RPG Price Points

[Technik4]

How much would it cost some of the 3rd party d20 publishers to produce a color book? Has this been attempted (at all?)? I would certainly be more apt to pick one up with full colour, and I dont think its an uncommon sentiment.

For instance Races of Faerun was 192 pages, full color hardback. It was priced at 29.95, which means I got it on amazon for about $20 something. Would a similarly sized book (perhaps softcover instead of hardcover) run about 39.95 for a 3rd party d20 publisher? If so, and if the content was right, I could see myself plopping down around $27 (at amazon).

I'm sure the above is flawed, but I think its an interesting discussion.

Technik

 

[JoeGKushner]

Full color d20 books have been coming out from 3rd party publishers for a while now.

Mutants & Masterminds.

All of Bastion Press old product up to Into the Green/Wrack and Ruin.

Slaine, B5 and others by Mongoose.

Etc...

I've found that 95% of the gaming public probably doesn't share this view. They may say they do, but the fact that Bastion went to black and white and that most d20 products are in black and white indicates otherwise.

 

[Jim Butler]

I really think seeing how many pages a particular product has and then trying to compare prices based solely on that is misleading. Some products have very wide margins with large type; others have normal margins with small type. Some are full-color; most are black & white. Some are based on licenses (which cost more money for the publisher); others are not.

The retail prices for books are based on lots of things: cost of designers, editors, and illustrators; printing costs; marketing expenses.

For all d20 companies, their costs for printing a book are higher than that of WotC. WotC prints 50,000+ copies of a single book, and they get huge cost breaks from the printer for doing so. Small d20 publishers print a few thousand of a particular book, and thus they end up paying significantly more than WotC.

Printing is the single largest expense that a publisher has. Until we can start selling as many as WotC (which I don't see happening), I doubt you're going to see pricing levels fall significantly below that of WotC. Wizards was charging $19.95 for their 96-page books. At that price, they could make money and continue to invest in new R&D. Small publishers need money to invest in new products just as badly as WotC does.