A .PDF query

[Michael Hopcroft]

I have a query for the folks who regularly buy .pDF RPG's -- what's the most you think people would be willing to pay for a complete RPG in .PDF format?

I have yet to see one over $10 with one exception that charged $20 for an enormous (almost bloated) book.

Also, does it make any difference whether it comes on a CD_R or whether it comes as a downloadavble file?

[Jake Norwood]

I don't know about everyone else, but $10 should be the "good faith" limit on this. Heck, I paid $10 for inspectres, and I'm glad I've got it, but it (as far as I know) was made at no expense (overhead-wise), is only 42 pages long, has no illustrations, and I have to print it out on my paper with my ink...

Compare that to a 270 page hardcover with illustrations at $30, and there's no comparison. For $10 bucks I got a LOT less then 1/3 of a traditional RPG book, paid to a company with no overhead, no shipping, no art expenses, no...anything.

Now, I think InSpectres is a great game, and I don't regret the $10 at all (well, not much at least), but I do think that it's too much for too little. InSpectres should sell, IMO, for $5, as with anything else under 100 pages on the net, unless it's got some *wicked* art and content. Hell, if it's got any art... I know that art isn't part of the substance of a game, but if I'm paying up an hour or two of my work/paycheck, I want something better than a PDF'd word document.

So what am I saying? If you're going to charge money, make it worth it on multiple levels. And I love inspectres...really...I just think that had I seen it at my FLGS I would have laughed my butt off..."you want $10...for this!"

If you're asking for money, justify it first. Give us something worth our cash. We really did work for it, and it costs you nothing.

Jake

[Valamir]

Compare that to a 270 page hardcover with illustrations at $30, and there's no comparison. For $10 bucks I got a LOT less then 1/3 of a traditional RPG book, paid to a company with no overhead, no shipping, no art expenses, no...anything.

Well, IMO Jake, its the $30 book thats priced wrong (too low), not the $10 pdf.  

Gamers routinely spend $50-$75 for PC and console game cartridges...games that won't even be playable 4 or 5 years from now when they've moved to new technology.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

I don't know about everyone else, but $10 should be the "good faith" limit on this. Heck, I paid $10 for inspectres, and I'm glad I've got it, but it (as far as I know) was made at no expense (overhead-wise), is only 42 pages long, has no illustrations, and I have to print it out on my paper with my ink...

Give us something worth our cash. We really did work for it, and it costs you nothing.

I have to say, I disagree here. The cost involved is pretty high:
- lots of thought and design,
- destruction of/injury to personal relationships as work goes on,
- time, time, and more time.

People like Jared and Ron that have jobs they go to every day to pay the bills still have to work in order to produce game output. I've had this argument used against me before: "But, you don't have to work on that." Yep - I do. It's my second job.

Pricing that sort of immeasurable work is hard. I'm planning on pricing Paladin according to how many words are in it, which I think is fair. It's a direct ratio of work to payment.

Right now, I'm looking at around 8000 words. It'll probably be more, but we'll use that number. Given that, if I charge $8, that's $0.001/word you're paying. That doesn't sound half bad, and considering we're writing for a smaller market - and prices tend to rise in a smaller market - if I get 30 customers, I'm making the low end of the freelance market ($0.03/word).

I don't see much that's unfair in that. The hardcopy RPG market and the online RPG publishing market are both underpriced. Ain't nobody around here making less than $5/hour - if a game isn't worth 2 hours work, why are you buying it?

[Jared A. Sorensen]

It's a tough call but I've decided that rather than charge by the number of pages/illos it has (which is how you get 500 page books of NOTHING), I do it this way:

Main Book= $10 PDF and twice that for hardcopy/bound version.
Supplement= 1/2 price of the main book.

I look up at my shelves of books...and I look at a game like Deadlands. I paid about $10 for it (hardcover, COLOR cover...BROM cover...~180 pages, "pro" layout, illustrations -- it's a real game...heck, it even won an Origins award). I paid too much for Deadlands. I will never play it or run it. It's lame.

Is InSpectres an amateur product? Yup.
Does it look that way? Yup.
But dammit, those 42 pages mean something. And you can play it, as-written, out of the box.

- J

[Victor Gijsbers]

Gamers routinely spend $50-$75 for PC and console game cartridges...games that won't even be playable 4 or 5 years from now when they've moved to new technology.

Don't forget how much work there's in such a game. There are tons and tons of art, music, sound effects, and game design in it. Much more than in your regular pen & paper RPG. A game like Baldur's Gate 2, with it's 100+ hours worth of gameplay... I shudder to think how much work has been done to make it.

And don't forget that publishers of PC games lose a lot of income to illegal copying of their games, while publishers of books don't lose nearly that much. So I think it's reasonable that a PC Game is more expensive than a book-based game.

[Mike Holmes]

The actual overhead on a $20 book is less than $10, right? I'm assuming here that the seller is not using the advantageous distribution system to sell more copies, but selling online as Jared is doing (In the other case we are talking apples and oranges)? So the $20 book makes more than $10 per copy sold. Jared's makes less than that at $10 per copy, which explains the difference in cost. And InSpectres may be better material than the $20 game, thus increasing it's value to cost ratio.

