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?

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

Jake Norwood wrote:
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.

Jake Norwood wrote: 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.

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

Valamir wrote: 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.

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

Lord Daemon wrote:
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.

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

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

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.

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.

Clinton R Nixon wrote:
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.

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

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

If anyone is interested, here is my thinking on the subject:

I believe that pdf files should be sold for less than $10 with 5 to 9 being optimal. This is just me but I don't want to take the chance of throwing away anymore than $10 on something I can't inspect. This IS why I would spend up to $30 on hardcovers. If you go to a bookstore or hobby shop you may not get a discount but atleast you get a glimpse of the artwork, layout, and general quality.

Our (Politically Incorrect Games / www.pigames.net) first official release is The Colonies RPG which will sell for $8.95. I would like to charge $7.95 to compete with Deep 7's Mean Streets (which is nice!!!!!), but I don't want to undercut our other game, Dystopia, when it ships as a paperback.

As far as worth goes, anyone who puts a lot of work into a project-whether it be writing, drawing, or layout deserves to be compensated by the purchaser. I would love to get $100 but who would pay it. I've put considerable time and effort into these projects just like Nathan and everyone else in this forum. Let's be realistic, the amount we can charge is determined by the market. Customers/fans will pay only what they are willing to risk. More than $10 maybe too much. Even 9 to 10 may be pushing it.

Let's also remember, people have to print on their own paper using their own ink, print quality is only as good as their printer, and download the file (large files on 56k is not fun). The benefits are instant access to the file (in most cases), hyperlinks to sections (hopefully), and full color without paying high prices. Balance.

Just my opinion,

Brett Bernstein
Politically Incorrect Games
www.pigames.net
"Games with 'tude."

About 5p.

When I pay for a physical product like a book, I am part paying for and hence lubricating the mechanisms of production, frex:
- the cutting down of trees and transportation of timber
- the processing of timber to woodpulp and paper
- the production and transportation of ink
- the actual print process and shipping of the product
- the rent and labour of the establishment that retails the product
- wages in all of the above
- capital asset depreciation of all of the above
- transportation costs for all of the above
- last and to some extent least, the labour of the artist

All of that is, to me, worth the £15-odd I stump at the counter. At least, I can understand WHY I am being asked for £15. I see no reason to pay an even remotely equivalent price for a purely electronic product. The capital investment in a physical paper product is orders of magnitude higher than that for a PDF, and hence the unit cost for an electronic product should be orders of magnitude lower, IMO.

I would consider $1 to be the absolute top end I would be willing to pay for purely electronic publishing.

I would consider $1 to be the absolute top end I would be willing to pay for purely electronic publishing.

But I have to ask the question. For those people who feel this way...could you explain exactly why you are placing a higher value on what are essentially formatting issues than you are on the actual content?

Valamir wrote: But I have to ask the question. For those people who feel this way...could you explain exactly why you are placing a higher value on what are essentially formatting issues than you are on the actual content?

Valamir wrote:
Of course how CC arrived at his price of $1 is unique in itself.

[note, however, CC failed to account for the fact that many of those same expenses and wages would accrue to the PDF side of the equation in the form of the paper and ink used to print out a copy at home].

No, most consumers operate under the principle of Utility, which is simply "How valuable is that item to me".

By this logic, we should be able to sell CC a book of meaningless drivel typed by a monkey for $19, since it is apparently the paper and binding that he derives enjoyment from (of course, judgeing from the Times Best Seller list...this could well be true for most readers).

But I have to ask the question. For those people who feel this way...could you explain exactly why you are placing a higher value on what are essentially formatting issues than you are on the actual content?

And now we've seen the "information is free" side of the debate. I can't say I agree at all, which is odd, since I've been a big proponent of open source and other free-information groups.

Information has a right to be free if the artist wants it to be, but it's not intrinsicly so. Where Contracycle's argument fell apart for me was when he started talking about artists' commissions. But - if the artist did his work on a computer, why would I pay for it? (according to his argument) The artist hasn't used any paper or canvas or paint or ink. The artist has spent only time (well, that and the investment for the computer, drawing pad, software, and more.)

Basically, Contracycle's argument boils down to a complete lack of respect for the work put into a product's ideas. I suppose that if you don't respect intellectual labor, it doesn't make sense to pay for it.

