I think a big determining factor here is that we're talking about non-physical products, for one thing, which happen to have physical equivalents going for a certain price in the real world, second.

I think people react to the idea that they're basically paying for a bunch of pixels on the screen, no matter how many weeks/months of work went into producing the file on the author's/publisher's side of things. There's also the fact that, no matter how current the file type is (.PDF, for instance), you're essentially paying for a file that might get lost in computer crashes, become obsolete due to platform or software changes, or corporate marketing, or whatnot (whereas you can still hold a book in your hand 30 years after the purchase).

So there's a whole bunch of feelings that come along with the medium that puts it in contrast with the actual physical equivalent product, and points towards some given value people are willing or not willing to pay for it.

Quote from: flyingmice;430096We are not talking here about "people not being willing to pay much for something that they are most likely only going to look at a few times and never play". Christ! I'm in that category! This is the MAXIMUM some people will pay, NO MATTER THE UTILITY. That is a completely different mindset.

I guess I'm one of those people. $10 is pretty much the maximum I am likely to pay for a PDF because the utility of a PDF is very low to me. If I'm going to run the game, I need to either print it out or buy a hardcopy -- either of which greatly increases my cost of the item for me so the PDF still has to be cheap for me to buy it. Sure, there might be a few PDFs I would pay more than $10 for, but I don't see any at the moment.

Quote from: Benoist;430101I think a big determining factor here is that we're talking about non-physical products, for one thing, which happen to have physical equivalents going for a certain price in the real world, second.

I think people react to the idea that they're basically paying for a bunch of pixels on the screen, no matter how many weeks/months of work went into producing the file on the author's/publisher's side of things. There's also the fact that, no matter how current the file type is (.PDF, for instance), you're essentially paying for a file that might get lost in computer crashes, become obsolete due to platform or software changes, or corporate marketing, or whatnot (whereas you can still hold a book in your hand 30 years after the purchase).

So there's a whole bunch of feelings that come along with the medium that puts it in contrast with the actual physical equivalent product, and points towards some given value people are willing or not willing to pay for it.

And this is true. I think this is wrong thinking, but I do think many people feel this way. Pdfs have their own utility, not just something to be printed out. Pdfs can be searched, hyperlinked, cut and pasted from, and customized/annotated in line as well as printed out. Books cannot do that. Pdfs can be replaced for free with new and corrected text. Books cannot do that. Pdfs are immensely useful on their own terms, and people should stop seeing them as books with the last part - the printing - left out.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmice;430075I'm not taking this personally. I'm taking this as a publisher. RPGers are cheap bastards. That $10 buys you a pack of cigarettes and a coffee. That's the value you set on a pdf game.

-clash

I don't smoke and I don't drink coffee. I rarely drink beer, wine, or liquor. I buy most of the paperbacks I read at second-hand bookstores. Here's a better comparison: I have a Netflix subscription so for $9/month I can watch tons of streaming movies and as many DVDs as I want - I could, if I wanted, watch one or two movies a day for a month for less than $10 - THAT'S the value I place on a pdf game. I don't think I'm cheap; I just try to maximize my buying power. I don't have money to throw away. EDIT: And that Netflix subscription? Yeah, it's $9/month, but I've probably spent more hours watching movies on it in the past year than I've spent gaming in the last 15 years.

Quote from: flyingmice;430107And this is true. I think this is wrong thinking, but I do think many people feel this way. Pdfs have their own utility, not just something to be printed out. Pdfs can be searched, hyperlinked, cut and pasted from, and customized/annotated in line as well as printed out. Books cannot do that. Pdfs can be replaced for free with new and corrected text. Books cannot do that. Pdfs are immensely useful on their own terms, and people should stop seeing them as books with the last part - the printing - left out.

-clash

I agree with the possibilities the PDF medium offers that the printed book does not, but let's face it, there are a lot of publishers who are completely inept at it, in the sense that there are no hyperlinks, copy/paste functions may be disabled, or worse, you might actually buy a simple straight scan of a printed product instead of a "real" PDF file.

Let's face it, now: many publishers actually DO still think of the PDF as a book without a printing costs added to it. In many cases, this is how the publisher comes to be in the first place. "Whoo hoo, products with costs slashed!" It's still in many cases an afterthought, rather than a product designed on its own merits.

Quote from: Benoist;430109I agree with the possibilities the PDF medium offers that the printed book does not, but let's face it, there are a lot of publishers who are completely inept at it, in the sense that there are no hyperlinks, copy/paste functions may be disabled, or worse, you might actually buy a simple straight scan of a printed product instead of a "real" PDF file.

Let's face it, now: many publishers actually DO still think of the PDF as a book without a printing costs added to it. In many cases, this is how the publisher comes to be in the first place. "Whoo hoo, products with costs slashed!" It's still in many cases an afterthought, rather than a product designed on its own merits.

Again, i agree with you completely. When I said "people should stop seeing them as books with the last part - the printing - left out" I didn't mean just customers. I very much meant publishers too.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmice;430075I'm not taking this personally. I'm taking this as a publisher. RPGers are cheap bastards. That $10 buys you a pack of cigarettes and a coffee. That's the value you set on a pdf game.

-clash

Cigarettes have an artificially inflated value, though.

Valve Software did some research about the pricing of video-games a ways back, especially the pricing of digital games.  When they first launched their game, Left 4 Dead, it was priced at $50 dollars on PC (Valve's primary focus as far as platform goes).  A few months later, they tried an experiment -- they dropped the price to $25 through their Steam service.  They found that the revenue they generated from the sale exceeded the original launch, despite all of the marketing they had used beforehand to make sure the original launch was as big as possible.

