Quote from: Oddend on October 05, 2021, 05:12:02 PM

Quote from: Pat on October 05, 2021, 04:55:53 PM
That's why it's usually a good idea to refer to the specific branch of IP law, rather than talk about it in general.

This is correct, though one good general statement that can be made about "Intellectual Property" is that it's all made-up Clown World nonsense (unlike property).

I can see arguments for and against the concept in general, but the implementation has definitely become an entitlement money machine for big companies.

Quote from: Pat on October 05, 2021, 05:24:35 PM

Quote from: Oddend on October 05, 2021, 05:12:02 PM

Quote from: Pat on October 05, 2021, 04:55:53 PM
That's why it's usually a good idea to refer to the specific branch of IP law, rather than talk about it in general.

This is correct, though one good general statement that can be made about "Intellectual Property" is that it's all made-up Clown World nonsense (unlike property).

I can see arguments for and against the concept in general, but the implementation has definitely become an entitlement money machine for big companies.

On this we agree 1000%

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 05, 2021, 05:20:33 PM

Quote from: Oddend on October 05, 2021, 05:12:02 PM

Quote from: Pat on October 05, 2021, 04:55:53 PM
That's why it's usually a good idea to refer to the specific branch of IP law, rather than talk about it in general.

This is correct, though one good general statement that can be made about "Intellectual Property" is that it's all made-up Clown World nonsense (unlike property).

Not so IMHO, the author should have the right to profit from his work and not be at the whim of any big corporation/rich fuck that decides to profit from it and runs him from the market.

The problem is with the period granted thanks to the Rat. Because they didn't want the mouse and other IP's to fall into public domain.

And we might even discuss trademark law regarding intellectual works (movies, novels, comics, RPGs). Maybe it should also be restricted to the life of the Author?

Then the evil corporations would only have to murder the creator and would all be theirs!

Quote from: HappyDaze on October 05, 2021, 05:27:36 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 05, 2021, 05:20:33 PM

Quote from: Oddend on October 05, 2021, 05:12:02 PM

Quote from: Pat on October 05, 2021, 04:55:53 PM
That's why it's usually a good idea to refer to the specific branch of IP law, rather than talk about it in general.

This is correct, though one good general statement that can be made about "Intellectual Property" is that it's all made-up Clown World nonsense (unlike property).

Not so IMHO, the author should have the right to profit from his work and not be at the whim of any big corporation/rich fuck that decides to profit from it and runs him from the market.

The problem is with the period granted thanks to the Rat. Because they didn't want the mouse and other IP's to fall into public domain.

And we might even discuss trademark law regarding intellectual works (movies, novels, comics, RPGs). Maybe it should also be restricted to the life of the Author?

Then the evil corporations would only have to murder the creator and would all be theirs!

Public Domain you dumbass. You're trully nothing but a troll, welcome to the ignore list.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 05, 2021, 05:29:31 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on October 05, 2021, 05:27:36 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 05, 2021, 05:20:33 PM

Quote from: Oddend on October 05, 2021, 05:12:02 PM

Quote from: Pat on October 05, 2021, 04:55:53 PM
That's why it's usually a good idea to refer to the specific branch of IP law, rather than talk about it in general.

This is correct, though one good general statement that can be made about "Intellectual Property" is that it's all made-up Clown World nonsense (unlike property).

Not so IMHO, the author should have the right to profit from his work and not be at the whim of any big corporation/rich fuck that decides to profit from it and runs him from the market.

The problem is with the period granted thanks to the Rat. Because they didn't want the mouse and other IP's to fall into public domain.

And we might even discuss trademark law regarding intellectual works (movies, novels, comics, RPGs). Maybe it should also be restricted to the life of the Author?

Then the evil corporations would only have to murder the creator and would all be theirs!

Public Domain you dumbass. You're trully nothing but a troll, welcome to the ignore list.

Oh no! I'm being ignored by a socialist. It must be because I have a dark taint.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 05, 2021, 01:02:01 PM
Something else to keep in mind:

Is piracy wholly or partly to blame for the ridiculous PDF prices? Or is it the other way around? Or is it a vicious circle?

I mean softcover $20 US and PDF $14 US? I've seen this stuff more than once, come on, once you made the PDF your cost for copy is zero.
...

The same amount of work went into creating the book whether it is a PDF, or a hardcopy.

Selling the hardcopy means you have to pay the printer, shipping, etc... It is a significant overhead cost incurred, not to mention the additional labor costs involved.

