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Kestral posted:These stories always make me wonder how Burning Wheel Gold was able to exist. That is hands-down one of the most beautiful hardcover RPG books ever printed, with gorgeous cover, high-quality paper, excellent binding, a page count of 599, and it's sold for $30 to $35. I get the impression that BWHQ doesn't do more than break even on each copy, so they could charge the market rate of $50-60 that you often see for hardcovers on Kickstarter, and provide a product that is light years ahead of what everyone else is doing for the same price. And it's all done in the US through Cushing-Malloy, a specialist small- and medium-run printer. Luke Crane might be a bookbinding nerd, but that alone can't account for this difference in outcomes.
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Jan 24, 2021 04:32
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Nessus posted:Maybe he has juice with that company? On the other hand, those people have just gotten one hell of a business opportunity. Might be some form of juice, but he's been using C-M since the early 2000s for BWHQ stuff and the books have always been ridiculously cheap while also being well-made, so it's more than just like, long-term customer discount. BW Gold was outstanding even by their standards, but it wasn't without precedent. I wonder if there's a way to get Luke to speak about it, given recent events. Probably not, since he works at Kickstarter and probably can't make statements that seem to be advocating for a specific printer, but he's got some insights that it would be really helpful to have more widely distributed now that we're having such issues with printing and distribution.
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Jan 24, 2021 05:05
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Plus, even if you did get an answer it'd probably be in flowery wizard whimsy speak and then he'd call you a dipshit for wanting a clear answer.
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Jan 24, 2021 05:27
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I know lots of people bounce off of Burning Wheel and that's fair cause it's a complicated god drat tome of a book and Luke Crane's writing style rubs many people the wrong way, but you gotta admit that Burning Wheel Gold is just so loving pretty. I got my copy as a gift for cat-sitting for friends that were going to a con and I got so into flipping through it I didn't notice that the position I was in for 5 hours threw my back out. You can critique a lot of the text, but the actual layout of the book is just gorgeous.
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Jan 24, 2021 05:45
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I only worked with printers for medical informational printing, so it might be different for proper big boy books. But the prices were dramatically smaller if you signed a contract guaranteeing multiple runs or at least something else to be printed every X time period for the next Y number of years.
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Jan 24, 2021 05:48
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I know nothing about the ins and outs of printing, and like I said it's possible that Massif wasn't looking in the right place for their print needs, but it's also possible it comes down to the sort of work you want done. A 400+ page full color hardback isn't a small ask, and for a single print run rather than something expected to have multiple runs there are probably all sorts of considerations.
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Jan 24, 2021 06:14
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Terrible Opinions posted:I only worked with printers for medical informational printing, so it might be different for proper big boy books. But the prices were dramatically smaller if you signed a contract guaranteeing multiple runs or at least something else to be printed every X time period for the next Y number of years. Also, print is going to be the only way you can ever get Burning Wheel. It's the one product he won't make available electronically. It may just be enough of a passion project for him that he's undervaluing it so he can get it out there.
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Jan 24, 2021 06:56
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Lynx Winters posted:Plus, even if you did get an answer it'd probably be in flowery wizard whimsy speak and then he'd call you a dipshit for wanting a clear answer.
