Sounds like some one is winning a bet.

Quote from: Nexus;866440120 dollars?

Holy fuck.

Yeah. OPP's system of selling bloated, PoD-only books that push if not exceed the $100 mark is one of the big reasons I don't bother with the World of Darkness anymore. What I find really ridiculous is that they won't even throw in the PDFs for free.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;866409I'm assuming, judging by what they've done so far, that they're errata updates are going to need errata updates in of themselves.

It's gonna be one of those books where "page xx" is the table of contents.

JG

Quote from: James Gillen;866463It's gonna be one of those books where "page xx" is the table of contents.

JG

Uhm, if I remember correctly, WW books are notorious for that, so...  How is that different, and why would that slow anything down?

I am not sure they are going to put in the errata people send them. They didn't do that for V:DA20 either apparently. I distinctly remember matt.celeb posting something like that.

Quote from: Brand55;866452Yeah. OPP's system of selling bloated, PoD-only books that push if not exceed the $100 mark is one of the big reasons I don't bother with the World of Darkness anymore. What I find really ridiculous is that they won't even throw in the PDFs for free.

Yeah that is a crime unto itself.  There are many small press and truly indie game creators that make PDFs free when you purchase the POD.  Why can't Onyx Path?  Oh I am sure they will create a excuse, but fact is they are money grubbers.  At this point you have to be a die hard fan to get those books.

So in the end, if you want the cheaper books from OPP, you have to pledge to their "deluxe" KS, as it seems.

Crazy!

And not throwing in the pdf with a price-tag like that?! WTF?!
The KS Backers do get that benefit as well. So take note, folks, if you really want to have OPP books in print, go for the KS versions...even though they are called Deluxe versions, they are cheaper in the end (and still probably deluxe value when compared to PoD).

What a stupid way to do business...shame on you, OPP. Fail on all accounts. Lucky them that they have such a fanatic fanbase or they'd be out of business soon (lets call them OOB instead of OPP from now on )

I think Kickstarter is their main sale because I know a few fanatics that were piss off with the prices in OBS.  What is worst is that David Hill, one of the freelancers that Onyx Path hires, actually defended this shitty practice.

Look a high quality fully colored book should not cost more than 60 dollars.  A high quality black and white book should not cost more than 40 dollars.  PDFs should not cost more than 20 dollars.  That is just simple truth.  If it is a soft cover than the price should be reduce as well.

FWIW I think most people know upfront that the books are cheaper via the KS as the offset printing run reduces the cost considerably.

The cost of a 700 page full colour book by POD is immense. I wouldn't be surprised if it was around $100.

Quote from: Snowman0147;866528Look a high quality fully colored book should not cost more than 60 dollars.  A high quality black and white book should not cost more than 40 dollars.  PDFs should not cost more than 20 dollars.  That is just simple truth.  If it is a soft cover than the price should be reduce as well.

Unfortunately, this is not the case with extremely long premium color POD books.

To print a hardcover premium-color POD book of 650 pages through DTRPG/RPGNow, for example, costs about $75 as an absolute minimum. Every page you add beyond that adds another 10 cents to the print cost. That's the absolute floor price you must charge just to get the book printed.

Against this you have to amortize the production cost of the book. If you pretend that writing, editing, and layout design are free- which they are not- that leaves you with the big-ticket expense of art. If you make a very modest budget of $200 per full-page illo and put a quarter-page worth on every two-page spread, that 650 page book is going to cost you a bare minimum of about $16,000, and the reality will inevitably be worse.

Now, if you're a runaway hit, you're going to move 2,000 copies of that doorstop, and so if you're of a congenitally optimistic disposition, you can assume that the book's going to move 2K copies through its reasonable lifespan. That means you've got to amortize $16,000 over 2,000 copies which means a minimum of $8 added to each of the print prices, so you're at $83 here apiece just to not fall into the red, with extremely optimistic numbers and a willingness to sit in the red for months while the initial sales start paying off your art investment.