Sounds like a deal to me.

Mike

[Valamir]

Don't forget how much work there's in such a game. There are tons and tons of art, music, sound effects, and game design in it. Much more than in your regular pen & paper RPG. A game like Baldur's Gate 2, with it's 100+ hours worth of gameplay... I shudder to think how much work has been done to make it.

Doesn't matter.  Consumers aren't interested in reimbursing producers for the producers costs.  Consumers are interested in paying a price consistant with their evaluation of the products utility to them.  If a PC gamer though a PC game was only worth $10, he wouldn't want to pay more regardless of how many 1000s of man hours went into it.  

Both computer games and TT RPGs are nothing more than ways for consumers to spend their liesure time.  If an RPG is viewed as giving them as many hours of enjoyment and the same level of enjoyment as a PC game, they'll pay the same amount.  If they don't, they won't.

By pricing RPGs so low producers are basically sending a single to the consumer saying "you won't enjoy our game as much as you would Dungeon Siege, so we'll charge less".  If you're selling Mercedes you shouldn't price it like an Escort.

And don't forget that publishers of PC games lose a lot of income to illegal copying of their games, while publishers of books don't lose nearly that much. So I think it's reasonable that a PC Game is more expensive than a book-based game.

And RPG producers lose a lot of income to players who just bum the GM's copy for character creation and never buy the book themselves.  

Further the price of hard and soft cover novels has risen far faster than the cost of RPG books over the last 20 years.  Why is that?  I think a big reason is the producers of RPGs themselves have been pricing their product unnecessarily low for years.

I don't know, perhaps this ties into that "gamer insecurities" thread, but in my book, if you're proud of your product...price it like your damn well proud of your product.

[Jake Norwood]

Hey ya'll...

First off, I'm not attacking Jared or anyone else for how they price their games. Yes, as I said, InSpectres is a wonderful game (which many more expensive games are not). Are all 42 of those pages wonderful, usable material? Yes.

Are full-sized RPG books underpriced? Yeah, I'd say so, but what are you gonna do...really? Computer games take a lot more work to make. That's a given. We customers pay more for RPGs? A lot of folks say so, but when I saw that the Wheel of Time game and SW d20 were $40 and $35 respectively, despite the beautiful interiors, I said "hell no." Now every game at your FLGS is up to $30, and as a current member of the "industry" I get that. It makes sense to me...but as a customer I think it sucks. So I buy a LOT less games now. Do I buy better games? I hope so.

So what am I saying? Let's say TROS should be priced at $50 (I wouldn't pay $50 for any game unless it did my dishes, too, but hey). It's 272 pages, one color plate, hardcover (yeah, hardback is important to me), and a B&W drawing on almost every 2 page spread. The print quality is excellent (not on the pre-release copies, but on the new ones that only I've seen...it's nice, trust me).

As a side note, there mere fact that it's available in any kind of traditional format means a greater cost of time, money, stress, grief, financial risk, and other stuff that PDF-only publishers have very little concept of. If all that's only worth a $10 return per book (which is way more than most folks ever actually get to see as a return on their book--the "average" is closer to 4, I think), then what justifies a $9 profit per book to an indie PDF publisher?

Can anyone really say that a 50 page PDF with no bells and whistles at all, including the "bell and whistle" of a publisher-provided hardcopy is worth 1/5th of the so called value found in a full-size commercial game of quality (lets say, for argument's sake, that TROS is just that)? I, the consumer, don't think that it is. Maybe I'm a cheapskate, but I'm also a part of the market.

There is a caveat to all of this of course--something is worth exactly as much as someone else will pay for it. So if you want to price your 50 page pdf'ed Word-doc for $10 or for $100 bucks, than good for you if people will pay that. Jared did it for 10, and he's very happy with that, and people are buying it, so I cannot and would not say that he's wrong. If folks will regularly pay $15 for it, then do that. I will continue to gripe and think it's "not fair," which it isn't, but then again neither is life. As for me, I'll pay $5 for anything that I'm interested in as a PDF. I'll only pay $10 for something that I've *got* to have, such as InSpectres (and if I had realized how plain it was I might have wavered for a few days first, although I still would have gotten it, on Clinton's enthusiastic reccomendation alone).

The Hobby industry is a hobby industry. Paid or not, we're doing this for fun. Do we deserve to be sustained by it so that we can be an elite class of full-time game designers? I'd like to think so, but I know that the real answer is "no." Are $10 PDF games overpriced...most of them are most of the time. Are full-sized games underpriced? Only a little, some of the time, because I won't buy one for more. Stingy? Yeah...

Anyway, this was a long and probably scattered post that in all likelihood did very little to answer the initial question, so I'll hop off my horse now, quit preachin' like a jackass, and go back to trying to make 5 bucks a book on something that will take hundreds of manpower hours to create.