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Jan 24, 2021 08:49
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Tsilkani posted:Also, print is going to be the only way you can ever get Burning Wheel. It's the one product he won't make available electronically. It may just be enough of a passion project for him that he's undervaluing it so he can get it out there. He's all but said as much about underpricing it, yeah. My impression from talking with Luke at conventions back in the day and reading way too many BWHQ forum posts is that they make back the cost of production, and probably not much more if any, because it's a 20-year passion project for a group of friends. I think they might have taken a loss on one of books in the Revised era, but those folks were not financially secure enough to eat a significant loss on a print run until at least Gold. All of which still suggests the cost of production for Gold aren't more than $35, which makes me wonder why Cushing-Malloy is able to offer that kind of service for them while other authors are barely able to put out something that still has pages attached to the spine after a few years. It's not just Massif that has this issue, and I don't mean to throw shade at their competence. This is happening to nearly the entire industry, which is why it's so baffling to me. Somehow, one company is able to put out a physical object that puts everyone else to shame while charging a price that, if they were actually trying to make a profit on it, would be equivalent to or a little less than what everyone else charges. It's possible Kai Tave hit the nail on the head with the mention of color. Burning Wheel and Torchbearer have always been in black and white. But the paper quality is excellent, which you'd think would narrow the gap between standard B&W printing and color? Their one color book, Burning Empires, used a Chinese printer and ran $45 in 2007 dollars for full color with similar production values and tome-sized dimensions, if that data point helps any. Maybe if you want color specifically, Chinese printers are your only option? Man, I'd love to pick the brain of an insider on this stuff.
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Jan 24, 2021 09:06
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Personally I'd be willing to sacrifice color art, or greatly reduce its quantity, in order to get semi-reasonably-priced physical books. You could keep the gorgeous color art in the PDF and POD.
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Jan 24, 2021 12:13
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The overall style in the Tomb of the Black Sand adventure is an excellent example that B&W art can still look amazing.
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Jan 24, 2021 12:40
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I just think people are just going to have to bite the bullet and just pay more for RPG hardcovers than they are now or just skip them all together. I am sure that being full color is a lot of the problem with keeping things cheap, but printing and especially shipping are just going to be getting more expensive no matter what. Most RPGs these days tend to be one off projects so unless you are a company that is constantly publishing books for other creators getting the relationships in place for cheap printing just might not be possible. If printing a physical book is very key to what you want to create I think you have to design everything to be black and white from the ground up. Having printed books in B/W while the pdfs are beautiful full color documents will just lead to the perception that the books are "cheap" in more ways than one.
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Jan 24, 2021 13:10
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Nessus posted:Personally I'd be willing to sacrifice color art, or greatly reduce its quantity, in order to get semi-reasonably-priced physical books. You could keep the gorgeous color art in the PDF and POD. For a lot of print layout this means an (expensive) full book pass to ensure that the B&W version still looks good. I think it’s worth considering but it adds a lot of work that’s already kinda not being paid for. e:f,left window open for three hours,b
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Jan 24, 2021 16:25
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The prices for games need to go way up even if the costs of printing don't. At this point I'm starting to wonder if we should just start boycotting publishers who sell $19.99 PDFs until they get the messaage.
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Jan 24, 2021 16:43
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RE: printable materials, I think if more and more people get access to 3D printers, it would become feasible to have more component-heavy things like board games transfer to a print and play template, but those are more of a nerdy novelty now and I don't know if there's really a reason for them to become more mainstream and cheaper. For something like a full-color book, it's again a problem of the price of RPG books not keeping up with the price of production on a lot of levels. People have to come to terms with the fact that there's going to need to be a middle ground between "not actually making money on the books, but priced to a level people deem is an acceptable enough to buy them at" and "being price gouged for college textbooks" and unfortunately the shipping cost is going to need to be factored into it, too.
