What if paper books stopped selling?

[RichCsigs]

Over in the Monster Manual III Buying? thread, we got into a discussion about the current price of D&D books. Someone mentioned that the prices wouldn't go down, that Hasbro would just simple stop printing D&D books all together.
My question is, would that happen, or do you think WotC would try to use a .pdf format (or some kind of downloadable thing, I'm not that computer savvy) instead of printing books? Or would that not be cost affective?

 

[EricNoah]

My prediction/guess:

I doubt that selling pdfs will ever turn any kind of significant profit for WotC. Heck, didn't they stop producing the scans of old D&D and AD&D products because they simply weren't selling well compared to the cost of preparing them? Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Wotc (and Hasbro for that matter) make money not from selling ideas but from selling physical things (books, miniatures, toys, cards, etc.). WotC would sell the D&D license to another company and get out of the biz altogether rather than go PDF-only.

 

[Crothian]

First off look at how mony people game and how many of them actually use the internet for gaming. And then look at those that actually use the net for gaming and those that actually buy PDFs. I don't know the numbers but it gets pretty small. PDFs might be the future to some extent but its going to be a while.

 

[talinthas]

until i can curl up on my bed with a pdf, paper books arent gonna stop selling.

 

[Telperion]

I hate reading books of a computer screen. That's all I have to say.

 

[reanjr]

Over in the Monster Manual III Buying? thread, we got into a discussion about the current price of D&D books. Someone mentioned that the prices wouldn't go down, that Hasbro would just simple stop printing D&D books all together.
My question is, would that happen, or do you think WotC would try to use a .pdf format (or some kind of downloadable thing, I'm not that computer savvy) instead of printing books? Or would that not be cost affective?

If books stopped selling, Hasbro/Wizards would do one of two things, in my opinion.

1. They would sell D&D to any number of companies who would only be too happy to pick it up (though few could afford it).

2. Stop producing so many books. They could cut down on most of the R&D staff by limiting themselves to a handful of books each year. By doing so, they could focus only on what books sell really well. By the market having a vacuum in it, those books would sell even better. So Wizards could make much larger print runs on these select books and they could cut the price OR increase the margin.

 

[reanjr]

My prediction/guess:

I doubt that selling pdfs will ever turn any kind of significant profit for WotC. Heck, didn't they stop producing the scans of old D&D and AD&D products because they simply weren't selling well compared to the cost of preparing them? Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

I heard the same thing a while back, though I don't remember from where. Wizards acts very short-sighted, though, when it comes to RPGs.

The cost of scanning a PDF is not that high (I know, I've done it before). And the cost of running a PDF-selling business that doesn't require marketing, because it's already well-established, is also not too high. Over time, I'm sure they would have made money. But they need to see profits NOW or else Hasbro will bend them over and spank them.

I hate investors. They ruin American long-term so that they can profit short-term.

 

[Nifft]

1) Paper demand would fall.

2) Paper would become very cheap.

3) I could finally finish my life-sized State of Maine paper maché.

-- N

 

[Turanil]

IMO WotC books are not going to stop selling in the near future. However, we can imagine that things are going to change over time. What will rpgs be like in 2010?, in 2020?, in 2030? (after that I don't care, I will probably be dead). Sooner or later, rpgs book will be replaced by something else. Someday you will have a small tablet easy to use and read in hand. But then, it won't be a book; you will have access to it to various forms of digital media, and where rpgs are concerned, I guess that we will have the best of pen and paper (socialization and DM running things), video games, and LARP mixed together in one single type of ultra role playing game, who knows?

 

[Mouseferatu]

I don't believe that PDFs will ever replace printed books in the RPG industry. A lot of people hate reading books onscreen. A lot of gamers aren't an active part of the Internet community and don't know about them. The PDF market is a tiny fraction of the RPG market as a whole, and while it's a growing one--and will, I'm sure, continue to grow--I honestly don't think it'll ever grow to a large enough segment of that market to support the industry on its own.

Besides, when you tally up all the different factors, PDFs aren't more cost-effective than print books.

*Waits for the screams of outrage to die down. *

Think about it. You still have to pay for writing, art, development, layout, etc. What you're saving on is printing and distribution costs, and that is a massive savings, certainly.

But the truth is, you can't sell PDFs for nearly the same cost as a print book. People have tried it on DriveThruRPG, and while they've sold some copes, the vast majority of replies have been in the neighborhood of "What the hell are they thinking?!" When you combine the narrower audience for PDFs with the fact that you must cut down the price of a PDF dramatically from a print book, you're right back where you were--in an industry that really doesn't make very much profit.

There is, unfortunately, exactly one way and one way only to turn the RPG market into a truly profitable endeavor, one so profitable that it might actually be possible to drop the costs on books. One way. And that is, figure out how to increase the size of the market by a substantial amount. Nothing else, ultimately, will do the job.

If you could convince Hasbro that the time was right for a new D&D cartoon, that'd be a good start.