The Price of RPGs: You think the US is bad...

[masque]

That's actually a Swedish RPG, not a German one. It's very popular here, although I don't care for it much personally.

Here's a picture of the cover.

It has no splatbooks per se, so the "Priest splat" was probably the background supplement on religion. The "tracker splat" I'm unsure of. Did it have a black cover?


-V

Ah. It makes sense, since he's currently doing his doctoral studies in Sweden. Maybe the RPG put him onto it.

I have no experience with European languages at all, besides a year of Latin for help on the American SATs, and English.

Perhaps it did. I'm currently not anywhere near the books. I was just looking at the covers and seeing what I could piece together from the picture and what the words looked like (real scientific, right?).

I'll revise the first post for accuracy when I get back from work.

 

[Olive]

Tell me about it...

What annoys me is that in the past year, the Pacific Peso (Aussie dollar) has gone through the roof compared to the $US yet the prices for US printed gaming books has remained the same.

Another case of charging $x for a product because you can? And who gets the difference? The importer? The FLGS?

Well, given that WotC have actually raised ALL of the prices of the mimis, I suspect it's WotC Aus.

Some stuff has actually gone UP since the dollar started to get better...

 

[Staffan]

there was a {edit} Swedish {/edit} RPG named EON in a very well-taken care of boxd set.

What is very special about this boxed set is how heavy it is. It is entirely packed with books, all of which were bought separately. It contained the {edit} religion sourcebook {/edit}, the main rulebook, a monster book, and {edit] a couple I don't know what, exactly, they were (maybe a worldbook and a wilderness survival guide?) {/edit} (I think, Swedish is about as understandable to me as Korean). The main rulebook had no price on it, but the rest of them did.

Each book had a large white pricetag. Two were 16.900, two were 17.900, both prices in yen. Using a 100 yen to a dollar conversion, that's far too many dollars. Each. Plus the main rulebook. Makes me feel better about D&D's prices, myself...

Here in Sweden, most sourcebooks for Eon cost 179 or 199 SEK, which means about $24 or $27. American stuff usually costs 10 SEK per dollar, which is overcharging a bit - it appears that either the Swedish distributors or the retailers have conveniently forgotten that the dollar is a lot cheaper now than a few years ago. The actual exchange rate is somewhere between 7 and 8 SEK per dollar, to which is added a sales tax of 6% for books.

 

[wocky]

Your FLGS in Argentina charges cover price multiplied by 1.7 for any D&D product, so you end up paying around 50$ for a 30$ book, while Amazon would charge 21$ (assuming the usual 30% discount) plus something like 7$ per book in shipping (plus extra 10 or 11$ for the whole shipment). It's certainly cheaper to buy through Amazon... still, many people don't (many because of ignorance, fear of putting their credit card numbers online, or simple lack of an international credit card).

However, you shouldn't just compare the prices, since whether something is "expensive" or not depends on how the price of the book compares to other prices in the country. Prices in Japan sound excesive, but I'm almost tired of hearing how much a meal costs there... Even the 50$ charged in Argentina sounds reasonable, but you know how much I make working 6 hours a day as a programmer? A bit over $400. A Big Mac with fries and a coke is around $2.5, movie tickets (in the best theatre) at less than $4, a pint of local beer between $1.5 and $2.5, local bus fare is as low as $0.25 music CDs around $9, DVDs no more than $18, Paperback books around $7, a good pair of trousers for $30, good leather shoes for $50-$70, good wine for $3 a bottle (much better for $10 a bottle).

The story has a two part moral:
1) Even at $30, D&D books are very expensive to us. The price means nothing.
2) Come visit Argentina for your holidays, it's cheap.

 

[Davelozzi]

What's sad is that, outside the U.S., it's cheaper to order books from Amazon.com and pay for the shipping than buy them in the LGS (if there are any nearby at any rate).

Unfortunately, that's the case within the U.S. as well.

 

[morbiczer]

Geez dude, what kind of post-communist hell have you found yourself in?!?!?

If I were you I'd just move away.

Wel it's not bad living here and after all this is my home country. But I lived half a year last year in Berlin, Germany and it is really sad how many things can be done in a big Western city which can't be done even in our capital (good RPG shops, Pop/Rock concerts, sport events, etc.) Well, one can't have everything in life. And ten years go everything would have been much worse so maybe in another 10 years we'll have a decent FLGS in town.

 

[Zander]

There are many reasons why UK prices are higher than US ones. But by far the factor that has the largest impact is that UK consumers don't mind paying high prices.

US consumers will go to great lengths to find bargains. Britons, by contrast, are among the laziest shoppers around and will make almost no effort to get better value. If Britons stopped purchasing products at high prices, British retailers would stop selling them at those prices.

Take Games Workshop's products for example. Even before the £ started its increase over the $, GW's products could be bought for less in the US than the UK - including the ones that are made in the UK!

 

[Turanil]

If Britons stopped purchasing products at high prices, British retailers would stop selling them at those prices.

Take Games Workshop's products for example.

AAAH!!... BEERK!!! Games Workshop: Berk!! AAAHH!!...
What d'you think? It's the same in France: there is a Games Workshop store in Paris (I mean, a store that is exclusively dedicated to Games Workshop's products, and bears the name "Games Workshop"). Prices in this shop are simply totally scandalous! (You can even flame me because I once buy something there). I think that prices in this shop are 50% to 75% higher (for similar kind of products) than other gaming stores. These people are thieves, and their customers just good to feed a troll.

 

[Ranger REG]

I guess as long as people buy their stuff, they can afford to keep the price high. They consider themselves the "Rolls-Royce" of miniature industry, or "Versace" (unless there is a more popular fashion designer known in France).