Pathfinder Is Still Bad

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Mon Jun 13, 2011 10:56 am

CraigM wrote:
Count Arioch the 28th wrote: My FLGS has banned 3e and 3.5 games because their policy is "No games are to be played in the store if we don't sell them". I respect their right to run their business how they see fit but I take my patronage elsewhere. (Plug: http://thedragonshoard.com/ ). I run my 3.5 eberron game there, great atmosphere!
Wow, that's amazingly short-sighted. I guess I can see where they would want to do this, but that totally locks out having the players have a say in what the game store carries (Ie: I" just found this really cool game [title here], and people online think it's awesome. It's a little slow getting through the distribution chain, but you should really carry it when you can. We'll play a few games here just to get people interested.").

Oh well. Not the first time I've seen places do stupid things.

Isn't part of the deal for selling 4E that you can no longer sell 3E?
(which is retarded, but there you go)

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Mon Jun 13, 2011 11:10 am

That wouldn't surprise me - what with "There is no 3E here" literally being the only way 4E can sell.

CraigM · Post by **CraigM** » Mon Jun 13, 2011 11:51 am

fectin wrote: Isn't part of the deal for selling 4E that you can no longer sell 3E?
(which is retarded, but there you go)

If that's the case, then my FLGS is not adhering to that in the slightest.

DragonChild · Post by **DragonChild** » Mon Jun 13, 2011 12:36 pm

Isn't part of the deal for selling 4E that you can no longer sell 3E?

If I'm remembering correctly, it was that if you're publishing 4e material, you could no longer publish 3e material. There was nothing to do about "selling", just publishing. I can't remember if they removed that restriction or not.

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Mon Jun 13, 2011 12:51 pm

But you can totally sell Pathfinder and 4E at the same time.
YAY! You can have Cucumber Pepsi OR Cardamon Pepsi! Congrats

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Mon Jun 13, 2011 12:57 pm

DragonChild wrote:
Isn't part of the deal for selling 4E that you can no longer sell 3E?
If I'm remembering correctly, it was that if you're publishing 4e material, you could no longer publish 3e material. There was nothing to do about "selling", just publishing. I can't remember if they removed that restriction or not.

I believe they changed that bit of the GSL. For instance, ENWorld is publishing their adventure path Zeitgeist for both 4E and Pathfinder.

K · Post by K » Thu Jun 16, 2011 8:26 am

Why are Pathfinder PDFs only $5 less than their paper counterparts? I mean, why would I pay $13.99 for a PDF when the actual paper copy is $19.99? For that price I can get a used paper copy on eBay or Amazon and make my own PDF.

Did they fail economics or something? WTF? Don't they understand that the PDF option is not replacing the paper sale, but is the option for someone who is not going to buy the paper copy but wants a legal PDF and is too honorable to just get a free PDF off a torrent?

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Thu Jun 16, 2011 9:30 am

If you subscribe to their lines you get the pdf for free.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu Jun 16, 2011 1:16 pm

K wrote:Why are Pathfinder PDFs only $5 less than their paper counterparts? I mean, why would I pay $13.99 for a PDF when the actual paper copy is $19.99? For that price I can get a used paper copy on eBay or Amazon and make my own PDF.

Did they fail economics or something? WTF? Don't they understand that the PDF option is not replacing the paper sale, but is the option for someone who is not going to buy the paper copy but wants a legal PDF and is too honorable to just get a free PDF off a torrent?

This has been discussed many times on the Paizo boards, and the answers range from the stupid to the semi-reasonable.

On the stupid end: "If we lower the price of the PDF, too many people will buy the PDF and not enough will buy the paper copy!" (Welcome to the 21st century.)

On the bullshit side: "The cost of printing and shipping the physical copy is minimal, so it will never really be that much cheaper than the physical book."

On the semi-reasonable side: "We need bricks-and-mortar stores to carry our products as part of our marketing strategy (e.g. so that people can have a sample copy to flip through). If we undercut the B&M stores too much, we'll piss them off. Some stores are already pissed off by our on-line store."