I dunno. I'm not even going to bother arguing this further, because, to be honest, I'm incensed, and it's probably not a good idea for the admin to start a flame war.

contracycle wrote: Because I am aware of what I am paying for, and I won't pay the same rate for less investment. I respect the fact that an object was produced, shipped, marketted. I recognise the need to recompense the people who invested in this process. And I simply am not prepared to recompense a PDF printer-wannabe at a substantially, egregiously, higher rate of capital ROI just because they think I should.

I happily grant that it is relatively unusual, and it occurs in large part because I had to study business accounting. But, lots and lots of people study this sort of thing, its hardly unique knowledge. OTOH, I grant that most people don't think in those terms, they only think in personal cost/benefit terms. However, there is a knock-on effect here: if it becomes established that PDF's retail for about the same rate as printed products, and PDF's cost substantially less investment to produce... then print paper RPG's become even less economical as a business investment. You can get the volume of return for a substantially lower volume of investment, so PDF printing applies massive profit pressure to existing paper publishers. Perhaps SEP field material, for most, but this too has corrollaries - we should expect RPG production to shift more and more to PDF-only as profit competition starts to bite, which means that in the end we will also presumably lose the friendly local gaming store: either because it has no physical products to stock, or becuase the products it does carry need to be radically discounted to compete with the slightly cheaper PDF competition. And in that price cutting environment, all the advantages are with the PDF's, and the price of PDF's will eventually stabilise at (IMO) a handful or dollars at best after all.

Well, here's the thing. You say that if PDFs cost the same as printed products, then print RPGS become less economical. But like someone else already said, there's not much of a market for PDFs. I mean, it's there, but we're not talking about mp3s here -- it's not like everyone's going to start using PDFs instead of shelling out twenty or thirty bucks for printed games. Therefore, I really don't see PDFs exerting pressure to existing paper publishers. There's really no competition. So I really can't see the FLGS going away -- I mean, that's just really improbable.

pigames wrote:
Quality of publishing can often be confused with quality of content. A full color, cool looking book will generally sell better than a plain looking document. The "if it looks cool it must be good" attitude is an important factor to those wishing to sell their products.

Clinton R Nixon wrote: And now we've seen the "information is free" side of the debate. I can't say I agree at all, which is odd, since I've been a big proponent of open source and other free-information groups.

Information has a right to be free if the artist wants it to be, but it's not intrinsicly so. Where Contracycle's argument fell apart for me was when he started talking about artists' commissions.

But - if the artist did his work on a computer, why would I pay for it?

Basically, Contracycle's argument boils down to a complete lack of respect for the work put into a product's ideas. I suppose that if you don't respect intellectual labor, it doesn't make sense to pay for it.

deadguy wrote: Well, here's the thing. You say that if PDFs cost the same as printed products, then print RPGS become less economical. But like someone else already said, there's not much of a market for PDFs.

deleted accidental post

But this is capitalism, which does NOT recognise labour as a source of value.

All of these complex economic and pseudo-economic arguments are missing the point entirely. The only issue that really matters when pricing an item is "What will the market bear?" There is no correct price for any item, whether it be electronic or physical. The balancing issues are:

1. Getting the price high enough for perceived value

2. Keeping the price below the upper bounds of your audience's tolerances.

How much the product cost you to produce doesn't really play a factor in setting a price that will sell. The customer doesn't know and doesn't care. Selling the product to them only requires that price and perceived value are in accord.

Putting this concept into practice isn't easy. I know a fellow who has made millions trying to get companies to grasp this concept and put it into practice. General Motors is currently spending millions (a good deal of which is being paid to the fellow I know) trying to adapt their business practices to this reality (they have to, because Toyota and Ford already have, and a serious shakeup in the auto industry is in the works if GM doesn't get on the stick).

I don't think the local hobby stores have anything to worry about. PDFs will never replace print books for one simple reason - Piracy. Why would anyone pay for a PDF of D&D 3E if their good buddy can print one out for him, or simply email him the PDF?

Current PDF games can get away with it because their market is small. Most PDF games don't have the marketing capital behind them to sell 1000 or 10,000 copies. If each person that buys a PDF makes a copy for 2 friends, the loss to the game designer can be recooped by adding a couple bucks to the price. A mass market game put out by WOTC or White Wolf that sells 10,000 copies can not recoop the cost of 20,000 lost sales by raising the price of their game a couple bucks. And the more marketing a game has the more players it will likely have and the more people who will desire a copy. Thus, that 2 pirated copies per person suddenly turns to 4 or 5. If you doubt me, take a look at your gaming circle and ask, how many of them own a copy of a D&D players handbook? Now pick any small market game you've played and ask how many own that book? See what I mean?