Conclusion?  Economically, 50-60 dollars is too high of a price for the video-game market based on actual sales data, and sales can help boost overall profits if you find a lower price that works.

The data shows that $25 is a "good" price for a game that took dozens, if not hundreds of professional artists, level designers, coders, engineers, QA teams, etc. to create over the course of a few years, costing hundreds of thousands (more likely millions) of dollars in production to make, and god knows how many man-hours or overtime, so I feel perfectly comfortable saying I'd pay $10 for an RPG PDF.

Quote from: Peregrin;430118Cigarettes have an artificially inflated value, though.

The data shows that $25 is a "good" price for a game that took dozens, if not hundreds of professional artists, level designers, coders, engineers, QA teams, etc. to create over the course of a few years, costing hundreds of thousands (more likely millions) of dollars in production to make, and god knows how many man-hours or overtime, so I feel perfectly comfortable saying I'd pay $10 for an RPG PDF.

And computer games have an artificially deflated value, because they sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies, if not in the millions. RPGs sell in the hundreds or maybe thousands of copies. Hell, small press games can sell in the tens of copies. The economics of scale are entirely different. They can amortize the setup costs of producing that first copy over an enormous run. We can't. The market for computer games is four times the size of the market for Hollywood. Just think about that.

-clash

Quote from: ColonelHardisson;430108And that Netflix subscription? Yeah, it's $9/month, but I've probably spent more hours watching movies on it in the past year than I've spent gaming in the last 15 years.

No kidding.  In the last month, I watched around 8 movies and 60 tv episodes via Netflix.

Gaming-wise, I get about 3 hours every two weeks, or around 80 hours for the entire year.

Quote from: Benoist;430109The data shows that $25 is a "good" price for a game that took dozens, if not hundreds of professional artists, level designers, coders, engineers, QA teams, etc. to create over the course of a few years, costing hundreds of thousands (more likely millions) of dollars in production to make, and god knows how many man-hours or overtime, so I feel perfectly comfortable saying I'd pay $10 for an RPG PDF.

I agree.  Boardgames are another area (and I'm talking niche boardgames here, not Monopoly) where you get a whole lot more for your dollar than in your average RPG, yet the production costs would have to be as much or higher.

I've always thought the complaining about gamers being "cheap" was a bunch of BS (Old Geezer loved to pull that one on TBP any time anyone complained about a product's price).

If anything, RPGs tend to be quite overpriced compared to equivalents in other markets.  Bookwise - I can get a 725 page technical manual and a comic book full of art for a combined total of under $50.  Good luck getting a deal like that in RPGland, where Mongoose has a tiny 100 page book going for $25, or for $40 you can get a whopping 200 pages.

Quote from: Benoist;430109I agree with the possibilities the PDF medium offers that the printed book does not, but let's face it, there are a lot of publishers who are completely inept at it, in the sense that there are no hyperlinks, copy/paste functions may be disabled, or worse, you might actually buy a simple straight scan of a printed product instead of a "real" PDF file.

I'd say that was the far majority of pdfs in the market.  I have yet to see many good pdfs.

Quote from: flyingmice;430116Again, i agree with you completely. When I said "people should stop seeing them as books with the last part - the printing - left out" I didn't mean just customers. I very much meant publishers too.

It'll be interesting to see if attitudes change with ebooks gaining popularity (some estimates place ebooks as being 80%+ of the market by 2015).  Currently, ebooks appear to be priced more or less like physical books from my cursory glance (at least, for stuff like technical manuals).

Quote from: flyingmice;430121The market for computer games is four times the size of the market for Hollywood. Just think about that.

-clash

Not for non-MMO PC games -- it's a shrinking market, actually -- consoles are where the growth is, and Steam is a PC-only software platform.  

The Steam research includes small-press indie games as well -- in fact small-press titles routinely reach the top ten sellers list when discounted -- we're talking niche-of-the-niche and unknown games that would never survive retail, let alone a flea-market.  These games are also labors-of-love, by one to maybe a half-dozen people, some putting their social life on hold for years to finish these projects, some investing thousands of their own income into it, which inevitably take far more technical and artistic skill to complete than a tabletop RPG, and yet they're willing to sell their games for sub-$20 prices.

Again, I'm perfectly comfortable saying I'll pay $10 for a tabletop RPG PDF, and I don't think it's cheap.  The economies of scale are different, but the value to me, the consumer, is relative to other forms of entertainment because of substitution factors.

See, when you eliminate the physical product, all I'm really paying for is the skill and output of the creator.  I'm funding your projects, not buying a book, because we've essentially eliminated the middleman.  So, why not place a value based on the relative quality of output, the skill required to create it (scarcity of skilled labor) and its utility?  After all, doctors get paid more than mechanics.

This raises an interesting question, of what is the "ideal" price for an RPG pdf.  That is, if this poll had asked if you'd pay more than $15 dollars for a PDR, or if it had asked if you'd pay more than $5 for a PDF, would the results be notably different than the above?

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;430160This raises an interesting question, of what is the "ideal" price for an RPG pdf.  That is, if this poll had asked if you'd pay more than $15 dollars for a PDR, or if it had asked if you'd pay more than $5 for a PDF, would the results be notably different than the above?

RPGPundit

Kind of a loaded question, because it all depends on the content.

Whatever. I have been in this business since 2002. Don't listen to me because I must know nothing. Bitch about how much pdfs cost. Rail against The Man! Assume economies of scale mean dick. I won't bother arguing. Assume that means you are right. I don't care. You all don't want pdfs that cost more than 10 bucks. You all also have all the rpgs you will ever need. Why am I bothering? This is just stupid.

-clash