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 every respect to our mainstream competition. And when we do that, we should get paid.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

Joshua wrote:
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.

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.)

Darren wrote:
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.

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

glyphmonkey wrote: 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.

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.

Ben wrote: 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.

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.

Victor wrote:
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?

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.

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

Hey! This is a moderator post.

Most people posting so far have completely failed to understand the difference between options and preferences.

As long as this thread is about options, then all is well.

However, a number of you are posting from the basis of defending your preferred choice among those options. And that's just bullshit - no one can tell you what to do, so you are not in danger. No one is oppressing you.

If you are irritated or upset by the topic at hand, or more accurately, by the viewpoints represented by others' posts, then I have serious moderator advice for you: you must develop the courage of your own convictions. That courage will permit you to post about the options you've chosen without attacking others. That courage permits you to post and let readers make their own choices.

But posting in irritation, outrage, or hurried confrontational explanations only arises from fear. The intensity of that fear is not courage, no matter how justified or satisfied you feel when posting.

As content moderator here, and arguably among the vanguard of constructive self-publishing in the hobby, I say this: I despise your fear. I'[ll stomp it out of the posts here with a mallet. Post your chosen options and your knowledge of the range of options, for others to understand. Don't defend them or attack others.

Best,
Ron

I think that Joshua has a point here, let me see if I can lay this out coherently.

Let's say that Joshua goes all out on his printing for Shock.  Glossy full-color pages, hard cover, whatever else.  At POD rates it costs him $15 a book.  Using Clinton's "double what it costs" scheme that's a $30 book.  The problem is that he would be introducing this book into a niche market (the indie RPG market) that has an expected price point closer to $20.

Joshua is going to have a hard time selling at $30, not because his game isn't worth $30, but because the customers are un-used to spending that much money on an Indie game no matter how good it looks.  This ends up being an uglier proposition for Joshua if, in addition to the added printing costs, he spent a similarly increased amount on editing, layout, and art.  He ends up with an extremely attractive, high quality product, and he can't recoup his expenses.  We don't even have to talk about his personal expenses here, this could be purely the expenses for things he farmed out.

I think part of the problem, and this I is something I think is interesting, is that until quite recently the technology didn't really exist for indie RPG producers to have a chance to produce books with the same physical qualities as the big boys.  So the indie producers have been pushing a "content over appearance" line for a long time, and have been tossing in a "and it's cheaper too!" line into the mix.  This is all well and good, and definitely true, but it presents problems for us now that we can produce giant glossy books (or probably will be able to in a year or two).

It seems to me that Joshua is rightly worried that we may be making this option difficult to pursue economically.  Now that we have the options to make books at least as pretty (and probably far prettier) than the big boys who get all those economy of scale niceities, we find ourselves in a position where it looks like no one can actually afford to do so.  Because there's a seemingly-entrenched impression (and there's plenty of evidence of it in this thread) that indie RPGs should be cheaper than RPGs from the big companies.

It seems to me that Joshua's position is similar to the one that the Forge has been pushing for a while.  In the same way that "You're work is good!  Don't give it away, sell it because it's worth money."  Josh is saying "Don't under-sell yourself, your work is worth more than $20."  Of course, as Ron pointed out above, it's all a matter of options.  If you want to give your work away, then you're free to do so.  If you want to sell your work for less than the market will bear, well you're free to do that too.  Discussion of what the market actually will bear?  Well, I just know that I'm not really qualified to speak to that...

Now, assuming that I'm reading Joshua correctly with the above, the only response I have is...  Well, I don't think it will actually turn out to be a problem, at least not in the long run.  It strikes me that I at least would pay $30~$40 on an indie game that really struck me as interesting, especially if it were also an attractive product physically.  What it will probably take is for someone to bite the bullet and go ahead and produce such a game so that we can all see how it works out in real life.  The downside, of course, being that whoever that is is going to be assuming some significant financial risk...

Thomas

Josh, I apologize for my rough tone.

I will take a break from the Forge for a few weeks. I have had too much of it lately.

- Frank

Just to be clear, Clinton, I am being an asshat out of love.