Plus a good pdf is not just a scan - there are additional labor costs involved when you get into fancy indexing, bookmarking, and making printer friendly versions, etc.

IMHO a PDF at 1/2 to 40% the hardcopy print price, the author/publisher is just cutting out the margin they would lose anyway to printing and shipping.


And that is assuming that they are selling direct, and not having to pay any royalties.

Are you like Venger and self publish everything? Someone like him can maximize his margin.

Or do you have to cut the author a royalty like Pundit probably gets? Then the publishers margin goes down.

Did you pay for freelance or staff writers? Their payment is a fixed upfront cost that has to be recouped over time. Which is why you see PDFs over 50% of book price - they are recouping their upfront costs.

If they sell a hardcopy to a FLGS, big Box, or Amazon, they are buying the book at a 40% discount off of MSRP at least. But you still get to pay the same printing and shipping costs. Huzzah! So the margins go down even more!

Bundling a PDF download with a print copy - you are actually getting a Discounted PDF, as they are absorbing the costs associated with PDF features that people like, outlined above. (Or if they are only charging slightly more then they are recouping the additional costs of making a good PDF as outlined above)

Discounting the PDF to less than 40% of print, and now they are making even less than the margin they get from a Print copy. When they have put in the same amount of work to get to that point.

PDFs 1/5 the cost of the hardcopy are screaming deals when one considers the actual amount of effort it takes to create the product. And are usually only done if the author/publisher is willing to take less margin (usually calculating that they will make it up in volume) or sales of the product have slowed to a point that heavily discounting the PDF makes sense to keep some interest and cashflow coming in from the product.

I'm sure someone with more knowledge of book selling/printing can correct me if my numbers are off, but I believe the underlying economic realities are sound.

Do some companies calculate things so that they can charge the maximum of what the market is willing to bear? Yes, they do.

But even for a small guy like Venger, he has to deal with the economic realities of not going broke.

People should be compensated for their work. And usually a lot more work goes into making the things that we like than is obvious at first glance.

Quote from: Jaeger on October 05, 2021, 05:35:20 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 05, 2021, 01:02:01 PM
Something else to keep in mind:

Is piracy wholly or partly to blame for the ridiculous PDF prices? Or is it the other way around? Or is it a vicious circle?

I mean softcover $20 US and PDF $14 US? I've seen this stuff more than once, come on, once you made the PDF your cost for copy is zero.
...

The same amount of work went into creating the book whether it is a PDF, or a hardcopy.

Selling the hardcopy means you have to pay the printer, shipping, etc... It is a significant overhead cost incurred, not to mention the additional labor costs involved.

Plus a good pdf is not just a scan - there are additional labor costs involved when you get into fancy indexing, bookmarking, and making printer friendly versions, etc.

IMHO a PDF at 1/2 to 40% the hardcopy print price, the author/publisher is just cutting out the margin they would lose anyway to printing and shipping.


And that is assuming that they are selling direct, and not having to pay any royalties.

Are you like Venger and self publish everything? Someone like him can maximize his margin.

Or do you have to cut the author a royalty like Pundit probably gets? Then the publishers margin goes down.

Did you pay for freelance or staff writers? Their payment is a fixed upfront cost that has to be recouped over time. Which is why you see PDFs over 50% of book price - they are recouping their upfront costs.

If they sell a hardcopy to a FLGS, big Box, or Amazon, they are buying the book at a 40% discount off of MSRP at least. So the margins go down even more!

Bundling a PDF download with a print copy - you are actually getting a Discounted PDF, as they are absorbing the costs associated with PDF features that people like, outlined above.

Discounting the PDF to less than 40% of print, and now they are making even less than the margin they get from a Print copy. When they have put in the same amount of work to get to that point.

PDFs 1/5 the cost of the hardcopy are screaming deals when one considers the actual amount of effort it takes to create the product. And are usually only done if the author/publisher is willing to take less margin (usually calculating that they will make it up in volume) or sales of the product have slowed to a point that heavily discounting the PDF makes sense to keep some interest and cashflow coming in from the product.

I'm sure someone with more knowledge of book selling/printing can correct me if my numbers are off, but I believe the underlying economic realities are sound.

Yes work goes into everythin, never said otherwise, but once you have the product you're not paying those costs anymore, hence why those are fixed costs.

So you can make some math and decide how many PDFs you want to sell to pay those costs. You can divide between 1 and a million, your costs remain the same, your marging too, you just take longer recuperating your initial investment.

