Pricing and marketing your games and mine

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

I have a hard time keeping it in my pants on others' threads, apparently, so I'll open this as a thread of my very own. Parden the splurge of questions and ideas. I should have been posting about this long ago, and it's sort of tumbling out.

1: How do/did you price your games? I see people underpricing their work all the time and it's painful on two levels. One, they're selling themselves and their excellent work short (I don't want to mention Matt Wilson's or Luke Crane's name here, so I won't), and two, it can depress the market if people think "Forge games" are low-budge.

Under the Bed cost me about $4.50 a pack to print my first 100. Once publicity costs were taken into account, that meant that I would break even after 50 copies. Thank you to everyone who made that happen so frickin' quickly.

2: How much effort goes into the design of your games?... then I realized, I didn't get paid for the hours and hours and hours that I put into designing the game and its ephemera. On that count, I probably still haven't broken even. But I think we can. I think we can make a profit at our games. I want to see someone — probably an unmarried someone with no kids with brilliant designs, first — be able to make a living publishing their own games. Vincent would be a lot closer if he wasn't so virile, and I bet Ron's doing OK, as well.

To make that happen, we need to price at what the market will bear.

3: How do you seal pricing and presentation together? Shock: is going to have a higher price by ~$10 (I'm not sure of the actual final price. That's why I posted this thread). I'm hoping to stop feeling like I'm not going to make rent this month because I'm designing games. I want to invest serious time and energy into a game and not feel like it's a fool's errand. That means making books that not only play well (we're pretty good about that around here), but that look good in every way. Luke set the bar really high with Burning Wheel and I want to see everyone striving for that. I want to see the average Forge-gestated game going for $21 to $31. And I want our audiences to love us for it.

(Those numbers aren't random, either. They're deliberately off the $5 marks. Not $20, $25, or $30. And certainly not $10. If someone's going to spend $10, they'll spend $11.)

I really, really want to know how everyone else feels about this. Because we're producing things here that are already better than much of our competition in many ways, and we have the potential, by next GenCon to have a lineup that is all better in [/i] every[/i] respect to our mainstream competition. And when we do that, we should get paid.

[Ben Lehman]

I thought very long and hard about the pricing for Polaris.  I ended up selling for $20 at GenCon (when selling in person, it is way better to sell at the $5 breakpoints -- it helps make change) and $23 on Indie Press Revolution.  In all honesty, I think that the game is probably worth more than $23, but because of the shipping policies of IPR (orders over $25 free shipping) I would have to charge $28 to make a profit on that, and that's too much sticker shock relative to other prices.  I sold it for 20eu on my Finnish tour, which is roughly $23 and also is a nice even breakpoint for in-person sales (hand me a twenty, I hand you a book.)

This is a roundabout way of saying Joshua is right.  I had someone at GenCon be disappointed in the $20 price-tag of Polaris because he said "I thought $15 was standard for these sorts of games."  That's not a good thing.  If $15 is standard, then $26 looks beyond the pale, when in fact it is almost a quarter the price of D&D.

yrs--
--Ben

[Darren Hill]

I was a bit hesitant to respond here, since I'm not sure I agree with the argument proposed.
I think forge-inspired games tend to be better than mainstream games, but that doesn't automatically mean they should cost as much.
The production costs of many mainstream games are going to be a lot higher than indie games, and it's quite likely that the R&D cost involved is at least as great, probably a lot greater - at least for front-rank companies like White Wolf, Wizards, SJG, and others.
Mainstream games also often have a lot more content - granted, a lot of is of zero value to some of us, but it has to be paid for.
Put a copy of Polaris next to one of D&D rulebooks, and I'd argue that the D&D book should cost notably more.
Put a copy of most forge games next to most large, hardback, art-filled, mainstream rulebooks, with their high page counts and huge numbers of rules or setting information, and I do think those mainstream books should cost more.