Indie games can go for $30+.  I have full faith that a lot of people at the Forge could produce something similar to Nobilis, and sell copies at that $50 price point, and I'd really like to see this happen.  However, no customer is going to buy a book -- regardless of the quality of its contents -- unless its presentation and production quality match the price tag.  There are very difficult things that can be done to increase the physical quality of our books, and there are also some massively easy things that can be done to increase that same quality.  I outlined some of those options beforehand.

(I have doubts that a first-edition game from an unknown designer could pull this off -- a Dogs 2nd Ed or a Compleat Sorcerer could do this handily.  My FLFS ain't even reaching for those numbers.)

One point that I haven't heard yet is ubiquity of players, and I'd hazard that this is one of the reasons why White Wolf and D&D can sell multiple $35 hardbacks for a single game -- customers know that they will be able to find a group to play with.  To a lesser extent this worked for Nobilis, in that the market it targetted (older gamers who knew what they liked) could also reliably expect to get their friends to play.  Except for a few titles, this isn't the case for indie gamebooks.  But, and here's the important "options" bit, this is something that can be addressed, either through game design, through packaging & presentation, or through general marketing.  Making the game seem more accessible, highlighting the "out of the box" nature of most indie games, including support for connecting groups (Clinton, would you mind if we slapped FindPlay icons onto the back covers?), fostering vibrant forum communities -- all of these things will reduce the "but I'll never play it" nonpurchase excuse.

Now, I'm looking at a $20 price point for FLFS at Con, and probably a slightly higher price point for online purchase and on the MSRP on the back cover (~$24).  I'm not specifically interested in making cash off of the project because at this rate of my own personal time investment, I'd need a blockbuster movie deal to break even.  I consider FLFS design to be my hobby, and I wouldn't dream of costing my time for it.  That stance may not be shared by other designers -- but on the other hand, I sincerely doubt I'll be (significantly) undercutting them, otherwise we should start criticizing all those damn freeformers for stealing all our sales.

Pricing Indie games is a thorny subject.  I've long been on record as being critical of under pricing indie games so I'm not going to rehash that here.  But there's one aspect of the pricing equation that's been left out of this discussion so far, and that is how vigorously are you personally planning to promote it.

If you're going to go the Luke Crane or Mike Miller route and you're out there on the convention circuit and you're pounding out demo after demo and your enthusiasm is getting people fired up.  And you're out there on the forum and blog circuit and you manage to walk that line between promotion and shilling and drum up interest and be involved.  Then you can take your basic "indie-rpg" price point and bump it up another $5.  Your sales efforts will overcome any loss of sales due to the price and can be easily justified as compensation for the sweat equity of being out there.  Hey...if you're a BW fan today and the only reason you gave it a shot was because you sat in on a phenomenal Luke Crane demo and now you have many hours of happy gaming behind you...then Luke (et.al.) did you a service by introducing you to something you enjoy.  That service is worthy of being compensated for.

On the other hand if you plan on taking a "if I build it, they will come" approach and you figure a couple of announcement on news boards and a website with a paypal link is about all the effort you're planning to do...Then you're probably better off just giving it away for free.  But if you really want to at least recoup some costs then you can take your basic price point and subtract $5 and rely on a couple of reviews to generate sufficient traffic and the "its cheap, so why not" attitude to capture a few sales.

Personally, I'd rather see folks in that second group just give it away and not have any costs to recoup by going with PDFs or the like because I do agree with Joshua that a flood of under priced product does set expectations too low.  There is one reason and one reason only why people in this thread think $30 is an unreasonable price for most Indie-rpgs.  Because they're used to seeing indie-rpgs at $15.  It has NOTHING to do with perceived value, or cost, or anything other than "wow, that's higher than what I'm used to seeing...therefor its too expensive".

If what gamers were used to seeing was $50 for mainstream RPGs and $30 for Indies...then $30 for the exact same book would seem entirely reasonable.

Don't believe me?  Just ask your American friends how many people are loving how cheap gas is now that its "only" $2.00/gallon.  When they were used to seeing $1.00 / $1.50 two bucks was outrageous.  Now that they've gotten used to $3.00 / $4.00, two bucks seems like a bargain.

