What's Your Price Limit?

[Jfdlsjfd]

I also don't care for formats other than PDFs, for the exact reason you mentionned: there is no guarantee with onlline good that the service will exist in 10 years. While PDF, if I am careful enough with my saves, will.

 

[Distracted DM]

I'm right there with you - game sounds fabulous, but is just sitting on the shelf mocking me. Then when v2 comes out, I just have to hang my head in shame....and then buy it.

Yup- if I'm lucky I'll think to pull some shelfware down rarely and give it a read-through... but more often they just sit on the shelf waiting to be read- some day. Definitely some day. Soon.

Question for folks, but do people buy books to play with a group, or do they talk with players, and buy books together? Put another way - if you've been playing with a group for awhile - is one person responsible for the supplies for a game everyone plays?

The only TTRPG stuff that my group "went in on" was DnDBeyond content, the legendary bundle back in the 2010s. I think my players saw the value in it, and saw the big price tag of ~$200+, and thought "oh hey we could all chip in on that." The discussion on physical books never comes up though, though my players would often buy their own copies of the PHB and rarely they'd get me gifts of miniatures etc. (very kind of them).

It's interesting that the DDB chip-in came up unasked, but the other books I use never do. I don't complain, I buy them because I'm a collector even if I don't think of myself as one... just an interesting difference to consider.

 

[Weiley31]

More than $400 is the cap for me if I'm being honest.

 

[Velderan]

TTRPG books are massively undervalued. The profit margins are non-existent, and creators get paid less than minimum wage for a book which took many people months or years to make, and which you can get months or years of use out of.

So, yeah, $70 doesn't pay for a hardcover TTRPG book.

WotC sells its core rules -- three books -- for, what $30 each? Depending on where you are in the world. But it's Hasbro and can print hundreds of thousands of them at a time, and so pays pittance for each book. And in doing so, trains the market what a hardcover TTRPG book is worth.

(This, incidentally, is why monopolies are generally prevented through regulation--unfortunately our little corner of the gaming industry is too tiny to qualify for notice, but make no mistake we are operating in the contrails of a monopoly, and the industry problems that causes are apparent).

The rest of the industry sells 0.1% of what Hasbro does if they're really lucky, and pays 10 times or more per book printed. And doesn't have worldwide distribution deals, if at all. And if they do have distribution deals, they're on much worse terms--like, 60% of the cover price is gone right there.

So a hardcover book? Really? For a non global-corp with massive economies of scale? It costs $100. That's minimum wage for the labour.

If you are paying less than $100 (and you are, because every company prices its books at $60 or so), it's because the company is not paying itself or its creators a living wage. Because they literally can't. And this is why the entire TTRPG entire industry is mainly people in their spare bedroom as a side job.

Sure, maybe the books aren't worth $100 to you. Maybe TTRPGs are not a viable business if you're not Hasbro. I'm not telling you what a TTRPG hardcover is worth to you... you spend your money how you want. Your priorities are yours. But I am telling you what it costs if people are paid fairly. And that's $100 for minimum wage.

Going back to this post, what do you think a publisher would need to charge for a typical 192 page TTRPG book in PDF format in a direct sale to fairly pay the folks who worked on it?

I know a lot of people seem to severely undervalue a PDF because they typically seem to only look at the costs to generate the file and distribute it while seemingly ignoring all the costs of a physical hardcover that went into actually creating it (writers, artists, editors, etc). And that’s assuming you’re not losing whatever percent sites like DriveThruRPG take for the sale.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I think one of my problems with expensive Pdfs is the art costs. I like lush display books as physical artifacts - but the artwork on pdfs is something I find mostly annoying (especially if I want to read on my old black and white kindle). They make the books bigger, slower to download and load, and make the text less readable.

So it might be a fair cost to make and to pay the artists - but if I'm reading on a Kindle much of that art is only making the product worse and you're still getting me to pay for it