn't. There is no demo of Joe's Book of Enchantment. People buy based on my in character blurb on RPGNow or reviews on various sites. There are 4-5 demos (all different sections of the book) for Character Customization. The demos were available on RPGNow, Gamewyrd, my website, mention in RPGNow's magazine, there are several reviews out. In their first 6 weeks they both sold exactly the same number of copies. Caveat: they were released about 1 year apart.

My conclusion: People who say they need preview material are not PDF buyers. And providing them preview material does not convert them to PDF buyers at a meaningful rate.

 

[rpghost]

One year ago we had 1/5th the users spending less then 1/5th the money...

http://www.rpgnow.com/customer_graph.jpg

http://www.rpgnow.com/gross_graph.jpg

I still feel demo/previews matter. People want to "page through" your book to make sure it's of quality.

James

 

[Crothian]

This is why I think reviews matter more for pdfs then print material. Reviews are a good way to get lear what it is a pdf.

 

[jmucchiello]

One year ago we had 1/5th the users spending less then 1/5th the money...

http://www.rpgnow.com/customer_graph.jpg

http://www.rpgnow.com/gross_graph.jpg

I still feel demo/previews matter. People want to "page through" your book to make sure it's of quality.

James

Then why no greater sales. Enchantment magic is not nearly as popular as making characters so even the content of CC would indicate it should fair better. Both books get similar reviews here at ENWorld and on RPGNow (and elsewhere). So if 5 times as much money is being spent why are sales flat from a year ago?

I think Crothian has it right. Sales bumps for my PDFs traditionally occur when a review comes out. CC is on his list. When he gets to it, no matter what he scores it I'm sure there will be a surge of sales that day or two.

Also, falling off the front page at RPGNow, in this case the top twenty best sellers causes sales of CC to shrivel up. I'm considering paid advertising but I doubt that will be effective for a PDF.

I'm not saying my books don't do well (49 and 91 on the all-time d20 list and 65 on the all PDF list is great).The missing part of the equation, James, is that while there's 5 times as many sales there's how many times as much product? JBoE is product 246, CC is product 1828 so just eyeballing it there are over 7 times as many products now. 7 is greater than 5 and so while the pie has grown, the slices are thinner.

Since CC came out there have been nearly 150 releases. That's since the end of June. LPJ's release today is priduct id 1972. That edges past 8 times as many products.

 

[direheroics2]

Oh yes. I'm convinced reviews of PDFs are the key.

But there are folks who won't buy a pdf w/o a preview. Then again, those folks are likely to never a buy a pdf for exactly the same reason.

Can never please everybody.


dh

 

[The Sigil]

I'm not saying my books don't do well (49 and 91 on the all-time d20 list and 65 on the all PDF list is great).The missing part of the equation, James, is that while there's 5 times as many sales there's how many times as much product? JBoE is product 246, CC is product 1828 so just eyeballing it there are over 7 times as many products now. 7 is greater than 5 and so while the pie has grown, the slices are thinner.

One word of caution here...

While there are far more products, consider that a great deal of that figure of 1828 comes from RPGNow.com adding all of the out-of-print TSR downloads.

What that means to me is that while the pie has grown 5 times and the product offering has grown 7 times, making the average "slice" smaller (5/7 the size), it's likely that the huge growth spike in product offering is a one-time blip - nobody else has a product catalogue of 500 or so items that are already scanned as PDFs. I would assume that some of the increase in sales is due to adding the TSR PDFs, but since they were available at the WotC online store and SVGames.com prior to their addition to RPGNow.com, I think their impact in terms of total sales was smaller than it might have been.

In other words, I think that things will rebound in the following year because I think the pie will probably continue to grow at the same rate, but because we won't have a massive "dump" of 500 PDFs again, I think that the slices will grow... the "dump" represents a small "dip" in terms of total portion of pie served over time. For example, if RPGNow.com adds another 1000 PDFs this year (my guess is that that's about the number of non-TSR PDFs that were added), and sales "only" double...

Last year there were approximately 300 products and the pie was X in size. Each product made on average X/300.

This year there were approximately 2000 products and the pie was 5X in size. Each product made on average 5X/2000 or X/400 - a smaller piece of the pie.

If next year we add another 1000 products (the current non-TSR pace) and the pie doubles in size we'll have 3000 products and a pie that is 10X in size. Each product makes on average 10X/3000 - or X/300 - the same as they made a year ago.

I intend to stick things out for a while and see what happens. My guess is that the "flood" of products will slow (simply because, as I mentioned, nobody has a huge back catalog to dump into the mix like WotC did) and that the pie will continue to grow as people become more aware of and accepting of PDFs (and as PDF quality increases) - so eventually the growth in revenue will outstrip the growth in total number of products.

--The Sigil

 

[jmucchiello]

My guess is that the "flood" of products will slow (simply because, as I mentioned, nobody has a huge back catalog to dump into the mix like WotC did)

(speculation) Didn't White Wolf announce the end of World of Darkness in a big universe reset at GenCon? (end speculation)