I've bought a load of forge-developed games, almost as many as I could get my hands on, but if they had been $5 more expensive, I might not have - I would certainly have been slower to buy and would have bought a lot fewer games. My first few purchases were very hesitant , so there's even a chance I might not have started buying at all.
The high price of Polaris also did put me off, and I very nearly didn't buy - ditto for Mountain Witch. (Mind you, I'm an oversees customer without much income - the $10 shipping charge hits me hard: I could avoid that with Mountain Witch, but I did think I was paying a high cost for a PDF.)
So, based on my experience, that tendency to a lower price point might well translate into a high profit, if more more people buy. I think there's a very good chance that is happening.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Not agreeing with my argument is an excellent reason to post in this thread.

Nonetheless, your argument assumes that everyone working on the project is getting paid properly. On an indie project, I put just as much work into it as I would if I were working for SJ or WW. But I'm going to make a lot less money because the volume of sales is smaller. So the books have to cost more because they don't have a volume discount. That's the bug in Capitalism, right there. And someone's got to pay.

Now, what you're saying is that the perceived value of a WoD splatbook is higher. OK. Can you explain why that is, relative to Burning Wheel or Mountain Witch? What makes you feel that way?

[Josh Roby]

To my mind, other-Josh, indie games have a few hurdles they need to clear before they can regularly charge in the $25+ range.  None of this has to do with the game design; all of it has to do with the book design and manufacture.

Before we continue, yes, I am a total bookbuilding snob.

I haven't held many of the wonderful Forge games in my hands, but I have seen a few, and have seen the general quality of Lulu and their, um, ilk.  It's crap paper with no gloss, digital duplication or worse printing, and merely adequate binding.  I wouldn't trust any of the indie games I have seen thrown in a backpack or similar.  This is the biggest hurdle, since real professional bookbuilding is almost totally unavailable at the print runs that indie games are manufactured in.  Any of the "big three" printers usually require a minimum run of 5000, which is not presently realistic for indie games.

Of all the indie games I've seen, Polaris is the only one with a layout that I'd call professional-quality.  The rest are very simple page flows with full-page line art.  We have a lot of game designers at the Forge; we don't have many page designers.  The art itself ranges from the amateurish to real quality.  We need to actually pay for art and layout if we want it to contribute to a product that we expect other people to pay real money for.  All of these are far more feasible fixes, they "just" require a larger initial investment.

These games don't have ISBNs, don't have Library of Congress registries, don't have UPCs.  Most of the games paginate, which is great; not all of them index, which is admittedly rare in mainstream games, too, but it's still an essential part of any reference book (and gamebooks are reference books).  These are the easiest things to fix; Library of Congress entries are free (well, two copies of the book).  ISBNs have a marginal fee (which could be mitigated if some Forge publishers throw some money together to buy a bloc of numbers), and UPCs can be purchased along with the ISBNs pretty simply.  Indexing is a gigantic bitch of a task, but it's worth the day you lose to endlessly cross-referencing numbers.

While I think quality printing and binding may be a ways off in the future for indie games, the rest of the above is very much within our reach.  Addressing these items would make me, at least, far more willing to throw more than twenty bucks at a gamebook.

[Darren Hill]

I'm not saying that the perceived value of a WoD splatbook is higher. I'm saying that the percieved value of a WoD core rulebook is higher.

I mentioned the main reasons in my above post. I don't have the Mountain Witch rulebook, just the PDF, so I can't compare them directly. Imagining what the rulebook looks like based on the PDF, and knowing the content, it might well stand comparison next to one of those mainbooks. I do have Burning Wheel, and that one does stand comparison with mainstream books - it's 500 or so content-packed pages, professionally laid out. The art isn't particularly impressive or memorable, but the page design is attractive.
But most forge-inspired games aren't like Burning Wheel. In part because of the reasons Joshua states, but also because the game design results in smaller books. Hefty large format softback or hardback are going to be percieved as being more valuable than slim, novel-sized books. (Around here, we may consider a lot of the content of those larger books to be useless, but that doesn't mean it took less work to create.)

I agree that the economics of publishing aren't kind to small press publishers, but many potential buyers don't care about publishers problems. They want a good product at a percieved fair price.