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Jan 24, 2021 17:37
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Rand Brittain posted:The prices for games need to go way up even if the costs of printing don't. While it may not be the most popular take, I have a lot harder of a time with that suggestion than with physical copies. With the logistics of physical copies, there's a hefty production cost per unit that's been discussed to death. Outside of "keeping your website running" (which isn't free by any means, and while it's surprisingly hard to find hosting plans oriented towards distribution to pull an estimate from, it's a bit more expensive from what I'm finding - but "a bit" not even leaving 2 digit figures for a small or independent publisher who doesn't need DTRPG scale infrastructure, and web hosting without that is still a cost to account for) or itch/DTRPG's cut if you choose to have it hosted by them, the production cost for each PDF sold is... less than a cent of electricity. Depending on the range a given game is hitting in terms of scale and the size of the team working on it, any development/writing costs can come back fast from that. I'm pretty sure Baker and Harper are doing just fine, and "solo project that's artless or public-domain art" has a much lower cost to make back. This does also come off of the handful of physical RPGs that I do have as a context point - it's hard to say "yeah, charge more than $20 for the PDF" when the physical copy is already around $20. Caveat, my interest in physical books does skew towards the zine side where production costs and standards are lower. I have physical copies of LANCER and Electric Bastionland and both were absolutely worth the $50+ paid for them, and I would have paid more if it came down to it; but for better or worse most RPGs are not 400+ pages of quality half/full page art every second or third page in a hardcover format. Please pay people appropriately for their games. "Appropriately" for physical games is definitely much higher than the current paradigm. "Appropriately" for PDFs, and picking PDFs as the sticking point to say "no, this is where we don't buy anything" especially as the format where the authors/artists/etc get more of the money you spend on it... I dunno. To draw a bad parallel, it's like looking at the music industry, seeing how absolutely shafted musicians get financially, and drawing the conclusion "so don't buy merch at their shows until they raise the prices on it". The merch at shows is where most of them survive and the one place the record label doesn't get to be a vulture. Forgoing that and only putting money through the label has you spending the same or more and getting even more siphoned off by middlemen and less getting to the creator. It's a bad parallel because it reintroduces physical production and distribution costs, but the sentiment behind it stands.
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Jan 24, 2021 17:49
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Lord_Hambrose posted:I just think people are just going to have to bite the bullet and just pay more for RPG hardcovers than they are now or just skip them all together. I am sure that being full color is a lot of the problem with keeping things cheap, but printing and especially shipping are just going to be getting more expensive no matter what. Most RPGs these days tend to be one off projects so unless you are a company that is constantly publishing books for other creators getting the relationships in place for cheap printing just might not be possible. Color art or black and white art really don't have anything to do with it though, the massive, massive cost issue is shipping, and that's going to remain the same whether your art is in color or not. I got to take a glimpse at some of Lancer's expenses and out of a roughly $400k kickstarter, 1/4 of that went into shipping. It was by far the single greatest expense of the entire project. I highly, highly doubt the art budget even came close, and Lancer is full of full-color art from professional comic artists and illustrators. e; like yes RPGs should still cost more anyway, but that's really sort of orthogonal to the point I've been making which is that the act of having a physical book made and shipped internationally is increasingly becoming so incredibly expensive that even if RPG designers upped their costs to where a game "should" be, it still might completely outstrip their budgetary ability to do so. e2; even though color makes printing more expensive, again, the real hurdle is shipping unless you're willing to do some sort of "we'll print a run in the US, everyone else has to use pdfs" deal, but for so many, many people "why can't I get a hardcopy" is an IMMEDIATE dealbreaker. Check out the Kickstarter thread where Nemesis of Moles posts a link to Our Shores, a Southeast Asian RPG anthology KS, one of the first comments is someone going "no print option, no deal." Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Jan 24, 2021 |
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Jan 24, 2021 18:25
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SkyeAuroline posted:While it may not be the most popular take, I have a lot harder of a time with that suggestion than with physical copies. With the logistics of physical copies, there's a hefty production cost per unit that's been discussed to death. Outside of "keeping your website running" (which isn't free by any means, and while it's surprisingly hard to find hosting plans oriented towards distribution to pull an estimate from, it's a bit more expensive from what I'm finding - but "a bit" not even leaving 2 digit figures for a small or independent publisher who doesn't need DTRPG scale infrastructure, and web hosting without that is still a cost to account for) or itch/DTRPG's cut if you choose to have it hosted by them, the production cost for each PDF sold is... less than a cent of electricity. Depending on the range a given game is hitting in terms of scale and the size of the team working on it, any development/writing costs can come back fast from that. I'm pretty sure Baker and Harper are doing just fine, and "solo project that's artless or public-domain art" has a much lower cost to make back. Artists are not making a living at the current price, therefore it is too low.
