Monday, March 29, 2010

Robert Dubois of Dream Pod 9 Follows Up

First, before we get to the content of his reply let me publicly thank Mr. Dubois for taking the time to respond.

Second, let me appologize to him for letting this post sit for weeks.

Now, his response:
We talked it over at the office and will be correcting the price of a few of the titles next week (after the GM's Day Sale ends) mainly a few of the older books that are priced at 70% off the printed book price they will be reduced to 50% off, for Tribe 8 its only the 2nd edition players handbook that will see the price decease. Our newer books for Heavy Gear Blitz will maintain their current pricing. I read the post you linked below and can understand peoples point of view, we have to live with piracy and we still have to pay all the writers, artists, sculptors, and production staff that work on the products, be they printed books or eBooks. One thing we came up with at the office was the idea of making bundles the eBooks for each gameline and selling them for a special additional 25% off discounted price for people that want to pickup the entire gameline at once. We'll be putting those bundles up next week after the sale ends. Let me know your comments about our plans.


I'm glad to see they are looking at it. I'm disappointed that are doing so little. As I said in my original post I understand the issues with PDFs of books currently in print. However for PDFs of out of print books different rules apply.

As for having to pay his staff: if five plus years out of print books aren't amortized off they never will be. If he is depending on PDFs above reasonable price points to fund future projects he also has problems.

The simple fact is, as is proved by a post over at RPG Blog 2 about The Cortex System PDF being over priced, there is a ceiling to PDF prices. If you can't get under it I would say don't bother being in the market.

Dream Pod 9 has ceded my business to the used market as has White Wolf. Perhaps I'm unique but I doubt I am. In a business with razor think margins pushing customers to the used market or piracy is not a smart long term strategy.

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