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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nighthawk" data-source="post: 1150557" data-attributes="member: 12733">As a customer, my main concern is cost, simply because it is a concern I have with everything else where money is a direct factor. Ironically, the publisher has this very same concern. It's the all the other stuff that makes this a messy issue.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Even as a customer, I see this as basically a "if we can afford to publish it and the customer can afford to pay for it" issue, and such is a tricky thing to successfully pull off in a specialty niche market such as P&P RPGs. The competition within that market is tough to begin with. Add in the other specialties such as computer games, console games, miniatures games, etc. and it gets even tougher. Then factor in the other entertainment options for the consumer and the uphill climb is incredibly difficult to make.Over the years, I have purchased many books, hardback and softback, of many different types (fiction, historical, mystery, etc.). I have never found that the RPG books are out-of-line at all (on a general level, that is). Overall, they have been typically cheaper in cost. I have wished that books were cheaper, but that is a purely selfish motive, not a realistic one. I think that business market conditions are such that RPG businesses are going through what others already have and are also currently experiencing: getting a profitable product to your customer base at a cost where both sides consistently benefit is a lot harder than it first appears, and takes serious work to make it happen and do so for the long-term. In the RPG business, where so many folk are gamers first and likely have little-to-no business experience, unrealistic conditions can and do occur that will either surprise the business and customer base or create unrealistic expectations (to the consternation of both sides at times, IME).  Personally, I think market exposure and product shelf space (whether real world or virtual reality, so to speak) is important to the business. Unfortunately, this is a bad time for gaming stores, and places that stock such products as an additional choice (bookstores, etc.). This limits word-of-mouth business and impulse buying. I can only speak for myself, but IME, impulse buying was a fair amount of my purchases (and those I knew). This is no longer true, for various reasons. Perhaps the customer base has changed enough that they cannot be as readily identified and categorized?I also see the RPG business as contracting in a serious way. I do not know how this will turn out, but I am hoping for the best. It's going to be painful methinks, but I see it as natural part of doing business in such a limited field.</blockquote>

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