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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Storm Raven" data-source="post: 64300" data-attributes="member: 307">First here is a basic economic fact that most people have a hard time dealing with. The market value of a product has almost no relationship whatsoever to the cost of producing it. This is so universally misunderstood that professional sport team owners exploit this misunderstanding to try to rally fans behind ideas like salary caps by arguing that this will reduce the cost of tickets to see games.It won't. You could reduce the costs of putting on a professional baseball game to nothing and ticket prices will be unaffected. Similarly, if a movie cost zero to make and market, the cost of a ticket to see that movie will probably not be changed. Why? Because the price of a commodity in the market is primarily set by demand for the product. Hence, saying movies are expensive to make has no bearing on the market value of the movie.But here is the real point: that movie ticket earned you about two hours of enjoyment, a value of about $4.00 per hour. How many hours of enjoyment do you get for your PHB? It cost you $20.00 or so, so if you get more than five hours of use out of your PHB, then it is a better value for you than the movie was. You derived more hours of enjoyment for your dollar with the PHB than you did with the movie.For example, I game about twice a month right now, each session lasting about 5-6 hours. Since the PHB came out in August 2000, I have played consistently. That means I've had 32 or more gaming sessions at 5-6 hours each, for a rough estimate of between 180-200 hours of gaming. Even factoring in the cost of the DMG and MM, that is an incredibly good value for my money.And that's just actual game time. I've spent I don't know how many hours reading the books, fiddling with stuff from them, referencing them and so on out of session.At $60.00 for the set, I'm paying about $0.33 an hour for my entertainment. By comparison, I'd have to watch that $30.00 DVD of the two hour movie 45 times to get similar value. I know some people watch a single movie 45 times, but there aren't many.The reason that the explanation of how expensive they are to make does not reflect on what their market price should be is that it isnt the point of that argument. That argument runs towards why game companies should want to raise prices, not towards why you should pay more for the product. The simple fact of the matter is that all the economic data we have indicates that gamers would pay more for most products, since we have examples of many very low cost games being ignored in favor of better produced more expensive items. Bringing up the cost of producing RPGs is just an acknowledgement that RPG companies should raise their prices. Not a justification for why. The why is that you'd probably buy the stuff anyway even if it were $10.00 more per book.</blockquote>

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