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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GrahamWills" data-source="post: 8062040" data-attributes="member: 75787">I'll echo <a href="https://www.enworld.org/members/mnblockhead.6796661/">MNblockhead</a>'s thought a little bit here: Everything costs something; even if it doesn't cost money, it costs time. For a lot of people (especially right now!) they have more time than money, and so will be biased towards free products because it's worth the effort searching for the good stuff. Other people will actively enjoy searching for good stuff -- for example, I find it quite fun looking through online art to find exactly the image I want, and if I spend half an hour doing that, then that was a fun half-hour!But the people who have plenty of time and little money are not the people you are going to make money off. You want people who have lots of money and little time. The ideal customer is the one who will not even look at your product's advertising, but will just buy it sight unseen. They might just do that, or you can provide a subscription model, but the basic idea is the same -- make people believe that your products will be consistently worthwhile and lock them into it."Free" and PWYW systems are not going to attract these people, so by targeting them you are deciding to try and make money off a segment of the community with little money. And that's going to be tricky.Some case examples from my experience:Pathfinder Adventure Paths: I play a regular PF2 game using the Ages of Ashes campaign. Our group enjoyed the first book, and so continued to be locked in to buy the rest; when the new circus-based AP comes out, we'll buy into that. I think that's about $250 they'll get from us. Paizo could try something different -- offer the first book (out of five) in an AP for free. That's a 20% loss of income for people who would have bought, and my guess is that it's not worth while, as Paizo has a reputation for quality anyway -- free books will not attract new people.Fate Worlds: I supported this Patreon which was essentially a subscription to get Fate campaign frames. Overall it probably meant I paid $7 for each world, which is well above the PWYW average for them, but I knew the content was good. About half the worlds I bought I wasn't that interested in, so if I'd done PWYW, I'd probably have paid $5 for them and skipped the other half. So Evil Hat would have got an average of $2.50 for each world, instead of the $7 they actually got. However, this model didn't generate enough income for Evil Hat to keep going, so not sure on what side of the example this goes.Savage Worlds Dungeon Crawl: I was looking for a one-shot to run for a session and had little time, so I went to drive-thru looking for product. I bought about 8 items from random people for a range of prices, probably totaling $25. They were pretty uniformly disappointing.Overall, if something comes from a recognized publisher with editors, quality control and so on, I am guaranteed a certain standard and so when I buy from them, I know what I'm getting and I'm very likely to buy without thinking. My experience of self-published material is that it's generally low quality and takes forever to find anything worthwhile; and even when I do, there's not a lot of output from that source to make it worth following.</blockquote>

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