If D&D was available only in PDF I guarantee one person per gaming circle would buy a copy and then give copies to the rest of the circle. At best, they may share the cost of the single purchase.

Therefore, even if you disregard teh intellectual value of a game, a PDF game requires a publisher to charge more than the cost of materials. This is also very common in the music/film industry if you need another example. A CD costs a few pennies to mass produce, but a CD or DVD will cost you $16 to $30 due to of piracy (or at least that's what the record companies claim).

,Matt Gwinn

I hate to say it but within a week of D&D 3e's release the bookwarzes sites were flooded with pdfs of it.

I'm thinking my case might be illustrative. In a week I'll have a 128-page e- book that is produsely illustarted (and that doesn;t count the color cover). I was told I was only lilkely to sell 200 copies total. Of course, this will be the same content as my print book, down to illustrations, but you'll have to print it yourself.

You can find a sample chapter on my website, but the sample is much bigger than the same chapter in the actual e-boiok is likely to be (according to my typesetter).

The question: How much do I charge? My etailers get 20% of my take, including the guy who'll be running my direct sales. If I set the price at $10 I get $8 to pay my royalties and build my capital. If I set it to $12 I get more -- but do I drive away sales? The same nbook in printed form will sell for $19.95.;

Which is better from the standpoint of the experienced marketed\r? Will people pay $12 for a e-book of this size?

I'd go for a rounder number. If you are going to be over 10 then you are going to be over ten. 12 is not a very magic number. You may as well charge 15.

Well, my view on pricing can be found elsewhere. I won't repeat that stuff here, but I will add this.

What would YOU be willing to pay. If you saw the teaser chapter for the first time, would its content and illustration get you fired up to pay $15...or is it...ho humm...well if it were $5 I might check it out...

Now I know, your going to say "but I'm biased". Of course you are. But if YOU who know and love the game aren't willing to say its worth $15 than its unlikely anyone else is going to think it is.

Note: I'm just picking $15 as a number, my point is simply this...don't sell yourself short. For niche markets like indie RPGs there are only so many potential buyers out there anyway. Reducing the price isn't going to suddenly attract hordes of outside interest.

If you think its great work...than price it like its great work...the catch is...it better actually be.

Bailey wrote: I'd go for a rounder number. If you are going to be over 10 then you are going to be over ten. 12 is not a very magic number. You may as well charge 15.

All,

Sorry to jump in late.

I have to go with Clinton on this point. The market size for computer games is very much larger than the market for hobby adventure games. Actually its probably more than ten times the size for more popularly targeted c-games. In addition, the production costs of viable computer games are high, much of the time a successful computer game has even had custom software designed for it.
Now to add in marketing and advertising (which can reach seven figures for many popular games) and tech support staff and you can see that the model is completely different. So when you see computer game costs you can be pretty sure that the retail price reflects a very small margin of profit for the company per piece.

Our business is primarily a grass roots business with a sprinkling of larger appeal. The pricing of most books in the industry is based on a simple equation,

[Production Cost (writers, artists, printing, etc) x2] to get the price that a distributor gets the book at (40% of the retail).

Not everybody uses this equation, some people add more or less to it but it is pretty generic.

If you were to raise the bar of prices of the products in the market it would probably hurt the marketplace overall in the short and medium range. That is not to say that a book with a higher production cost (that reflects itself in the quality of the book) shouldn't charge more. The amount of spending in the market does not necessarily expand because you raise prices. So what you might get is the same people buying fewer books and more risk per publisher, except for the Big Four.

Eugene Zee

All,

Forgot the part about the PDf. When you are selling a PDF you have less constraints. Forget about how great the game is when you are setting a price. Save that for actually promoting your game and you will see increased sales if you are able to communicate that better quality. Game quality will make more money within the sales process because it is less objective.
Instead use an objective fomula based on production quality to determine the price.
Here is a suggestion,
(X cents per word + cost of artwork) / possible number of books sold
In addition you should probably keep it between $5 and $15 unless it has some specific exceptional facet to it.

When I priced Kayfabe I based it on the following:

$125 for art
$100 for ability to sell at Gencon
$180 to print 50 copies

That averages $8.10 a copy, so I priced kayfabe at a nice round $7.95. I figured I could make up the difference in PDF sales (which I have done).

Not the best formula for calculating a price, but it's a fair price in my opinion.

,Matt G.