[talysman]

Of all the indie games I've seen, Polaris is the only one with a layout that I'd call professional-quality.  The rest are very simple page flows with full-page line art.  We have a lot of game designers at the Forge; we don't have many page designers.  The art itself ranges from the amateurish to real quality.  We need to actually pay for art and layout if we want it to contribute to a product that we expect other people to pay real money for.  All of these are far more feasible fixes, they "just" require a larger initial investment.

back in August, I was talking to Kibo (who is a professional graphic designer) about roleplaying games, and we looked at a number of game books; he didn't approve of the graphic design of most of the roleplaying games because most of the higher-production value books of even the major publishers are "fun to look at" but don't look "fun to read". he approved of certain aspects of the D&D3e and WoD designs, didn't approve of the GURPS cover designs (because they don't have a uniform appearance across the product line and don't look good on the spine.) I showed him The Burning Wheel and he thought it was a very good design. he didn't much approve of the common practice of lots of illustrations.

he also had something to say about the pricing, which is more on-topic for this thread. his opinion is that we should be pricing games higher and marketing them more in the way that specialty items are marketed; he specifically compared the RPG market to the leather and sex fairs and the way they market their goods. I'm not sure how useful that advice is, but it seems similar to a suggestion raised once here on the Forge: that we should be pricing RPG books the same way university presses price specialty monographs.

I remember another bit of advice on pricing that Mike Holmes posted once; I may have to track down the thread. he mentioned something about figuring out the cost per unit, doubling it, adding the percentages (if any) that distributors, stores or fulfillment houses would take out, and adding in your desired profit to price the book. perhaps we should add the advice "and then cheat upwarss to the next multiple of five", because it's better to price your book high and offer a discount later than it is to price it too low and worry how you're going to make up the difference.

of course, my own personal preference as a customer is for game books to be about 100 pages and cost $20-25, which contradicts what I just said. but hey, there's got to be a way to balance the two desires.

[Arturo G.]

Darren said:

I've bought a load of forge-developed games, almost as many as I could get my hands on, but if they had been $5 more expensive, I might not have - I would certainly have been slower to buy and would have bought a lot fewer games. My first few purchases were very hesitant , so there's even a chance I might not have started buying at all.
The high price of Polaris also did put me off, and I very nearly didn't buy - ditto for Mountain Witch. (Mind you, I'm an oversees customer without much income - the $10 shipping charge hits me hard: I could avoid that with Mountain Witch, but I did think I was paying a high cost for a PDF.)

I must admit I have the same feeling as Darren. I was also very reluctant in my first boughts of indie games. Always looking for reviews, free web or lite versions to check I was buying something that really matched the price.

Of course, I have been always happy with what I got for my money after reading it. But I must admit that the only game which satisfied me when taking the envelope apart was Polaris. The indie games look like indie games, and people used to commercial games who does not really know about what is inside, may easily suspect the price is too much to try.

We have here a problem of content vs. appearance. Indie games have a high-quality content. But you know most people values the second factor a lot when comparing prices and deciding what to purchase.

BTW, It's really a pity that the extra cost for oversees shipping is always preventing me for purchasing more happily.

Cheers,
Arturo

[Jason Morningstar]

I don't have the Mountain Witch rulebook, just the PDF, so I can't compare them directly. Imagining what the rulebook looks like based on the PDF, and knowing the content, it might well stand comparison next to one of those mainbooks.

In terms of production quality, The Mountain Witch is the best game book I've purchased in a long time.  Tim obviously upped his per-unit cost to achieve that, but the final product reflects well on him and indie games in general. 

I think most gamers are cheap bastards.  The cost-value equation is seriously warped in our heads - people often compare game books by "price per page", which is insane.  Were we (and I am preparing the Shab-al-Hiri Roach for publication, so I'll include myself here) to charge academic press prices, I don't think we'd make a single sale to anyone we didn't know personally.  I'd love to hear the counter-argument. 

I really like Ben's "one quarter of D&D" analogy.  That's a good, reasonable way to pitch it, particularly when coupled with a "quality of experience and amount of fun offered" argument. 

Maybe one issue to address is the competing priorities of various designers - I, for example, will be delighted to break even and gain some exposure on my first product, and don't need to feed my family with the proceeds.  There's a "gut feeling" where my game should be priced, and I want to value my own work, but I'd rather have it in more hands all things being equal. 