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Jan 24, 2021 18:34
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Kai Tave posted:Check out the Kickstarter thread where Nemesis of Moles posts a link to Our Shores, a Southeast Asian RPG anthology KS, one of the first comments is someone going "no print option, no deal." People talk a lot of poo poo like that and then buy the PDF anyway; I’m not sure there’s a good way to know how many PDFs you don’t sell when print isn’t an option.
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Jan 24, 2021 18:41
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Now I'm wondering if there's a market for playable scrapbooks or papercraft stuff. As in, reverse the focus and end up with "you will have a lot of fun making this thing, and when it's finished it's also a game". Like a map-making game for craft people. The Cloud Dungeon books are the closest I’ve seen, and they are definitely aimed at simpler sorts of paper craft.
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Jan 24, 2021 18:47
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Midjack posted:People talk a lot of poo poo like that and then buy the PDF anyway; I’m not sure there’s a good way to know how many PDFs you don’t sell when print isn’t an option. I don't think it's really a reach to suggest that campaigns with print copies garner more attention and hype, which largely (if not always) translates into more pledge enthusiasm. I'm pretty skeptical that Lancer would have raised nearly as much money as it did if the campaign was strictly digital only, even with the leg up it had in terms of one of the lead designers already being kind of internet famous outside of elfgames.
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Jan 24, 2021 18:51
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I think part of the issue is that the majority of RPGs (which are a tiny dribble of sales, yes) are made by people who're doing RPGs as a hobby who have a day job. People publish RPGs for free and go to kickstarter to make them pretty, in essence. When it comes to bigger companies where most sales do come from things break down, too; D&D and OPP are paying contracted writers so the price of the book is kind of orthogonal to the issue of if the book is priced appropriately for its labour, and I'm willing to bet "Games not called D&D" is a footnote, and "Games that aren't made by OPP, Evil Hat, or D. Vincent Baker" is even smaller still. spectralent fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Jan 24, 2021 |
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Jan 24, 2021 18:57
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Kai Tave posted:I don't think it's really a reach to suggest that campaigns with print copies garner more attention and hype, which largely (if not always) translates into more pledge enthusiasm. I'm pretty skeptical that Lancer would have raised nearly as much money as it did if the campaign was strictly digital only, even with the leg up it had in terms of one of the lead designers already being kind of internet famous outside of elfgames. It’s not a reach at all to say that people get excited for books, but how do you determine that it cut theoretical sales by 10% or 75% when there’s no book? 
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Jan 24, 2021 19:09
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Midjack posted:It’s not a reach at all to say that people get excited for books, but how do you determine that it cut theoretical sales by 10% or 75% when there’s no book? How do you determine that people saying "no book no sale" are secretly turning around and buying the pdf anyway?
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Jan 24, 2021 20:31
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Kai Tave posted:How do you determine that people saying "no book no sale" are secretly turning around and buying the pdf anyway? I personally know at least ten people who did exactly that but only because they were loud about their demands for paper before deciding they wanted the information regardless of form. Anecdote not data admittedly, and similar challenges exist on both sides unless you hack DTRPG or Kickstarter, extract the identities of buyers for a specific title, and trawl Facebook et al to find people who said they’d never buy a PDF. But I have other stuff to do this afternoon, so that question won’t get answered right now.
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Jan 24, 2021 20:57
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I mean, what's even the last really successful RPG Kickstarter, by which I mean something that really brought in the money above and beyond expectations, that had no print option whatsoever? I mean something that said "we won't do print, this is pdf only, period" where it went super nuts the way Lancer or Exalted 3E did? Or even "not quite as super nuts but still six figures" like Blades in the Dark? What's the standout example there?
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Jan 24, 2021 21:27
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Kai Tave posted:I mean, what's even the last really successful RPG Kickstarter, by which I mean something that really brought in the money above and beyond expectations, that had no print option whatsoever? I mean something that said "we won't do print, this is pdf only, period" where it went super nuts the way Lancer or Exalted 3E did? Or even "not quite as super nuts but still six figures" like Blades in the Dark? What's the standout example there? I mean, at the same time, how much of the money that those "super nuts" Kickstarters made got sunk into producing really heavy books?