Its all in the perception of what people expect and to the extent that under priced games set that expectation too low, they are counter productive.

For the record I also price at double the cost to produce, but instead of pricing the cover at double the cost, I recommend pricing the actual revenue received at double the cost.  This allows the book to be sold through distribution without losing your shirt.

Josh, dude: A|State.

Big, glossy hardcover.  Pretty cover.  Not $20 bucks.  Fits right in next to Blue Planet.

Me, It'll be a long time before I go that route, if at all, because it doesn't match what I want to do.  Death's Door is priced exactly where I want it, with the production values I want for it.  Other games out of BSP may look similar, may look totally different.  

There is no "indie" look, there is no "indie" price.  My shelf of indie games is all over the frickin' map for price, production, size, and the rest of it.  Some of them aren't worth as much as I paid for them, some of them are damn near priceless.

Design and produce the game you want.  Price it what you think it's worth.  People who agree will buy it, people who don't won't.

There's a parable in here somewhere about a man, his son and their donkey.

James

Assuming that you're charging enough to cover your costs, I think there are three angles to considering "what the market will bare."

1) What fans of Indie games perceive the value of your book to be;
2) What mainstream gamers perceive the value of your book to be;
3) What non-gamer perceive the value of your book to be.

Fans of Indie games will pay almost anything. You can charge pretty much whatever you want, and the Forge folks will likely pay. But the size of this market is small. (It's a tad bit more complicated than that, Indie fans will still compare your game to what's already out there, but let's ignore that.)

Mainstream gamers will always compare your book to the "Big Boys". It's important to consider these guys, otherwise you will be dooming your book to only a hundred or two sales fro the Indie crowd. The standard 300-page core book is selling for $55, I think. The standard 150/200-page supplement is going for $35. For these guys, the size of the book matters. We know its not true, but many gamers think quantity=quality. It's hard to tell these guys that a 120-page 6x9 book is going to give them the same pleasure as a 300-page 8.5x11.

I'll tell you, I was VERY nervous charging $24 for The Mountain Witch. When you go over the $25 mark, you start getting compared with those 150/200 page 8.5x11 supplements. This is something important to keep in mind. Because of this, my opinion is that we shouldn't be selling our books for over $25. That's a little less than 50% of the price of a big core rulebook.

Lastly, non-gamers. I know we don't sell that many to non-gamers, but isn't that a big drive right now, to open up the hobby? My opinion is that non-gamers won't value our books as much as a gamer would. My opinion is that they would think that a $20-$25 book in the 120-page 6x9 size to be "a lot". Again, that's my opinion.

So to sum it up, I think are current pricing scheme, $15-$25, is just about right.

timfire wrote: Lastly, non-gamers. I know we don't sell that many to non-gamers, but isn't that a big drive right now, to open up the hobby? My opinion is that non-gamers won't value our books as much as a gamer would. My opinion is that they would think that a $20-$25 book in the 120-page 6x9 size to be "a lot". Again, that's my opinion.

Joshua wrote:
Actually, I think we could probably get a greater price out of non-gamers, but it would require changing the packaging and presentation.  Non-gamers will see your typical gamebook as "just a book" and expect to pay paperback price.  But non-gamers are also very used to paying $40-$60 for games.

Joshua wrote:
One point that I haven't heard yet is ubiquity of players, and I'd hazard that this is one of the reasons why White Wolf and D&D can sell multiple $35 hardbacks for a single game -- customers know that they will be able to find a group to play with.

wrote: There is one reason and one reason only why people in this thread think $30 is an unreasonable price for most Indie-rpgs.  Because they're used to seeing indie-rpgs at $15.  It has NOTHING to do with perceived value, or cost, or anything other than "wow, that's higher than what I'm used to seeing...therefor its too expensive".

Blan wrote: Big, glossy hardcover.  Pretty cover.  Not $20 bucks.

Oh no, people pay $40-60 for boardgames, trust me.  Or at least they used to when I managed a GameKeeper/WotC store.  There are the low-end versions of Clue/Monopoly/Whatever at $20, and there's even the children's games at $10-$15, but there are a whole lot of games up into the $40 and $60 marks.  This is especially the case for special editions, but that's relatively tangential.

