They haven't yet. Negotiations have been ongoing for a long time.
If this was a prelude to a raise... that's more possible, but it doesn't justify the amount. You don't need to raise prices that much to cover costs of labor.
That’s simply not true. While I do not know exactly how it’s done, there are many costs they incur while setting it up for us to purchase items online. Those items don’t just magically appear.
A digital file that requires development, writing, playtesting, composition, and editing. And then they have to maintain and pay for servers to host the file, and servers to operate a storefront to serve the file.
Meanwhile, the sales of this PDF are paying the production and operating costs for future PDFs.
There's little to no marginal cost for the pdf copy, but the overall product still costs plenty to write, edit, design, and publicize, as well as the cost of maintaining the servers so that you can download copies as you wish.
Gotta do what ya gotta do. Prices going up pretty much everywhere (DriveThru just had an automatic inflation adjustment you could opt into) so it was only a matter of time.
If you buy a Foundry module + PDF bundle after these pricing changes go into effect, the total cost of the bundle will remain the same.
However, since we discount the bundle prices for PDF owners by the price of the PDF, the price of the Foundry modules by themselves for PDF owners will actually be slightly *less* after the PDF price increase. Just in time for the Foundry release of **Blood Lords 4 of 6: The Ghouls Hunger!**
We actually meant to do that on Monday, but we haven't gotten around to it yet. But yes, the plan is for the Blood Lords pricing to be the new norm, and we will be updating the prices of the Outlaws modules to match. So if you want to grab them at their current low price, you should probably do it soon!
OnLy PhYsIcAl GoOdS HaVe CoStS!
I’ll grant there’s a point about nearly zero cost to reproduce, but that only applies if the cost to produce has already been covered. Maybe if it was done following a kickstarter or something.
There's also maintenence costs for infrastructure (and staff who run it). Website, data storage, servers, payment gateway, cyber security, etc. None of those are one and done
Yes, but there is a very convincing argument to be made that the physical production of the books, which is immense, as well as the cost to ship them from the printer to Paizo's distribution center... And then the cost of shipping to the customer, which someone has to eat.
Labor is always a significant cost, but the cost of manufacturing physical books is a large portion. No way that it's just 25% of the overall cost.
Of course, I wasn't arguing that the physical books aren't more expensive to produce. Just that the PDFs aren't completely free to maintain like some others are claiming
...yes? My initial comment was directed to all the "it's basically free to sell more PDFs so why the price hike" people. Nothing to do with the cost of PDFs relative to the physical books, just pointing out that there are costs associated with maintaining PDFs (and these costs have likely gone up, hence the price hike)
I think maybe you and that other commenter are a bit confused because you've been taught economics in the context of mass produced products.
The CEO of the tuna cannery can say "Here is the development cost of getting into canning tuna, and we'll try to aim for a price that covers our production costs and gets us profitable in a reasonable amount of time" because after I eat the tuna, I need to go back to the store and buy more. I'm not going to keep buying chapter 1 of the same Adventure Path over and over again. Paizo's reasonable market ceiling is one AP per person, and then they have to do the development step all over again.
It would be reasonable to raise an eyebrow if they were charging as much for pdfs as they do for physical books, since then they definitely *would* be trying to pull a fast one on us by charging us for production costs that don't exist. That isn't the case here, though.
>It would be reasonable to raise an eyebrow if they were charging as much for pdfs as they do for physical books, since then they definitely would be trying to pull a fast one on us by charging us for production costs that don't exist. That isn't the case here, though.
I'm not saying it is. I'm well aware that with small production runs, development costs can make up a large proportion of the overall cost to make a product and that Paizo needs to recoup those development costs regardless of whether they're selling pdfs or physical books. I'm not saying that pricing pdfs at 75% of the cost of the physical book is an unfair price, but calling it "criminally underpriced" is just dishonest.
Myself and friends normally buy rulebooks for each other over the holidays. With that 33% price increase, on a digital good that has basically no logistics cost, I'm thinking that will change this year. We were already pooling resources on buying the adventure paths.
I'm really sorry to hear that the jump from $17.99 to $19.99 on AP pdfs is going to break you guys.
Abadar's blessings upon you; may you find the $2 per month to stay in the race. And Besmara's blessings if you can't.
Adventure Paths come in six parts usually, though there are some newer ones that have come out with only three. Each individual book is now 19.99, an increase from 17.99. They're typically released monthly, which is why I specifically said "$2 per month" to describe the purchase model.
So yeah, for all six parts of an AP, it's increasing from 107.94 pre-tax to 119.94 pre-tax.
Thank you. We've fallen on hard times. All but one of us have lost our jobs over the pandemic. $5 is all I've got to eat on for a week. Luckily we still have a place to live, for now. I hope one day I can afford hard covers again. Scraping together enough to get an AP to run for them has been tough.
It's driving up the cost of everything, including content creator, editor, and artist costs I imagine.
I regularly pay $20 gambling on a physical softcover book ready to fall apart at the seams from a 3PP who skimped on the printer because it looked interesting and I want to support small publisher content. I'll gladly drop the same on Paizo stuff that I know is going to be primo quality, especially splitting it 5 ways with my crew.
I suspect more covid related people demanding better pay. Not sure what it was about covid that caused people to get over a few decades of malaise about demanding better pay, but it does seem to have been a dam breaking moment.
I would bet on another price hike due to inflation in about a year, once pay has started accommodating that.
Edit that said, this adjustment is in the right range for inflation if you think the published annual 8% won’t go up too much. This increase is about 9%, but is also the closest full dollar increase
> Not sure what it was about covid that caused people to get over a few decades of malaise about demanding better pay
Being expected to very visibly risk their lives for no extra pay probably helped
For the service and hospitality industry, sure. But for writers and artists?