So I'll ask you all as a thought experiment - well-designed, well-presented indie game, around 100 pages perfect bound, ships with 40 cards.  Although replay value is high, realistically you'll probably play it on average four times, each a self-contained evening of fun.  You probably pull it out for occasional one shots.  What would you charge in $US, and why?

--Jason

[Victor Gijsbers]

That's the bug in Capitalism, right there. And someone's got to pay.

Since when are we forced to submit our labours of love to Capitalism? I am a huge fan of all things open source and copyleft, and am actually kind of disappointed that so few indie-designers release a Creative Commons version of their game. In this respect, the indie-RPG scene compares very unfavourably with, say, the Interactive Fiction scene. It costs at least as much time to make a good work of IF as it costs to design a good RPG, yet 99,9% of IF authors make their work freely available. So, no, it's not true that someone's got to pay. That's only true if you want to make a living out of RPGs. If you have a normal job and RPG-design is not your main source of income, why not make your game as cheap as possible?

[Iskander]

I want to see everyone striving for that. I want to see the average Forge-gestated game going for $21 to $31. And I want our audiences to love us for it.

This is really irritating me, and I'm having trouble expressing both the extent and the specifics of my irritation, but I'll try.

Your hubris is remarkable, and likely to be tragic. I've spent close to three hundred dollars in the last year on Indie games, and hate myself for paying for half of the stuff. Not because of the content (some of which is great, some of which is not), but because I'm sick of shelling out even twenty bucks for the badly put-together, horribly edited mess that most of them were. There are honourable exceptions, but for every gorgeous plate in The Mountain Witch (and they are lovely), there's a typography in the castle to make my eyes bleed.

I think you are overestimating the size of your audience, overestimating the price that the market will bear, and overestimating your audience's willingness to indulge you.

I suggest you need to nurture your audience a bit before they're ready for parasitism.

[daMoose_Neo]

Other things to consider:
WW and WotC can't be making that much - assuming each title is about $30, after distribution discounts the company reaps $10 per book. For a hardbound, glossy, full color, straight to the edge bleed book. Then there's marketing costs, and dear lord the marketing for these titles. I can't look at any magazine without seeing two to three full page, color ads for one of these titles. And conventions.
Likewise, according to WotC's own numbers, it costs them $.10 to produce a card. Following that, fifteen cards to a booster pack, that would be $1.50 COST per pack. SRP is 3.99, means they should roughly recieve $1.60 per pack. Heres something scary: their 75 card tournament decks still have an MSRP of $10.00. Means $4.00 they get through distribution, but their cost on one of those would be $7.50!!! I imagine that dime per card is inclusive, but Magic has a LOT behind it: $800 per piece of artwork, multi-million dollar prize support, marketing, etc.

Point: the big dogs are, usually, worse off than we are. Freelancers left & right are talking about how they're barely making payments and meeting deadlines.

And, other points are made here as well: its not all that often I see the indie games from here even come close to matching the  sheer volume of content. The aforementioned Burning Wheel and Mountain Witch are, and Sorcerror certainly has the production value. Myself, I have a little 50 page book that looks like a coloring book - for which I'm glad. It fits my theme, my system is incredibly simplistic, and theres not a whole lot I can babble on about for such a simple system. It sells for $12 a copy.
On the other hand, I have a print customizable card game, which I *intentionally* price below industry average at $8.00 per deck. For the CCG, that is a part of the appeal, because as a card gamer I know it sucks to have to shell out $10-12 a deck for three different games and be inundated with release after release.
And then, theres my own PDFs, which aren't a major focus of mine, except for The Supers which is only available as PDF. For Final Twilight and The Imp Game, the PDFs are priced quite a bit below the print editions, because I'm using them as an introduction to the print products. Twilight, being the CCG, allows the players to check the game out cheap and then order a deck of their own. Imp's PDF introduces all of the basic rules, sans illustrations and some other neat perks.

I use my pricing as a marketing point. Not "Hey, I'm cheap!" mind you but "Look, you can still play all of your mainstream stuff AND afford to try something different." And it works out.

