AEG is selling PDF's at last throught http://www.drivethrurpg.com/
Although all the Spycraft stuff that was up there has already come down, although checking the forums it is planned for later.
There is L5R (including the new Four Winds book (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=90_371&products_id=3505&affiliate_id=1656)), Swashbuckling (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=90_377&products_id=3521&affiliate_id=1656) and their D20 books, and Farscape (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=90_379&products_id=3523&affiliate_id=1656).
Interesting. Having a pdf of Toolbox could be useful.
WTF!!! The price for some of those damn pdf's is as much as it is for the real book. What happened to $5-8 for a pdf of a product. :mad:
They can't undercut the brick and mortar stores.
Quote from: PookaThey can't undercut the brick and mortar stores.
They can't as in "they cannot reduce their price points below those of the brick and mortars?" or as in "they won't screw over the brick and mortar stores that carry their print products?"
I'm assuming you meant the latter as the former seems a bit difficult to believe.
Quote from: PookaThey can't undercut the brick and mortar stores.
It seems to me you used to get the pdf version first and it would be anywhers from $4-$10 depending on size and publisher and then later you'd get the print version and that would be more expensive.
Quote from: KnightcrawlerIt seems to me you used to get the pdf version first and it would be anywhers from $4-$10 depending on size and publisher and then later you'd get the print version and that would be more expensive.
I think the only way publishers would ever consider this would be if they could count on enough additional sales at the reduced price to compensate for the initial lost sales on print books.
Otherwise, as Pooka seemed to suggest, they are just cutting the feet of their brick and mortar distributers out from under them.
Quote from: Maximum FuThey can't as in "they cannot reduce their price points below those of the brick and mortars?" or as in "they won't screw over the brick and mortar stores that carry their print products?"
I'm assuming you meant the latter as the former seems a bit difficult to believe.
Yes.
Do you remember what you were told about pookas btw?
Quote from: PookaYes.
Do you remember what you were told about pookas btw?
I seem to recall something to the effect that every statement made by a pooka contains within itself both truth and untruth. Correct?
No - Pookas always tell the truth.
Quote from: PookaNo - Pookas always tell the truth.
Hrm...I think I'll stick with my version of events for the time being... ;)
If one looks at the Baen Free Library (Baen Books), they have an interesting attitude toward e-books.
They sell e-books of their stuff - even serialize some books in progress. But, if certain books form a series, after a while they put the first 1-2 books in the series in the Free Library, knowing that if you REALLY like the series, you'll not only buy a dead tree version of the books you downloaded, but also by the later books in paper or elctronic form - maybe even both.
The alternative is, after all, that the casual reader will read the book from a copy in a local library, or buy the book and resell it if they don't like it - both of which will have worse financial repercussions to the author and publisher than not having the series' intro books free on the site after they've been paperbacks for a year.
For RPGs, this would best translate as putting the core rulesets (not the whole books, just the rules engine) free (example - the GURPS Lite ruleset), and dividing the non-core books up into two categories-
1. "continuing relevance" items = those that would have a long-term market in paper form, as copy-protected, pay downloads,
2. "timed obselescence" products = ones that will be eclipsed/subsumed into later products, or never be reprinted after the initial paper print runs, that will be pay products originally, but changed over to discounted or free downloads as the supply of printed copies disappears from stock.
Quote from: KnightcrawlerWTF!!! The price for some of those damn pdf's is as much as it is for the real book. What happened to $5-8 for a pdf of a product. :mad:
Apart from the band new stuff it's all 50% off RRP. And it all qualifies for the extra 20% gmday discount this weekend.
Wouldn't recommend them though as the files sizes are massive (being scans of books not produced from the document), and the one I bought (4 Winds) had no OCR (although I believe other do) and no bookmarks.
Quote from: BagpussApart from the band new stuff it's all 50% off RRP. And it all qualifies for the extra 20% gmday discount this weekend.
Wouldn't recommend them though as the files sizes are massive (being scans of books not produced from the document), and the one I bought (4 Winds) had no OCR (although I believe other do) and no bookmarks.
Yeah if I paid for a pdf I'd definitely want it OCR and bookmarked.
Switching from PDFs, does anyone know when Crafty Games will publish another Spycraft book ?