If you put a hundred-dollar price-point on your book, that means you're earning about $12 profit per sale. If you put $120 on it, you're earning a whopping $24 profit per book on 2,000 copies for $48K gross, pretending for the moment that writing/editing/layout was free. Trim off a minimum of about 35% for taxes in the US, and your titanic labor of producing a 500,000-word megatome has earned you $31,000 to split between you and your collaborators. After the book sells 2,000 copies, whenever that may be. Thus, producing the word output of a fat fantasy novel trilogy is not enough to live on for a year unless you do this monster job solo.

This is not to say that the market doesn't have a firm idea about what an RPG book should cost. It's true that they want to see $60 color hardbacks and $40 b/w books. But if that's the case, then they had also better want to see books of under 200 pages, because the economics just stop working at those prices if the page counts climb. This may be totally okay with a lot of people, but those who want monster megatomes that contain three books worth of writing are going to have to pay three books worth of price for it, too.

Quote from: SineNomine;866535Unfortunately, this is not the case with extremely long premium color POD books.

Yeah, POD can get crazy expensive which is why I was not happy to hear it when White Wolf announced they were switching to that model for all of their books. What I dislike most about the way so many WoD (and Exalted) books are written is that it seems like the authors love to be overly wordy, which inflates the page count and pushes the price of the books higher than they need to be. WW/OPP never missed a chance to spend three paragraphs to explain something that only needed three sentences. And of course a lower page count would also mean less needed art, further bringing the price down.

But all that aside, my wallet isn't missing the World of Darkness or Exalted these days. It is, however, eagerly awaiting that Godbound Kickstarter that you're working on.

Yeah when is Godbound going to happen?  It maybe the first time I give money to Kickstarter.

Still god damn man!  Why is POD so expensive?  How come the other method is so much cheaper?

I'm hoping to get Godbound launched as a KS in February. I just stuck the beta gazetteer up on my G+ feed, but the really ugly part of the job isn't done yet- the GM tools for making and handling demigod-worthy challenges and adventures.

As for book prices, it all has to do with the total lack of any economy of scale with POD printing. Conventional offset printing is almost entirely a matter of first print expenses; you've got to set up your press, and that's a major job. Once you do that, however, every further book is just a marginal cost in paper, ink and press run time. The printer spreads their setup cost over the run, so a run of a hundred books done offset is hugely expensive per-book, while a run of 5,000 gets a comparatively tiny portion assigned to the marginal ink-and-paper cost. If you're willing to print a few thousand books at once, you can get very decent prices.

This is one reason why KS campaigns for major RPG companies can work. You know you're going to get one or two thousand print backers, to which you add the amount you want for retail distribution, and get it done offset for a relatively low per-book price. Assuming you don't overshoot and put in too big an order, and assuming you can handle the physical mailing on your end, you come out ahead. But you need the surplus for your retail channels, and you can't exactly mail them to DTRPG and tell them to fill orders with them, so any POD prints have to be made as one-offs for the prices listed above. Thus, KS backers can get their books for a drastically lower price.

So when we pay a POD we also pay to set up the press for that book every time we make a order?

Quote from: SineNomine;866551I'm hoping to get Godbound launched as a KS in February. I just stuck the beta gazetteer up on my G+ feed, but the really ugly part of the job isn't done yet- the GM tools for making and handling demigod-worthy challenges and adventures.

I downloaded the gazetteer the other day but haven't had a chance to do much more than scan it. I like what I've seen so far, though I'm not sure yet if I'll use the default world. Either way, no rush on the Kickstarter. While I'm really eager to get Godbound in my hands, I'd rather wait a bit longer and have it done just right than have you rush things just to hit that deadline. I've always found the GM tools to be the best parts of your books.

In the meantime, I'm thinking of running a little "Call of Darkness" - a mixture of Silent Legions and Monte Cook's World of Darkness with a heavy dose of Scarlet Heroes rules thrown in for good measure. It'll be vampires, werewolves, and other types battling the agents of the extra-dimensional alien Iconnu that are seeking to turn Earth into their latest stomping ground. That should keep my players occupied until they get the chance to play at demigod.