Wu Ming said:

This is what happens when you use the standard FCKeditor interface, rather than hacking out the HTML.  Typical. 

Kage

Charax said:

This right here is 100% my view of things. When disciples comes out I expectit's on rapidshare by the end of that week.

The whole issue of selling PDFs has to be seen from the seller's point of view.

Say it costs a ballpark figure of $10,000 to Produce a Title (art, copy, layout, proofs, overheads, etc). This is cheap.

You have a finite market, say 10,000 people. Probably small.

SELLING VIA PRINT

Say each copy cost $10 (?) to print and distribute.

You will need to sell each copy for $10 + $1 = $11 to recoup costs.

SELLING VIA PDF

You will need to sell each copy for $1 to recoup costs.

However, say that for a nice color book you could flog it for $50, however, you can only squeeze $10-20 out of the market for a good quality PDF.

Thus the return on books is better than PDFs by at least $20 per unit.

Why not offer both? Well, if your market research tells you that people will on average buy one or the other but not both, and/or that demand is inelastic on this point, then it benefits you to only provide the book option.

I'm not saying that this is the way it is, I'm just offering a suggestion. Like almost everyone else here (?) I'm not privy to GW or FFGs market research and Marketing Plans.

What I'm driving at is that the decision is based firstly on what will recover costs, and secondly on what the market will bear. Any company that has been around as long as GW is aware of that, and if you read their annual reports (which are actually more fun to read than most!) you can see that where this ruthless kind of logic has been obeyed they have been successful, and where they've ignored it and paid the price that year.

That's just my 2c (.02c in PDF)

Unfortunately part of the problem with the PDF debate is rarely will the companies we want PDF’s from tell us the reasons they don’t do it nor will they discuss price points.  Thus, we just speculate as to the cost of these things and probably make assumptions that are incorrect.  Catalyst Games, the Battletech people, just recently put out a $5 PDF and have stated they are unsure whether or not they’ll do more, even though they were happy with the amount sold so far.  But they also do PDF’s of all their books in addition to hard copies.  Therefore, if a company that has success with PDF’s is unsure if they’ll continue with more I’m sure it must really be a difficult decision for someone who doesn’t have that much experience.  

My original opinion was I think that FFG is missing some sales by not doing PDF's however, now I feel that they may not be comfortable with the potential financial difficulties that come from pdf's and hard copies.  But, until FFG says something we'll really never know.  

Insequential said:

Sorry if this seems to be taking an example to flog the argument, but this simply doesn't seem to hold up to personal experience.  Consider GURPS as the example.  GURPS Basic Characters (half of what one might consider the core rules, with Campaigns being the second half) sells for $39.95 for a hardback color book.  Their e23 site didn't have the PDF for about a year-or-so, but then they offer it at $29.95.  You can get the book at third party vendours for around $26 and, of course, you can just get the PDF for free if you want to steal.  The cost of the PDF and the discrepancies between print and PDF costs seems consistent with other vendours, such as DriveThruRPG, where full-fledged games tend to go for the $25-30 range.

Insequential said:

Yet there is a growing segment of the market that will only buy PDF.  In the past eight years, I've only bought four physical RPGs: GURPS, becaue it's my system of choice and they didn't offer it in PDF at the time; WFRP 2e, because I wanted to see what all the hype was about and whether it was worth it (it wasn't); and Dark Heresy, which was also not worth the money (for me, anyway).  On the other hand, I've purchased around 20-30 PDF in that same period, and deliberately avoided products that are not in PDF.

If it's all about recouping ones production costs, then it seems that putting themselves outside of the market is somewhat strange.  As above, why not wait until sales tail off and, once there, offer it for sale via PDF?  Second surge of sales might be useful for what might otherwise be stale (or not selling) product.  Maybe?  I'm not a business person, though, nor versed in the economics of the RPG industry.  (Though it would be interesting to have an idea of the total production cost of the product, in terms of staff time, printing costs, etc., to see what kind of joy the comany is getting out of the product! )

As always, though, this is for honest people. Dishonest people can still download the scanned copies without letting GW recoup any of their costs as well.

Just some thoughts.

Kage

I've purchased PDFs and I've sold PDFs. As a generalisation I think it's fair to say that I both buy and sell more cheaper items than expensive ones.

It doesn't matter if there's a growing portion of the market that will only buy PDF until that portion can (somehow by buying a cheaper product?) take up the slack for book sales that /may/ be lost.

Marketing is all a guessing game, and more companies fail from messing up a good thing than from not jumping on the latest bandwagon.

Guessing what's in another company's Marketing Plan is also a guessing game

Insequential said:

That's reasonable.  At the same time?  Well, back to the GURPS example.  There's a $10 difference between PDF and hardback book.  I don't know how significant that sounds, but from a punter's perspective it doesn't sound so different... though more tempting.  At the same time, I can buy the product cheaper from Amazon for the original hardback book, which is of and in itself $14-15 cheaper than I get from the publisher.

So, if we're trying to deal with strict income/outcome models, where do we sit?  We have a cheaper product and... well, we have a cheaper product.  You mention sustainability of sales, but does not PDF release you from all but the absolute cost of development while at the same time distancing yourself from limited print runs?

Seems to me that the argument is more about acceptable profit margins than anything else.  Does the GURPS example indicate that printing a ~340 page colour hardback only cost $10?  Does the fact that Amazon offers products at so much less indicate that the profit margin isn't quite so cut and defined?

Kage