Well at least there website address is paid for and set up now.
http://www.crafty-games.com
Quote from: KnightcrawlerWTF!!! The price for some of those damn pdf's is as much as it is for the real book. What happened to $5-8 for a pdf of a product. :mad:
I was flabbergasted at the price of Fantasy Flight Games' PDFs at first.
Eventually they came down.
There's only 3 or 4 AEG d20 fantasy titles I would pay for in PDF format.
Spycraft... now that I have 2.0, considering its breadth, the reference value for having a 1.0 PDF would be pretty low for me, but it might be worth it for the last few titles I didn't pick up for 1.0.
If the SC 2.0 book ever came out in PDF, I'd snatch it up in a heart.
Maybe even for full price... :blush:
Quote from: Basara_549If one looks at the Baen Free Library (Baen Books), they have an interesting attitude toward e-books.
The Baen Free Library has made a customer out of me. I might never have really bought any David Drake novels; now I'm sure to snatch them up where I find them. Their philosophy is spot on; I love the authors that I do mainly because I borrowed one of their books from a public library. Having access to free material has definitely affected my bookbuying habits.
Mind you, this isn't a thread about ideal RPG distribution in electronic format. This is a thread announcing that one of the old bad boys of print RPGs has taken a half-assed step into the electronic market.
Quote from: PookaDo you remember what you were told about pookas btw?
They're ruthless businesspersons?
-SJ
Quote from: DocSwitching from PDFs, does anyone know when Crafty Games will publish another Spycraft book ?
They're a little bit in limbo right now, from what I hear, what with the start up of the new company and all. Official word is hopefully sometime late this spring or this summer... Though they are avoiding hard dates to prevent mass dissappointments, just in case.
They've got
World on Fire and
10,000 Bullets in the works, and I know they've got a few smaller projects...
Farthest Star,
Shatterpunk,
Crucible, and
Spellbound.
Crafty Games' guys say that more info will be forthcoming once the website is fully operational.
Quote from: Harry JoyI bought my first AEG book a few weeks ago, mainly out of frustration at the lack of anything new to waste twenty bucks on. The AEG titles have sat around my FLGS for a while gathering dust, but I gave "Wilds" a go, and was pleasantly surprised. It is a fairly good book, well written and with good advice, and decent crunch.
Are the others this good? I had pretty much written these off the same I way I did FFG stuff. Was I wrong?
Well, I guess it may come down to personal preference, as I preferred FFG's Wildscape to AEG's Wilds (though Wilds wasn't too shabby.)
A lot of them showed promise, but I felt as if the main editor, Jim Pinto, was a little too pround to take criticism and I never saw the line ramp up the way I saw some other lines.
Toolbox should be on any DMs shelf. If you liked Wilds, you may like Mercenaries, which is a similar collection of crunch and ideas. Relics and Secrets are the last and most polished of the series.
War and Empire were amongst my least favorite of the series. Some others, like Monsters, Gods, and Magic, were decent for their time, but you may find that compared to newer books on similar subject, they seem a bit dated.
This just in from the Spycraft forums over on Alderac.com...
Quote from: MorgensternThere are also various non-setting specific toolboxes planned like
Bag Full of Guns - Additional weapons for various situations and eras of play
Flags - Real and fictional organizations
Spellbound - High Magic system
Throw Down - videogame-style martial arts add-on
We're also starting to see a number of proposals for Powered by Spycraft products from a variety of third party developers, though it's too early to spill the bean on those 8).
No release dates have been revealed yet - while the writing for many of these projects is proceeding nicely, we're still building our company tool sets to makes stuff happen. Certainly nothing new is going out before we get the Craft Games website operational. I'm hopeful we should start seeing the first trickle of new stuff as early as late next month, but it's just not sound to promise anything yet.
Quote from: PookaThey can't undercut the brick and mortar stores.
Translation: They don't really want your fucking business.
Quote from: Lisa NadazdyTranslation: They don't really want your fucking business.
Hear, hear!
