Quote from: DavetheLost;973980A PDF is real worth nothing more than the purchaser is willing to pay for it. Unfortunately all of the pre-printing costs are the same for a PDF as they are for a hardcopy book, the only costs really lacking are the paper, ink and binding.

After all you are just buying access to information and in the digital age all information should be free.  Certainly creative types should put their work out there for free and be happy they have an audience. As for editing, layout, product promotion and all of that, it is epemeral with no real costs.

/sarcasm

Here's the thing, most who put in promotional work and professional layout (again, MOST, NOT ALL) work, or pay for it, they usually plan to sell a hard copy.  But a pure PDF product?  Most do it by hand.  Which is TIME.  Again, ephemeral, it's up to the PRODUCER to determine the price.  

Promotion?  Well, that depends on how it's done, if you go to say a site like this and BUY a banner, which is what?  25-50 per month?  That IS a cost to be recouped, but nothing that puts you several sites, like Paizo, TBP and many others, and that sort of budget is out of most PDF makers range.  But depending on how much you think you can sell, again, determines the price. A choice the game maker decides, often not a set cost.

It's not the customer, not ME, who decides what it's initial worth is.  The only thing I decide is whether or not I agree with the PDF maker's assessment and give them my money.  So really, saying free, or 5USD or a 1000USD per PDF is 'cheap' depending on the RPG developer making the game.

But an actual printing job, which requires multiple test printings, and then a full print run?  That's got a SET cost, which is part of the price.  Most text books, which is what an RPG is technically, are not under $80 each, for a full color hard back at near 600 pages, those run up in the $100+ range.  So if you can get a hard cover, glossy paged with full colour work that's solid and durable, and under 100USD, you've got a steal on your hands.

Quote from: Biscuitician;974266A lot of the games that hit the market these days are the result of a Kickstarter. I think 7th Sea got John Wick close to a million buckeroos.

Consequently, your pdf's of these games, for which the pdf is really a happy by product, should be half the price they are charging currently. John Wick does NOT need to be charging £25 (or thereabouts) for a game that was funded and them some.

PDF's don't have the print and publishing and shipping costs that paper does. I get that there are costs involved in the product itself, that's fine, but that's a one time cost. Once done, it's done for every copy that will be sold.

No game needs to be more expensive than Trek. £20 for a pdf in almost all cases, including these kickstarter games, is a nonsense IMO.

Product prices are not determined by feelz when actual business people are involved in setting them. There is a great deal more to setting an appropriate price than what people involved "feel" like it should be. Every product needs to have a return on investment that is at least defensibly comparable to the next best alternative use of the resources. For example, suppose I have a hypothetical minimum monthly income requirement of $2,000 post-tax from my work. Maybe this is because I need to pay rent and buy food. Maybe it's because the alternative use of lazing around reading and not working is worth $2,000 a month to me. Maybe it's because I could sink the time into another pursuit that would earn me close to $2,000. Maybe there's a man with a gun pressed to my head and he wants me to make $2,000 a month to keep breathing.

Whatever the creator's rationale and however defensible or stupid you think it is, this number exists and it exists for everyone. Not everyone realizes it exists until they get a ROI that's well below it and decide that they don't want to keep doing this, but minimally competent business people figure out this number before they start working.

The creator then invests the time and money necessary to create the product. Many creators will price their individual labor hours at zero dollars per hour, but artists, editors, designers, and other necessary components of the process are rarely so cavalier. There will be a production cost for the product. This production cost is then subtracted from the gross, after which a 15%-40% subtraction is made for taxes depending on one's location, and the remainder is then divided by the time required to create it to get a return-per-time-unit-invested. In the example case, I'd divide the net by the months I took to write it and if the net is not $2,000/month, I need to either stop making products like this or stop pricing products like this.

Given predicted sales of X units, whether they come in the form of Y Kickstarter preorders + Z retail orders or entirely as DTRPG retail sales, (X * Profit)/months to make => $2,000 or I done goofed. Either I have left too much money on the table from those X sales or the pricing for my goods is too inelastic to support the minimal necessary profit margin per sale. If I was really foolish I might never have run the numbers at all to realize that X sales at a given profit per sale was mathematically incapable of giving me the necessary ROI, or I might not even understand the market well enough to realize that X sales was my likely number.

Thus, when I price my paper books and PDFs, at a minimum I'll be pricing them to get me my required ROI. If it turns out the customers refuse to buy at that price, then that's a mistake that actually happened at the very start of this project, when I failed to realize that my sales at a given price point wouldn't cover my minimum profit requirements. Of course, if I'm a prudent seller, I'll be pricing my wares to where I think the sweet spot is on the demand curve, optimizing total income by getting the most sales possible at the highest price that is practical. But if it's simply a question of why I don't slash PDF prices because of their zero marginal cost, in a very real sense, it's because marginal cost has got very little to do with my minimum required product ROI.

I don't really understand why anyone would debate or complain or disbelieve a price for an RPG, whatever the format. If you want it bad enough you'll pay up to whatever limit you've set for yourself.  If the publisher sets his price too high, he'll soon find out and either find a way to lower the price or go out of business altogether if he can't lower the price and no one will pay what he asks. Either way, it's the publisher who takes the risk and reaps the reward. I don't walk into Barnes & Noble and tell them Charles Scribner's Sons is charging too much for The Great Gatsby .

Quote from: Christopher Brady;974384..Most do it by hand...