Generally speaking, the more "adult" the game is, the higher the price range.  Which means that party games, designed for a night of fun with you, your wife, and your four friends (sound familiar) are often sitting at the top.  I mean, Cranium had a $55 version and a $65 version for the longest time (admittedly, it had play-dough -- now there's a selling point) and it was a phenomenon at that price.  Other games like RoboRally went for a 'mere' $30 for the basic set, but then had three $20 expansions that people would return and buy within a week.

Joshua wrote:
Oh no, people pay $40-60 for boardgames, trust me.  Or at least they used to when I managed a GameKeeper/WotC store.  There are the low-end versions of Clue/Monopoly/Whatever at $20, and there's even the children's games at $10-$15, but there are a whole lot of games up into the $40 and $60 marks.  This is especially the case for special editions, but that's relatively tangential.

This is merely my opinion as a consumer:

If IPR (or someone) released a big bundle of games -- the popular ones: Sorceror, Burning Wheel, Mountain Witch, Primetime Adventures, etc etc -- priced at about, oh, $100, I'd buy that in a minute.

Maybe I'm an unusual member of the target consumers, maybe not.  A lot of people thought it was crazy to put out a big dungeon adventure for a hundred bucks, too, but it sold like crazy.

Cheers,
Roger

Before there was a WotC takeover, there were GameKeeper stores, whose foundations were solidly built on jigsaw puzzles, playing cards, and chess sets.  Then party games, too.  The typical customer was not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination.

(Then Pokemon came along, and GameKeeper got bought out by WotC, and then bought out by Hasbro, and then dissolved.  The End.)

On topic: packaging for games, including printed boxes and included dice, and constructing the package and all, can be rather expensive, but there are corners to be cut.  I'm sure guildofblades can point out a lot of them.  I think a lot of RPGs could easily be repackaged to be marketted alongside boxed games -- hell, that's how D&D got so big, right, with the Red Box or whatever?  Matt's Galactic sounds prime for such an application.  There was a board game called Heroquest that used minis and could easily be expanded into an RPG.  But the boxed package makes the game seem like it's more than "just a book."

This is interesting. Two quick points...

Firstly, this seems like a rather American-centric discussion. Which is fine, if that's the market you're aiming for. Here in London, I tend to prefer games that are either a. available in PDF form or b. cheap enough so that, when they're shipped to the UK, they're still affordable.

(I'll run an indie game at Dragonmeet in London this year. I'll choose one I like and I'll almost certainly recommend that players buy it at the end of the game, but I'll want to choose one that I think the players are likely to buy.)

Secondly...if I'm going to pay over twenty dollars for a game, I'd like to get a book that keeps me occupied for a while. I've bought games that, although they look fantastic, I'd finished reading within an hour. I'm obviously not suggesting going in the White Wolf direction - I skip all the bloody awful fan-fiction anyway - but it's good if the game is well-written enough to keep me reading and rereading.

And could I just quickly make the point that I completely disagree that fans of indie games will pay anything. I absolutely won't.

And again: nice discussion. Lots of food for thought. Thanks.

Graham

Valamir wrote:
Pricing Indie games is a thorny subject. I've long been on record as being critical of under pricing indie games so I'm not going to rehash that here.

Joshua wrote: I have full faith that a lot of people at the Forge could produce something similar to Nobilis, and sell copies at that $50 price point

Arrrrghhh ...

No one benefits from a "I'll show you mine" exchange of personal consumer preferences.

Joshua, this thread has lots of good in it - but I'm saying that you have to provide focus now, or it's going to get a waffle-print boot up its ass on the way to closure.

Best,
Ron

I disagree with Josh's points pretty much wholesale. I think that one of the greatest facets of the ethos of the Forge and the small press game "movement" has been "price your game at what you feel it's worth." What an excellent piece of advice for artists!

