What's Your Price Limit?

[TiQuinn]

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

Yeah that’s much more of a likely cap for me because I know I’ve spent once or twice in the $300 range. North of that would have to be something so incredibly dialed into my precise interests and I’d be checking with my wife beforehand anyways.

 

[Stormonu]

@Thomas Shey - but that's not all the costs, and it's this other portion that people don't think about. You have costs for writing, editing, and at least art. You have to divide those costs against how many you believe will sell. I think I've put in at least a hundred hours of writing into the most recent monster manual I've done and that doesn't include the art for some 350+ monsters (Because of art, I believe monster books are the most expensive to produce), plus a hardcover cost. A platinum seller on DriveThruRPG has to sell 1,000 units to get that ranking (the highest ranking tracked is Adamantine, which is 5,000).

This is just me spitballing, but assuming a "living" wage of $25/hour, with $25 for a quarter page piece of (professional) art and at least $100 for a cover, we're looking at a low side for the monster book above at $2,500 for the author and, ~$7,600 for art (for about 300 pieces) for a total of $10,100 just in raw cost (without an editor <cringe>, or a layout artist) for basically a one-man show*. Assuming it hits Platinum, that's a minimum of $10 raw per PDF (not counting DriveThru's cut, so at least $12 per to account for that).

* There are very few people I know who are skilled enough to both write and do the art for a product at a professional level. Normally, at least one of the two has to be sourced out.

 

[MNblockhead]

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?

I buy the books. When I'm getting near the end of campaign, I'll look over games I've not run or new games I've heard about. If the later, I'll often buy at least the core book to read it over. Starting with player suggestions and then buying the books and running a game generally doesn't work for me. I already have to have an interest an enthusiasm for a system and an idea for a campaign. I'll give the players a number of options I'm interested in running for the next campaign that we come to a consensus on. But by the time I've make my suggestions, I've already bought and have spent and good amount of time reading over and thinking about the system and adventures.

I run my campaigns online now and share my content via the VTT (or if D&D, through D&D Beyond).

I've never expected anyone I've invited to my games to own any of the books.

 

[Thomas Shey]

@Thomas Shey - but that's not all the costs, and it's this other portion that people don't think about. You have costs for writing, editing, and at least art.

I'm specifically talking about the difference in costs between the two formats. Of course you need writers, editors and artists for both (though the last is a certain degree of assessing the art value)

But those are fixed costs in either format, and they're up-front costs; you pay them when producing the document, and then you're done (again, not accounting for the fact that the digital files for the different formats are different and require additional work for each format).

But in one case (physical product) you've got ongoing costs for every copy you produce, and when you've expended that product, you have to pay again. Producing a additional PDFs for sale has approaching zero marginal cost. They simply aren't compareable.

But again, this is not assessing the cost of producing the game itself; this is comparing the cost of producing physical product versus digital only products, in particular to a post that assumed any PDF game product also existed in hardcover form, when that's simply not true; it exists for a range of higher-rent products, but that's not the whole market..