EDIT: Actually, the discrepancy used to be even more ridiculous. I live in Canada, and when I checked the prices of some products in 2009 it was actually cheaper for Amazon.ca to deliver a physical copy to my house than for Paizo to deliver a .PDF file to my computer.

K · Post by K » Thu Jun 16, 2011 10:23 pm

So I just checked Amazon. I can get new copies of all the books I'd be interested in for cheaper than I can get a PDF from Paizo. I think we can call that a business model fail.

erik · Post by **erik** » Fri Jun 17, 2011 4:36 am

I do not get why these dumbasses do not put the price on the floor. I barely have a passing interest in Pathfinder but I doubt my curiosity could resist it at $1. Surely they would sell more than enough to carve a larger profit and generate interest in their other products as well.

Juton · Post by **Juton** » Fri Jun 17, 2011 5:25 am

The number of people who would buy a Pathfinder book for a penny is not orders of magnitude larger than people who'd pay $20. Even if Paizo was giving their wares away for free at game stores, their potential audience is probably less than a million people.

The fact that you can get Pathfinder books cheaper from some retailers then from the manufacturer isn't unique to Paizo. At least for now manufacturers want their product in several different places so that people are aware of it and Luddites or people without a credit card can buy it for cash. As mentioned above this is extra critical for Paizo, because they want FLGSs to set aside space for Pathfinder events, not directly competing with their retailers facilitates that.

erik · Post by **erik** » Fri Jun 17, 2011 5:49 am

You said book for $20 I am talking about PDF. Apology for my lack of clarity.

I strongly doubt they have hundreds of thousands of people willing to pay >$15 for a PDF. Probably not even millions of people.

Their PDF sales surely could be raised in magnitudes by dropping the price to 99cents. This does not *directly* compete with LGS since they do not offer PDFs.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Fri Jun 17, 2011 8:37 am

erik wrote:Probably not even millions of people.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Fri Jun 17, 2011 1:26 pm

erik wrote:Their PDF sales surely could be raised in magnitudes by dropping the price to 99cents.

But would their total PDF + book profits increase?

Note that they do sell some cheap(ish) PDFs. For instance, a PDF of the core rulebook costs $10 compared to an Amazon.com price of ~$30 for the hardcover. Which is only sensible, considering that they're competing with d20pfsrd.com which provides HTML and PDF versions of the core rules (without art, etc.) for free.

erik wrote: This does not *directly* compete with LGS since they do not offer PDFs.

Here, let me Google something for you.

K wrote:So I just checked Amazon. I can get new copies of all the books I'd be interested in for cheaper than I can get a PDF from Paizo. I think we can call that a business model fail.

Well, it's a failure if you think their goal is to sell a lot of PDFs. But I suspect that "sell expensive PDFs" is more profitable than "sell no PDFs at all".

By the way, K, have you given any more thought to your proposed $8, 100 page, 1-20 adventure path? I'll buy a PDF of it for $3.

Juton · Post by **Juton** » Fri Jun 17, 2011 1:42 pm

erik wrote:You said book for $20 I am talking about PDF. Apology for my lack of clarity.

I strongly doubt they have hundreds of thousands of people willing to pay >$15 for a PDF. Probably not even millions of people.

Their PDF sales surely could be raised in magnitudes by dropping the price to 99cents. This does not *directly* compete with LGS since they do not offer PDFs.

Even if Paizo was giving their PDFs away for free I doubt they'd get a 10 fold increase in audience. They already put a lot of content online for free on their version of the SRD, so making PDFs cheaper won't lure in that much more audience. This is just an opinion, Paizo doesn't release any hard sales figures or player base estimates so I can't be any more definite.