I get endless --neverfuckingending-- second person second guessing about my pricing practices for Burning Wheel. I priced my game the way I did in order to maximize my competitive edge. It was a decision I  made after great consideration. It is not the only aspect of BW's appeal, but I know that the price is often the final tipping point to get a prospective player to give it a try.

And lest there be any doubt, I know what I'm talking about. I've sold 2300 copies of BW in three years -- and that includes 8 months when it was out of print. An average of 6 copies a day. So rather than ranting about how undervalued small press rpgs are, look at your own numbers and ask yourself why you haven't moved a tenth of that.

Do I get paid by BW for writing it? No. For me, such an expense would double the cost of production and price BW right out of the market.

As Alexander said, we've got a long way to go baby -- and as small press we do have something to prove. And I do not believe that simply self-publishing a single title is the way to go about paying one's self a salary. I'm not saying there isn't profit, but that's not the same thing as a living wage. I would love to pay myself a salary, but I do not think that up-pricing books to "what the market will bear" is the way to do it.

Price your books for what you think they're worth.

-L

>>I'm not saying there isn't profit, but that's not the same thing as a living wage. I would love to pay myself a salary, but I do not think that up-pricing books to "what the market will bear" is the way to do it.<<

There is not a company in the entire hobby game industry, excepting maybe a purely TCG publisher than can support salaried staff one just one title, much less an RPG title. We had to get more than 40 titles in print before we could go full time.

As for pricing, you have to price a product so you can make a profit. Exactly how much that price should be will depend one your production methology and what your target core market is. So there is no one ideal pricing strategy. All I can say is it is easily possible to overprice yourself, but its also possible to under price yourself as well. Go to far either way and it can hurt sales.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com

Everyone shut up until Joshua tells us what we're supposed to be discussing.

Ron

Thanks, Ron. I had to clean the house for a party and the thread went crazygonuts.

I see a couple of arguments here. Some are more articulate ways of saying what I'm saying. Some are not.

1: Indie games have to be published more professionally than they are if the prices are going to go up.

2: This is a hobby. I get paid by doing it and not losing money.

3: You should price your books at the value you feel is comfortable.

4: We can price our books lower than mainstream publishers and should set the market for them, competing on price.

5: Indie games are unfamiliar and should therefore be priced to customers who don't already trust the product.

My responses:

1: This is what I'm saying. We have to be comforatble charging what we're charging. This does not mean sacrificing your product's economic viability by pricing it too low, though. It means making the products better. If you feel like you can sell your game for $10, do you think you'll lose any customers if you sell at $11? Because that will enhance your ability to make the next game. I can see a value for low-priced Forge games. But they shouldn't be set arbitrarily low at $10. Think about every dollar, and if you think your game won't sell for $11, make it a dollar better.

2: For some of us, this is not a hobby. This is art. Hobbyists do things for their own benefit, maybe sharing technique with each other. Artists make something to share with the world. It costs an artist a lot to make something good. Time, effort, and a constant fight with conservative thought all go into creating something new. When that effort makes good, there should be a mechanical benefit to the artist.

3: I can't tell you how to price your games. Not effectively. I'm not talking about price fixing or some crap like that.

4: Competing on price with a volume producer? That seems like a losing battle, if ever they even notice.

5: There's a lot of work to do on publicity. I don't know how to make it work economically, but I bet we could figure out some stuff. In any event, I'm not sure that the best solution is to charge so little that people pay us in pocket change. In any event, Luke, you've raised your price to be just exactly what I'm talking  about, so I don't know how you could really be disagreeing.

So what I'm getting at here is that stuff like A|State is showing us the way in some ways. I think the fact that it looks good beside Blue Planet isn't much of a selling point — that's called "blending in" — but the fact that it's so well produced is a light to us all. Burning Wheel is a beautiful product with excellent rep. Let's make games like that and charge like Luke does.

For all of modern history, it's been a controversial thing to say that artists should get paid in money. In the information age, we're the people who control the biggest product.

1: Indie games have to be published more professionally than they are if the prices are going to go up.