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Jan 24, 2021 21:41
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Rand Brittain posted:I mean, at the same time, how much of the money that those "super nuts" Kickstarters made got sunk into producing really heavy books? In Lancer's case the physical goods production costs were the most significant part of the Kickstarter but even if we assume the print costs were comparable to the shipping costs (I don't believe they were, but just for the sake of doing some quick figuring) that would leave north of $200k to work with which is a lot more than the initial asking pledge of $50k in total would have brought in had it ended there.
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Jan 24, 2021 21:46
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Well you see 7th Sea 2e - uhm
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Jan 24, 2021 22:59
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SkyeAuroline posted:While it may not be the most popular take, I have a lot harder of a time with that suggestion than with physical copies. With the logistics of physical copies, there's a hefty production cost per unit that's been discussed to death. Outside of "keeping your website running" (which isn't free by any means, and while it's surprisingly hard to find hosting plans oriented towards distribution to pull an estimate from, it's a bit more expensive from what I'm finding - but "a bit" not even leaving 2 digit figures for a small or independent publisher who doesn't need DTRPG scale infrastructure, and web hosting without that is still a cost to account for) or itch/DTRPG's cut if you choose to have it hosted by them, the production cost for each PDF sold is... less than a cent of electricity. Depending on the range a given game is hitting in terms of scale and the size of the team working on it, any development/writing costs can come back fast from that. I'm pretty sure Baker and Harper are doing just fine, and "solo project that's artless or public-domain art" has a much lower cost to make back. The costs in writing, editing, illustrating, and laying out a pdf are not terribly cheaper than laying out a physical book, considering that most software these days lets you do both at once for minimal extra work. You might not be paying for the shipping and printing, but you're still paying for the creation of the product, and it's a nasty tendency of our hobby to undervalue that creation when there's nothing physical attached. Taking a zine that someone made out of love and didn't worry about having to live off of when they priced it and extending that to the work of people who are doing this as a living is going to warp the numbers. Yes, a lot of us are poor nerds and buying games can be a major expense, but the people making these games are poor nerds too, and telling them that their work is important enough that everyone should be able to play it, but not important enough that they should be fairly compensated for it, is nonsense.
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Jan 25, 2021 00:02
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Kai Tave posted:In Lancer's case the physical goods production costs were the most significant part of the Kickstarter but even if we assume the print costs were comparable to the shipping costs (I don't believe they were, but just for the sake of doing some quick figuring) that would leave north of $200k to work with which is a lot more than the initial asking pledge of $50k in total would have brought in had it ended there. Interesting! Although, I don't actually know if the opposite pole exists for comparison, a really big-ticket Kickstarter that was PDF-only. I guess 7th Sea 2e is the closest thing, but that was really its own weird thing.
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Jan 25, 2021 00:59
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One issue as well is going to be market size, given we've already looked at "D&D exploding back into reality again hasn't actually increased people's general interest in RPGs". Otherwise, doubling prices is probably just going to halve the amount of people who can sell professionally and the problem of people making work as hobbyists in direct competition with professionals gets bigger. On the other hand, I have no real idea how to do that; we're in a golden age of RPG accessibility and advertising, and D&D still sucks all the air out of the room and people will bash their heads endlessly against the wall of trying to make a teen romance drama work in 5e instead of just playing Monsterhearts or whatever.
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Jan 25, 2021 01:05
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I hadn't looked closely at the credits on my copy of Lancer, I was actually surprised there was more in there than Tom since it all looked like his style. That's some really tight art direction.
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Jan 25, 2021 06:00
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Arthil posted:I hadn't looked closely at the credits on my copy of Lancer, I was actually surprised there was more in there than Tom since it all looked like his style. That's some really tight art direction. It's like a murderer's row of art talent in that book, it's honestly insane. One of the benefits of Tom knowing so many comics artists is being able to call up folks like James Stokoe or Daniel Warren Johnson and go "hey you wanna draw some robots for my game?"