Jake

[rafael]

Hey, Michael.  Good question.

I was thinking about releasing a game as a PDF first, see if I could scrape together a little cash before printing it up.  Test the waters.

I figured five bucks would be good.  And I'd probably burn it on a cd, just because I can, and what the hell, with some good label art, it could be cool.  The cd burner cost me fifty bucks, and the labels are pretty cheap.  Ink's a little pricey, but I use that all the time anyhow, so it's not a big deal.  The disks are really cheap if you get 'em in bulk.  Thirty cents apiece, that kind of thing.  Get paper sleeves for them at some office supply store.  You can make a few bucks on each disk if you sell it that way (and don't forget postage).

As a consumer, I probably won't pay more than ten bucks for a PDF.

Basically, things are going to sell for what the market will bear, as Jake pointed out.  If I was putting out a game in PDF format, and it didn't have some incredible art, or if it wasn't really really long, I'd say five bucks was enough that I could get mine back in time.  If I thought I had created something really wicked, I'd say ten bucks.

-- Rafael

[Clinton R. Nixon]

I think we're all forgeting market size here:

Computer games have a market size ten times (I'm making this up, but most likely) the average role-playing game. Thus, a computer game maker can make $1 on each game and come out ahead of the role-playing game publisher making $4 per book.

Now, the role-playing game publisher has a market size 10 times (at least) than the average online indie game publisher. Thus, a traditional RPG publisher can make $4 on each book and still come out ahead of the indie guy making $9 per book.

If the indie guy sells ten copies, we're looking at:

Indie guy makes $90;
Traditional guy makes $400;
Computer guy makes $1000.

Jake -

Your points about "plain-ness" are valid as long as you judge a PDF by the standards of a hard-copy book. I like art as much as anyone else, but it takes more ink and more download time/HD space when used in a PDF. Jared decided to make Inspectres more spartan for the consumer - the game's easier to print and distribute.

[Seth L. Blumberg]

One consumer's opinion....

I think many PDF games are underpriced. $10 was exactly the right price point for InSpectres. I might have paid as much as $15, though reluctantly; $5 would have been too low for a game with that much buzz.

$30 is already too high, IMO, for a paper book. I am damned reluctant to buy glossy hardcover rulebooks. Anything above $35 had better be either the game of the fucking century, or a limited edition, or preferably both.

[Matt Snyder]

Your points about "plain-ness" are valid as long as you judge a PDF by the standards of a hard-copy book. I like art as much as anyone else, but it takes more ink and more download time/HD space when used in a PDF. Jared decided to make Inspectres more spartan for the consumer - the game's easier to print and distribute.

Jared's certainly not wrong in his decision to exclude art.  His game, his perogative. But, I think art or other graphic elements can be included in PDF documents without undue stress on the customer and/or his printer.  

If you're not going to include graphic elements of any kind, why bother w/ PDF at all? Why not a text file. Far slimmer memory-wise and no plug-in or reader required. You do PDF because it prints well first, is reasonably small second and because most folks can read it third. (I realize there are other reasons, like controlling the content, hyperlinks, and on and on, but most folks would agree these are the real reasons you distribute on PDF.) With those priorities, it seems silly to avoid art. Done well, art in a PDF can really make the production zing.

Yes, done poorly, the document bloats like a rotting carcass. But done well, you give customers a game that's worth having for $10 or more.

So, I guess I'm saying we should all do a better job on the production value and presentation of PDFs, and we'll get better games and, as designers, maybe make a few more nickels!

Matt

[Nathan]

Hello everyone,

Wow - this question is going to always cause friction.

Personally, I priced Eldritch Ass Kicking at $5 for PDF because it had a basic layout, a little art, and 24 pages of content. That content also is at a typeface of about 10, so it is a bit crammed in there. The game as a whole has sort of a "one shot" or "humorous" feel, although I have ran several sessions in a row, carrying over characters and keeping a little plotline about Taeron the Terrible intact.

Suddenly, though, Brett of PI Games is providing some art and a full color layout. I've got a guy in the UK providing me a nice color cover. I've got a guy locally that is drawing a couple of things, and I have another guy that is working on some rough drafts. When this thing is finished, I am going to charge more for it. I think it deserves it.

The question boils down to how much you feel your game is worth. I like that question.

But whether or not PDFs related to prices of hardcover products, I don't really care. This is a hobby. I want to have fun, and I want to spread the love. In a dream world, we would all collectively prep and offer suggestions on each other's PDF products -- so that in the end, we would be offering such a value that people would start perking up about PDF-only games.

Thanks,
Nathan Hill

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

This is fascinating ... we are really seeing a real-live market community develop before our eyes. Someone should be taking notes for a dissertation even as we speak.

One piece of data they may find interesting is that in 1998, when Sorcerer switched to a $10-on-the-barrelhead purchase, I picked $10 because it was the minimum permitted by the credit-card processer service I was using (and had no choice but to use).

What would I have done if the services of today were available, like Paypal, and I could set my price from $0.01 up? I really don't know.

Best,
Ron