A first time developer selfpublishing might expect nobody want's to buy his shit so it might be smart to lower the price to make it less of a risk for the buyer.

An established brand like D&D with Hasbro megabucks behind could stretch the recuperating period, only reasons they don't it's because the market pays their price and they have investors to please.

Quote from: Jaeger on October 05, 2021, 05:35:20 PM
I'm sure someone with more knowledge of book selling/printing can correct me if my numbers are off, but I believe the underlying economic realities are sound.

One thing that's different is the unit cost to manufacture. A print publisher who sends out review copies is having to pay the print costs for each one, while a PDF publisher who sends out review copies is basically just pressing a button. (The cost isn't zero, but it's relatively small and the incremental cost for each new unit is tiny.)

This doesn't just impact comped copies, but also promotions and the long tail. The calculation is very different if you have an opportunity to sell your books some place with massive exposure, but the venue requires serious discounts. A print publisher will have a threshold below which each copy costs them money, while to an electronic publisher it's all gravy. Compare Walmart to Humble Bundle; Walmart insistence on low prices is known to break companies, but it can be great exposure to a wider audience with little long-term downside for a PDF publisher, even if everyone pays only $1.

Print also requires physical inventories, which means storage costs, transportation, and taxes that encourage publishers to pulp books. This makes it very hard to keep all but the bestselling old titles in print, whereas a timeless PDF can keep selling for decades. Even if it's a tiny trickle of sales, if you have a large enough catalog, it can add up to serious money. Electronic publishers also don't have to worry about the second hand market cannibalizing sales.

There are some downsides to electronic, like piracy, but they're generally a lot less.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 05, 2021, 05:43:38 PM
Yes work goes into everythin, never said otherwise, but once you have the product you're not paying those costs anymore, hence why those are fixed costs.

So you can make some math and decide how many PDFs you want to sell to pay those costs. You can divide between 1 and a million, your costs remain the same, your marging too, you just take longer recuperating your initial investment.

This assumes that every PDF will keep selling steadily forever, which I'm sure is not true. For most PDF products, there is only a small number of copies (far less than a million) that you will sell ever. The sales in the first two years might be 80% of the sales ever. Thus, leaving it on the catalogs for another ten years might not change the total sales by more than a tiny fraction. Once the core market of users is reached, additional sales get less and less likely.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 05, 2021, 05:43:38 PM
Yes work goes into everythin, never said otherwise, but once you have the product you're not paying those costs anymore, hence why those are fixed costs. ...

But you do have to recoup those costs, and turn a decent profit if you want to have the ready capital to repeat the process again with less financial risk.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 05, 2021, 05:43:38 PM
...
An established brand like D&D with Hasbro megabucks behind could stretch the recuperating period, only reasons they don't it's because the market pays their price and they have investors to please.

Even a self-publisher has an investor to please: Himself.

They need an adequate income stream to not only cover his personal overhead, a.k.a., eat. But to also to allow him to create future product with less financial risk.

Those are not small considerations, for a self-publisher like Venger, or even someone like Pundit working for royalties.

The more an author or publisher is made financially secure by recouping a decent profit in a timely manner: The more risk they are able to take on creative projects.

Plus everything Pat just said.

Only someone not concerned (for various reasons) with the costs involved, would not want to be adequately compensated for their efforts in a timely fashion.

Quote from: jhkim on October 05, 2021, 06:38:04 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 05, 2021, 05:43:38 PM
Yes work goes into everythin, never said otherwise, but once you have the product you're not paying those costs anymore, hence why those are fixed costs.

So you can make some math and decide how many PDFs you want to sell to pay those costs. You can divide between 1 and a million, your costs remain the same, your marging too, you just take longer recuperating your initial investment.

This assumes that every PDF will keep selling steadily forever, which I'm sure is not true. For most PDF products, there is only a small number of copies (far less than a million) that you will sell ever. The sales in the first two years might be 80% of the sales ever. Thus, leaving it on the catalogs for another ten years might not change the total sales by more than a tiny fraction. Once the core market of users is reached, additional sales get less and less likely.

Perhaps pdf releases could be set to have their price lowered over time. Full cost for 1st year of release, 25% off for the next two years, 50% off for two more, and then free after 5 years...

Just random percents and time blocks, but it's just a rough idea.

One of the realities of the 2010+ TTRPG game market is that players aren't going to pay to look at your rules. Regardless of what you think about that, RPG book publishers should be open to freely sharing the lion's share of their rules content from a book.