I'm confident in my own mind that a|state (to use this as an example, as it is, unsurprisingly, the product I'm most familiar with) is priced a point which reflects the content and production values. Had a different distribution strategy been adopted from the outset, it may have been economically viable to set the price point lower, but the business plan dictated that the price point was:

a) Fair, given the content and quality

and

b) Comparable with similarly sized/produced products already out there in the marketplace.

All in all, I'm comfortable with the price point for a|state, gievn its current form.

2: This is a hobby. I get paid by doing it and not losing money.

I've heard from other people who have produced games in the past (mainly in the UK scene) that they wished they had set their price even a pound or two higher, as they felt they were underselling their product and even a modest increase in price would not have adversely affected sales and given a boost to their plans for further games/supplements. I am, I admit, primarily involved in producing games because my love of the hobby and the creative elements of it. However, in order not to lose ones shirt, there must be a certain element of hard-headed business sense involved.

3: You should price your books at the value you feel is comfortable.

As per my comments above, I'm entirely comfortable with the pricing of my product. Then again, I'm taking very seriously the pricing of future products in light of recent (over the past year) experiences.

4: We can price our books lower than mainstream publishers and should set the market for them, competing on price.

I can't argue with this, as the economies of scale dictate that the larger publishers have a massive edge in this regard. Having been on the booth at GenCon, I had the opportunity to sample many different games, production styles and pricing policies. 'Dogs in the Vineyard', for example, is a lovely book, wonderful just to hold in your hands and look at. The price set for DitV is to me, entirely fair, given the effort that has gone in to it and the quality of production.

5: Indie games are unfamiliar and should therefore be priced to customers who don't already trust the product.

But could unfamiliarity not be reconcilled with a reasonable price point, coupled with some form of consumer discounting during an initial launch period while the game in question establishes itself as a quality product and gains familiarity with the consumer? And as Josh pointed out, publicity is a big thing. I think that places like the Forge go a long way to addressing this, as the booth at GenCon taught me. The sheer number of people who came, gamed and purchased was great to behold? How can we further harness this? Well, I think set-ups like Indie Press Revolution go a long way to helping the indie games scene have greater presence in the marketplace. Individually, we can't out-shout the big boys for a 'share of voice' (apologies for the terrible marketing-speak) but collectively we can have a voice that shouts louder than any one individual. For example, I'd be delighted to have an ad for any indie game in 'The Circular', the CGS eZine. Some purchasers of a|state may have come to the game via the mainstream and be unaware of all the great indie games out there. If we can help in some small way popularise the scene, then I'm all for that.

The kind of 'affiliate marketing' (OK, marketing is my day job, I'll admit that much) can and does provide many benefits. I'm thinking not along the lines of "How can I promote my game?" but "How can I promote my game AND the rest of the indie games scene at the same time?"

So what I'm getting at here is that stuff like A|State is showing us the way in some ways. I think the fact that it looks good beside Blue Planet isn't much of a selling point — that's called "blending in" — but the fact that it's so well produced is a light to us all. Burning Wheel is a beautiful product with excellent rep. Let's make games like that and charge like Luke does.

Malcolm wrote: The kind of 'affiliate marketing' (OK, marketing is my day job, I'll admit that much) can and does provide many benefits. I'm thinking not along the lines of "How can I promote my game?" but "How can I promote my game AND the rest of the indie games scene at the same time?"

This is just to notify that I've split off a couple of side topics into new threads:

<a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=17668">Making money, making a living discussing whether or not fair recompense for design work is a pipe dream or an insult to customers, response to Viktor, Clinton, and Frank here.
<a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=17655.0">[rant] Copyright, Creative Commons, and Artistic Freedom about why I don't recommend people use copyleft licences, response to Vikor here.

yrs--
--Ben

2: For some of us, this is not a hobby. This is art. Hobbyists do things for their own benefit, maybe sharing technique with each other. Artists make something to share with the world. It costs an artist a lot to make something good. Time, effort, and a constant fight with conservative thought all go into creating something new. When that effort makes good, there should be a mechanical benefit to the artist.

Hello,

Despite several people's efforts, this discussion just went into the land of Internet Opinion About Ineffable Things. It also went into the land of What I Feel About What You Said About Me.

Neither land is good.

This thread's closed now.

Best,
Ron