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Jan 25, 2021 06:02
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Rand Brittain posted:The prices for games need to go way up even if the costs of printing don't. I'm not sure trying to force price-fixing is the answer to our problems here.
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Jan 25, 2021 06:17
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So for Massif specifically, the cost efficiency of doing a large print run of 10k books (which we did having already sold nearly 7k of them via kickstarter basically) meant our price per unit was very low, even with shipping and distribution. The actual shipping (from distributor) was charged customer side. It was nightmarishly expensive since it was global and we actually ate a hefty difference because we charged backers too early for shipping and rates went up when we actually put the book out. If customers didn't pay their own shipping the book definitely couldn't have been priced at $60, but otherwise the cost was fairly low. Printing in China was both higher quality and cheaper than US printers. I imagine if you're doing a low print run of books (~3k or so) the price per unit could get really high, like triple what we ended up with, and it would be tough for smaller print runs. In that case I could absolutely see books being priced at $70+. With digital there's no increased production cost at all and itch.io only takes 3%. It's also a comparatively low-price market compared to dtrpg and its a core book and our first book we're putting out so it made sense to price our .pdf around $25 (instead of $40 or w/e). I think for indie creators the very limited teams (Massif is just me and Miguel, 3 contractors, and a bunch of artists we pay on contract) and no physical locations to pay rent on mean the costs are very low. Often I think people don't factor in their own labor into the price of production either, or else have other work to pay their life costs while they work on RPGs, which can mean the labor spent there is undervalued. I did all the art for Lancer without any kind of explicit compensation - it's my own book after all - and that's 35+ pieces of full color art. Miguel and I only paid ourselves in 2020, and have since stopped until we figure out next year's production budget, and we both have other jobs that pay our bills. Operant fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Jan 25, 2021 |
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Jan 25, 2021 15:39
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Kai Tave posted:Color art or black and white art really don't have anything to do with it though, the massive, massive cost issue is shipping, and that's going to remain the same whether your art is in color or not. I got to take a glimpse at some of Lancer's expenses and out of a roughly $400k kickstarter, 1/4 of that went into shipping. It was by far the single greatest expense of the entire project. I highly, highly doubt the art budget even came close, and Lancer is full of full-color art from professional comic artists and illustrators. You might then have some disparities between, say, a copy of your core book printed by the US printer and a copy printed by the EU printer or whatever. But... does that actually matter? Really? Truly? Sure, you lose the economies of scale of printing everything at a single printer. But at some point the line of "money saved by having one printer do it all" has to cross "money lost as a result of shipping everything from China, where you have few customers, to the continents where most of your customers actually live", right?
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Jan 25, 2021 15:41
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You would be shocked to see the economies of scale in doing large print runs. With a US printer printing 3k books the price per unit was around $35 for the lancer core book. Chinese printers printing 10k books, even with shipping, reduced that cost to under $6-7 every time, and had better quality in previews consistently. I think this changes if you're not doing 4 color offset printing since you're using a different production method and is obviously cheaper for black and white. Also, freight is extremely cheap compared to home shipping. Shipping a book to south america or new zealand in initial quotes cost upwards of $80 per unit until we partnered with a distributor that had local distribution networks. Operant fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Jan 25, 2021 |
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Jan 25, 2021 15:47
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Kai Tave posted:It's like a murderer's row of art talent in that book, it's honestly insane. One of the benefits of Tom knowing so many comics artists is being able to call up folks like James Stokoe or Daniel Warren Johnson and go "hey you wanna draw some robots for my game?" At some point I think I would genuinely like a hardcopy of the game. Just because I think it would both be gorgeous and if worse came to worse I could use it to concuss somebody during a home invasion.
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Jan 25, 2021 16:14
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I'm still mad I didn't find out about the game until it was too late to get a hardcopy smh
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