I tire of the argument that PDF vendors undercut the print market when both sell the same material. PDFs are
different products than print books, regardless if the text within them are the same. They have different advantages and drawbacks, but dollars to digits, PDFs cost less to distribute. Inflating their price so that they don't pull sales away from brick-and-mortar stores would be like raising the price of food in grocery stores so they don't undercut restaurants. Both serve the same thing, but in different forms and packages.
Really, I think companies like AEG and WotC just don't want to undercut themselves. Having already invested in the print run of the books they now offer online, they have to make sure they don't undercut their OWN sales by having demand for that book filled by the electronic product instead. I think it has very little to do with the b&m outlets and more to do with not shooting themselves in the foot.
Which is really a half-assed way of doing it. By jumping into the online fray, successful print RPG companies are looking to supplement their print sales by reaching a market that they usually don't or can't. However, with their pricing, they are cutting off some of that new market, possibly to the point where electronic sales don't seem worthwhile. If they were serious about getting into online products, they'd have to seriously rethink their marketing strategy. The smartest move would be to do the reverse of what a lot of small-and medium-press PDF publishers do: break up their existing print products into several smaller electronic products with prices to match the current PDF standards.
Anyways, that's my ramblings.
Quote from: RoudiHear, hear!
...and lots of other stuff...
The insteresting thing is the guys from Crafty Games just posted on the Alderac boards, asking Spycraft fans what sort of format they'd like to see their supplimental books in. With regards to the book/PDF dichotomy, most them, and the gamemasters in particular, answered something like...
"Look, we want both of them. We want books, because it's a lot easier to read from a book than a computer, and because it's a lot more portable than a computer, laptop or otherwise. We want PDFs, because when we design NPCs and adventures and handouts for our players, it's a lot easier to cut and paste from a PDF than to hand-type everything out of a rulebook.
"But it's rediculous to expect a PDF to be as pretty as a rulebook. It shouldn't need to be. It should be simple, utilitarian and designed for small file size. And it's rediculous to expect to charge anything approaching the price of a rulebook for a PDF."
It'd be nice to see companies package rulebooks with a CD containing a PDF of the book.
Quote from: CyclotronIt'd be nice to see companies package rulebooks with a CD containing a PDF of the book.
Agreed. Hell, any RPG game to package a PDF copy of the book plus other electronic tools (like character generators, encounter generators, etc) would sell like hotcakes.
Quote from: RoudiAgreed. Hell, any RPG game to package a PDF copy of the book plus other electronic tools (like character generators, encounter generators, etc) would sell like hotcakes.
And yet, I don't think Deliria (http://www.laughingpan.com/deliria.html) is selling like hotcakes, although it does have a CD chock full of various electronic goodies. Now, this could well be because it's not a very good game - a friend of mine wrote a review (http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/10/10471.phtml) of it and found a bunch of problems with the game, and I haven't had time to look through the copy I got for free. (Pictures were awful pretty, though.)
But I don't think a CD full of electronic geegaws is enough to launch a game into stardom... especially since it seems that if you get one or two dedicated fans, they'll do it for you, put it on the internet, and you don't have to go through all the extra expense of manufacturing and including the cds.
Quote from: KnightcrawlerYeah if I paid for a pdf I'd definitely want it OCR and bookmarked.
The ones that make me scream in frustration are the ones that aren't bookmarked but are locked down so I can't bookmark it myself. Thankfully it was just a freebie, if I'd paid for it in that condition I'd be furious.
Quote from: jcfialaAnd yet, I don't think Deliria (http://www.laughingpan.com/deliria.html) is selling like hotcakes
The problem there could be marketing or distribution. I've certainly never heard of Deliria before.
Quote from: MaddmanThe ones that make me scream in frustration are the ones that aren't bookmarked but are locked down so I can't bookmark it myself. Thankfully it was just a freebie, if I'd paid for it in that condition I'd be furious.
Those are the type AEG are selling at the moment. Speaking from the experience of buying one. :mad:
Quote from: RoudiThe problem there could be marketing or distribution. I've certainly never heard of Deliria before.
Nice people. Beautiful book. Not quite my cup of tea insofar as gaming goes, but almost worth it as a coffee-table book. Er, almost.
Quote from: RoudiThe problem there could be marketing or distribution. I've certainly never heard of Deliria before.
Definitely. I've never heard the slightest mention or buzz about it at all.