That being said, I'm surprised more don't make more of an effort at providing specific tiers of content. Give me the RPGBOOK_SampleEdition.pdf, make it black and white, minimal artwork, no hyperlinking, etc. If that's what gets out there on a torrent site or Trove-clone? So be it.

Meanwhile, the TTRPG hobby is full of people with disposable income who like value added stuff, so while you're giving away the basic bitch version, you sell your full-color, full-artwork pdf, with hyperlinking and all the other bells and whistles. Put the ads for this product right inside your sample. Make people see the difference. There are a lot of people who want to support work they like, but first you've got to get them playing.

Quote from: jhkim on October 05, 2021, 06:38:04 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 05, 2021, 05:43:38 PM
Yes work goes into everythin, never said otherwise, but once you have the product you're not paying those costs anymore, hence why those are fixed costs.

So you can make some math and decide how many PDFs you want to sell to pay those costs. You can divide between 1 and a million, your costs remain the same, your marging too, you just take longer recuperating your initial investment.

This assumes that every PDF will keep selling steadily forever, which I'm sure is not true. For most PDF products, there is only a small number of copies (far less than a million) that you will sell ever. The sales in the first two years might be 80% of the sales ever. Thus, leaving it on the catalogs for another ten years might not change the total sales by more than a tiny fraction. Once the core market of users is reached, additional sales get less and less likely.

So selling it at $10 bucks gives you what? Lets say 100,000 total units ever (I doubt your assertions since you don't provide anything to back them but lets run with them), this would mean $1,000,000 bucks for the PDF alone minus 40% for DT?. Lets say you sold the same ammount of print copies at $60 bucks, that's $6,000,000 minus what?

That's not much money if you've got only one game, if you've got several it starts to add.

From OneBookShelf:
Here are the thresholds needed to earn each badge:

    Copper: 51 units sold
    Silver: 101
    Electrum: 251
    Gold: 501
    Platinum: 1,001
    Mithral: 2,501
    Adamantine: 5,001

DriveThru best sellers:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/metal.php

https://onebookshelfpublisherservice.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360022135314-Bestseller-metals-and-how-to-earn-badges

Mind you those aren't great numbers but that doesn't mean that a PDF at $40 is justified. Especially since many fund the game by crowdfunding.

Quote from: Zelen on October 05, 2021, 06:47:30 PM
One of the realities of the 2010 TTRPG game market is that players aren't going to pay to look at your rules. Regardless of what you think about that, RPG book publishers should be open to freely sharing the lion's share of their rules content from a book.
...

It is not without reason that some of the most popular games/systems put their core rules out with an OGL, or real easy 3pp license of some kind.

This serves two purposes IMHO:

1: Satisfying fucking cheap-ass lazy players. But gains their goodwill.

2: Offset by the increased network effect gained amongst players and rules hacking GMs. And if the game is good enough you will see offshoot games pop-up increasing the network effect of your game and promoting sales of the overall "powered by Xrules" family of games that seems to work well for everyone.

Being a first mover is huge in RPG land. And if you are not a first mover, you need to do something to promote a networking effect to maintain interest in the game.

It also helps if the game is actually good...

Quote from: Zelen on October 05, 2021, 06:47:30 PM
One of the realities of the 2010+ TTRPG game market is that players aren't going to pay to look at your rules. Regardless of what you think about that, RPG book publishers should be open to freely sharing the lion's share of their rules content from a book.

That being said, I'm surprised more don't make more of an effort at providing specific tiers of content. Give me the RPGBOOK_SampleEdition.pdf, make it black and white, minimal artwork, no hyperlinking, etc. If that's what gets out there on a torrent site or Trove-clone? So be it.

Meanwhile, the TTRPG hobby is full of people with disposable income who like value added stuff, so while you're giving away the basic bitch version, you sell your full-color, full-artwork pdf, with hyperlinking and all the other bells and whistles. Put the ads for this product right inside your sample. Make people see the difference. There are a lot of people who want to support work they like, but first you've got to get them playing.

Yeah, make your RPGBOOK_SampleEdition.pdf with ZERO art beyond the cover I would think, at least in my first crowdfunding campaign it's how I'm going to make it. every backer from 5$ and above gets this right away, to show the game is complete and only needs the art.

Think this would go a long way into making people less nervous about not getting the game.

Another thing I'm doing is formatting it myself. It's sorta hard to learn to but nothing impossible if you know your way around a word processor.