[Andrew Morris]

I had someone at GenCon be disappointed in the $20 price-tag of Polaris because he said "I thought $15 was standard for these sorts of games."  That's not a good thing.  If $15 is standard, then $26 looks beyond the pale, when in fact it is almost a quarter the price of D&D.

Ben, if indie games all cost what Polaris costs, I'd never have gotten into them in the first place. Universalis for $15? Cool, let me check that out. Sorcerer for $20? Uhm...okay, I hear it's really good. Random Indie Game X for $21+? No, thanks. I'll pass, no matter what I heard, unless I've already got a group of players clamoring to start a session.

The low pricing of (most) indie games lets buyers feel free to make impulse or speculative purchases. I can't count how many games I've purchased simply because they were interesting, even though I knew I'd never find someone willing to play. I woundn't spend more than $20 for that. The $20 mark is some sort of unconscious trigger for some reason. This is why I haven't purchased Polaris. If Polaris cost $15, I'd already own a copy, even though I'd never play it -- it's just not my cup of tea, and I don't game with anyone who'd be really into it. For $15, though, I'd buy it just to read through it and examine the mechanics.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

I'm going to have to side with the cheapos here. (Except Joshua Bishop-Ruby, who is being an asshat.)

As an indie game publisher, I can't understand pricing your book any higher than enough to make exactly twice what it cost to make the book.

Here's a breakdown on The Shadow of Yesterday. After printing, and Lulu's price cut, I make $11.92 on each sale. (The book costs $24 from Lulu.) It's about the same cut from IPR - I may make as much as $12.50 there, but I'd have to do the math.

So I make less than half of cover cost per book - and that doesn't count everything I paid for art and other expenses. I don't add those in, as I know I'm accepting a higher cost per book going through Lulu. (My original reason for this was quality. No matter what was said above, I'm of the opinion that a Lulu book's binding quality is much better than your average book printed with a local or POD printer. I work there now, of course.)

Anyway, pricing it higher - it seems like you're trying to actually gouge the customer. And that doesn't make sense. It also doesn't make sense to me when anything costs more than twice the cost to make it - this isn't an issue of shame about indie games. It is, however, a bit of an issue about indie games and pride: I'm proud to have my customers. I respect them. I know many of them. They have chosen a quality product. Why do I want to screw them?

This isn't an attack on Joshua's point. I think he's right in that we should value our games and price them fairly to ourselves and to our consumers. Pricing TSOY for $15 would be as unfair as pricing it for $30.

I am a huge fan of all things open source and copyleft, and am actually kind of disappointed that so few indie-designers release a Creative Commons version of their game. In this respect, the indie-RPG scene compares very unfavourably with, say, the Interactive Fiction scene. ... If you have a normal job and RPG-design is not your main source of income, why not make your game as cheap as possible?

Hey Victor! I'm working on it, man. I did just release the revised edition of TSOY in Creative-Commons licensed text last night.

[Frank T]

I totally agree with Victor and Clinton. Also, I know a good many people already gulping at PtA's 20 bucks plus shipping. Here's a bit on "fair payment". See, I'm a lawyer. I'm just an employee with little experience, so they only charge € 175 per hour for me. When I'm finished with BARBAREN!, let's say I'll have put 300 hours of work into it. That sums up to a total of € 52,200. Adding € 800 for artwork and layout, that's € 53.000. Let's say I can sell 100 books of the German version, and I can print the books for € 8. So in order for me to get paid properly, that's € 538 per book. Right?

This is pretty naïve, of course. But so is the initial post. The question is: What are people willing to pay for your book? That's the only thing that matters, commercially. If you want high quality layout and printing, you got high overhead costs, so that makes it even harder for you to get some profit, since there are only so many people interested in buying your game.

Designing games is a hobby to me. I don't do it for the money. I do it because it pleases me. And if, some day, I will hold the book in my hands, I will really sell 100 copies – that will be my payment.

No offence, Josh, but getting fair payment for the work you put into an Indie RPG? Boy, not even the rates I got when I was still a student chained to the copier in the cellars deep below some law firm. Get real.