:confused:

All books are laid out by someone and it takes time and skill to do so. I have no idea what you're going on about here. It is rather baffling. Do you think people don't deserve to be compensated fairly for their labour, which is composed of their time?

It's not baffling, it's the usual logic that Cupcake follows;).

Quote from: SineNomine;974398Product prices are not determined by feelz when actual business people are involved in setting them.

Whether or not that's true, it isn't what I said, at all.

Look, noone disputes there are some costs involved in creating pdfs. All I'm saying is that I'm not prepared to pay what seems to be the norm when it comes to asking price. £20 for a pdf is too much.

You are free to charrge what you like, I have no problem with that. But IMO you'll get more custom if you ask a lower price, as was the case with the recent star trek game. Had they asked the same for that as they do for all their other games (and I don't know why there's no parity), I wouldn't have given the game a second thought.

Again YMMV

Quote from: Dumarest;974464I don't really understand why anyone would debate or complain or disbelieve a price for an RPG, whatever the format. If you want it bad enough you'll pay up to whatever limit you've set for yourself.

That's just a poor argument. There's all sorts of reasons why people don't pony up the asking price for a product they might otherwise want. They might prioritise it differently as a luxury they desire according to their available funds.

I'm sorry if you don't understand taht, but it's not a great mystery.

The problem with pdfs for me is that, as much as I cognitively understand there is work involved in creating the content and putting the PDF together the end result of any transaction involving PDFs feels unsatisfying to me.  I don't enjoy reading them, and I don't enjoy owning them in any way.  I can't get past the feeling that I'm buying nothing...I have a hard time getting myself to spend any money at all on pdfs.  That's flat out stupid, I know.  But it's the fundamental wall creators have to break through with me.  The sad fact is that I pretty much don't even give a thought to buying a PDF if it's more than about $5 and even that small amount is a barrier for me.  Pdfs are essentially the "free bonus items" I get when I drop the bucks on dead trees.

As far as under-priced products go I don't think anyone could argue the BFRPG books aren't a ridiculously good value...

Quote from: Biscuitician;974513You are free to charrge what you like, I have no problem with that. But IMO you'll get more custom if you ask a lower price, as was the case with the recent star trek game.

At that point it's just a matter of debating what the demand curve looks like. You propose that the optimum total return is at X dollars while a publisher might think it exists at X+Y dollars. While the consumer has a better idea of their own demand curve, the (competent) publisher has a much better idea of the market's overall curve. This is not to say that they never misprice or that every product has the same curve, but publishers have a lot more riding on getting it right than the customers do.

If you're not prepared to pay the price that publishers want for their product, you're not in the market for the product. There's nothing wrong with that, as we're all simply not in the market for a vast range of goods. But there's no reason for publishers to pursue you as a customer if there's no prospect of getting an adequate return from your business, especially if trying to win you obliges them to leave a large amount of money on the table from existing customers who will pay an adequate price. Competing on price in a luxury market is a terrible idea, and will do much more damage to your bottom line than simple piracy will.

Quote from: Biscuitician;974514That's just a poor argument. There's all sorts of reasons why people don't pony up the asking price for a product they might otherwise want. They might prioritise it differently as a luxury they desire according to their available funds.

I'm sorry if you don't understand taht, but it's not a great mystery.

That means they don't want it that bad. You really have a hard time comprehending even the most basic ideas.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;973996PDFs have the same pre-production cost as a regular book. The cost of art, editing and layout doesn't go away simply because it is available in two formats.

That's true, but it has far less post-production costs. Like, almost zero, apart from what the middleman takes.

While I love to have the physical books in my hand, I've gone digital in my old age. I've got shelves of RPGs all over the house...

I think as POD has become more expensive and pdfs have followed suit (especially for the bigger companies). People generally like a price hike if they think they can get away with it.

Another factor is that a lot of older products that are now being turned into pdfs already have the art, editing, and layout already paid for. So all that's really needed is the preparation (and cost) to make it pdf ready. But if you look at the costs of some of these products, they are still very expensive.

Sure, you're buying the intellectual property and that's totally fair enough, but given the bulk of the costs have already been paid for then why are they still so expensive? Gah!

Quote from: The Exploited.;975425While I love to have the physical books in my hand, I've gone digital in my old age. I've got shelves of RPGs all over the house...

I find I still need hardcopy to play, though I can just about run an adventure via text-chat from a pdf if I print the maps. However giant hardbacks a la D&D are a pain; I'm hugely loving my Digest-sized White Star softbacks. All games should be that size!

Quote from: RPGPundit;975406That's true, but it has far less post-production costs. Like, almost zero, apart from what the middleman takes.

That is true, and I think there should be a price difference to account for that, but my point is it isn't no cost. You can lose money setting PDFs too low because there is still substantial money on the pre-production end and PDF sales are still part of getting a return. Personally I am not a fan of setting PDF prices high, and I try to keep my own as reasonable as possible (even doing occasional loss leaders) but I do think fans sometimes get the wrong impression about PDFs and how they can't really escape from that  pre-production cost.

Quote from: S'mon;975433I find I still need hardcopy to play, though I can just about run an adventure via text-chat from a pdf if I print the maps. However giant hardbacks a la D&D are a pain; I'm hugely loving my Digest-sized White Star softbacks. All games should be that size!

Yeah, nothing beats having the physical books (even just for speed but I do like the digest size as well. Savage Worlds is a great one for this...