If Paizo chopped its PDF prices it could be seen as competing with game stores. People might want a physical copy of the core book to bring to their games, but how many people bring copies of splat books to games? In my experience very few. People only want the content of the splat books and don't seem to care about the medium.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Fri Jun 17, 2011 2:41 pm

I have seen no evidence that PDFs and dead trees are substitutes, as opposed to complements. Having more white wolf PDFs makes me want more dead trees; why would pathfinder be different? If you think giving product away for free inherently hurts your sales, you should take it up with Cory Doctrow, or Gillette, or every webcomic ever.

Now personally, I tend think the coelasticty of demand between two goods depends heavily on how expectation of quality correlates to perception of quality. Pathfinder's... enthusiastic fanbase suggests that this is not an issue though.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Fri Jun 17, 2011 2:52 pm

fectin wrote:I have seen no evidence that PDFs and dead trees are substitutes, as opposed to complements.

Did you read K's post above?

K wrote:I mean, why would I pay $13.99 for a PDF when the actual paper copy is $19.99? For that price I can get a used paper copy on eBay or Amazon and make my own PDF.

Contemplate this on the Tree of Woe.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Fri Jun 17, 2011 3:11 pm

Woe is me! Undone by an anecdote! If only a single thought experiment weren't enough to prove aggregate behavior!

Oh wait. It isn't.

erik · Post by **erik** » Fri Jun 17, 2011 9:16 pm

I'm with fectin since that has been my impression. Free/cheap digital "papers" work as free marketing and increase demand for the dead tree works. I don't have any harder data than "it works for Cory Doctorow and others", so I won't push the point however.

quanta · Post by **quanta** » Fri Jun 17, 2011 9:27 pm

I have seen no evidence that PDFs and dead trees are substitutes, as opposed to complements. Having more white wolf PDFs makes me want more dead trees; why would pathfinder be different? If you think giving product away for free inherently hurts your sales, you should take it up with Cory Doctrow, or Gillette, or every webcomic ever.

Woe is me! Undone by an anecdote! If only a single thought experiment weren't enough to prove aggregate behavior!

Oh wait. It isn't.

Yeah.

K · Post by K » Fri Jun 17, 2011 11:41 pm

The point is not "oh noes, PDFs eat dead-paper sales!"

The point is that some people are not going to buy the paper versions sight unseen, but they will buy a cheap PDF just to browse the content. Heck, they might even then buy the dead tree version if it's something they plan to run or want around the table for character creation.

This is the exact same argument that online music and movie files already won. Guess what? Tower Records is out of business and iTunes is making bank.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Sat Jun 18, 2011 3:03 am

fectin wrote:Woe is me! Undone by an anecdote! If only a single thought experiment weren't enough to prove aggregate behavior!

Oh wait. It isn't.

I love people who think no evidence is superior to one piece of evidence.

K wrote:The point is that some people are not going to buy the paper versions sight unseen, but they will buy a cheap PDF just to browse the content. Heck, they might even then buy the dead tree version if it's something they plan to run or want around the table for character creation.

So in your case, you were planning on buying both the PDF and the dead tree copy?

K · Post by K » Sat Jun 18, 2011 3:25 am

hogarth wrote:
K wrote:The point is that some people are not going to buy the paper versions sight unseen, but they will buy a cheap PDF just to browse the content. Heck, they might even then buy the dead tree version if it's something they plan to run or want around the table for character creation.
So in your case, you were planning on buying both the PDF and the dead tree copy?

In my case, I'm not buying anything even though I would pay for a reasonably-priced PDF. This means a total loss to Paizo.

I mean, I prefer a PDF. I no longer have the space to load up on a bookshelves full of books I reference maybe once a week (or maybe once a year for things like adventures).

I would like to read them, however.

And for people who say "hey, you get a PDF free with full purchase," I have to ask if you've looked at other retailers. I can literally spend less money on the same new books from Amazon and make my own PDF.

This means I can actually resell the dead-wood copy for next to the value I bought it for.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Sat Jun 18, 2011 3:41 am

this argument is really dumb

just saying