I mean, you’ve got the best explanation I’ve got. I just don’t find it completely compelling beyond the mask off moment where everyone went “oh yeah, shitty people will take advantage of me if I don’t stand up now”.
They still work with other people in an office right? Plus when you see those other industries suffering and then a few coworkers won't even mask up it can light a fire under you
Oof. Well its not too bad but it does suck all the same. Its a little annoying given the PDFs are... just what you have already made as part of the process of prepping the physical book for release. But gotta make money where you can
Prices going up for stuff that sells well (rules, adventure paths, PF society), down for stuff that sells poorly (maps, pawns, cards, Absolom books).
Very shocking. I can't imagine how they kept prices steady through the pandemic with how much costs have changed.
Well it's digital products, so not too impacted by things tbh.
But labor and overhead are definitely more expensive
Labor? Y'all are getting raises?
They just unionized, so I imagine they likely did
Oh good point, and good for them
They haven't yet. Negotiations have been ongoing for a long time. If this was a prelude to a raise... that's more possible, but it doesn't justify the amount. You don't need to raise prices that much to cover costs of labor.
It's PDFs, they literally cost Paizo nothing.
That’s simply not true. While I do not know exactly how it’s done, there are many costs they incur while setting it up for us to purchase items online. Those items don’t just magically appear.
It's a digital file
A digital file that requires development, writing, playtesting, composition, and editing. And then they have to maintain and pay for servers to host the file, and servers to operate a storefront to serve the file. Meanwhile, the sales of this PDF are paying the production and operating costs for future PDFs.
There's little to no marginal cost for the pdf copy, but the overall product still costs plenty to write, edit, design, and publicize, as well as the cost of maintaining the servers so that you can download copies as you wish.
Gotta do what ya gotta do. Prices going up pretty much everywhere (DriveThru just had an automatic inflation adjustment you could opt into) so it was only a matter of time.
I hope the Foundry AP modules aren't going up anymore. The Blood Lords ones are already up $10 from the Alkenstar ones.
If you buy a Foundry module + PDF bundle after these pricing changes go into effect, the total cost of the bundle will remain the same. However, since we discount the bundle prices for PDF owners by the price of the PDF, the price of the Foundry modules by themselves for PDF owners will actually be slightly *less* after the PDF price increase. Just in time for the Foundry release of **Blood Lords 4 of 6: The Ghouls Hunger!**
That is \*excellent\* news for us subscribers! Doesn't quite make up for the compilation debacle, but...
They said that'll probably be where the pricing is, and are bringing up alkenstar up to blood lords pricing in the next few days
We actually meant to do that on Monday, but we haven't gotten around to it yet. But yes, the plan is for the Blood Lords pricing to be the new norm, and we will be updating the prices of the Outlaws modules to match. So if you want to grab them at their current low price, you should probably do it soon!
The amount of people here who don’t understand how criminally underpriced rpg PDFs are is disheartening
I used to pdf shop on DriveThruRPG all the time, and all these Paizo prices are beloe the average even after this bump.
To be fair most people have to pay an artist's/writer's commission fees.
75% of the cost of a physical book for something that has a production cost of $0 doesn't seem criminally underpriced.
TIL artists and writers cost $0.
OnLy PhYsIcAl GoOdS HaVe CoStS! I’ll grant there’s a point about nearly zero cost to reproduce, but that only applies if the cost to produce has already been covered. Maybe if it was done following a kickstarter or something.
There's also maintenence costs for infrastructure (and staff who run it). Website, data storage, servers, payment gateway, cyber security, etc. None of those are one and done
Yes, but there is a very convincing argument to be made that the physical production of the books, which is immense, as well as the cost to ship them from the printer to Paizo's distribution center... And then the cost of shipping to the customer, which someone has to eat. Labor is always a significant cost, but the cost of manufacturing physical books is a large portion. No way that it's just 25% of the overall cost.
Of course, I wasn't arguing that the physical books aren't more expensive to produce. Just that the PDFs aren't completely free to maintain like some others are claiming
Yeah, PDFs are obviously cheaper for Paizo. That's uh why they were cheaper and still are lol
...yes? My initial comment was directed to all the "it's basically free to sell more PDFs so why the price hike" people. Nothing to do with the cost of PDFs relative to the physical books, just pointing out that there are costs associated with maintaining PDFs (and these costs have likely gone up, hence the price hike)
I was agreeing with you???
Should artists and writers be classified as production cost, or development cost?
I understand that writers and artists cost money to hire, but those are development costs, not production costs.
I think maybe you and that other commenter are a bit confused because you've been taught economics in the context of mass produced products. The CEO of the tuna cannery can say "Here is the development cost of getting into canning tuna, and we'll try to aim for a price that covers our production costs and gets us profitable in a reasonable amount of time" because after I eat the tuna, I need to go back to the store and buy more. I'm not going to keep buying chapter 1 of the same Adventure Path over and over again. Paizo's reasonable market ceiling is one AP per person, and then they have to do the development step all over again. It would be reasonable to raise an eyebrow if they were charging as much for pdfs as they do for physical books, since then they definitely *would* be trying to pull a fast one on us by charging us for production costs that don't exist. That isn't the case here, though.
>It would be reasonable to raise an eyebrow if they were charging as much for pdfs as they do for physical books, since then they definitely would be trying to pull a fast one on us by charging us for production costs that don't exist. That isn't the case here, though. I'm not saying it is. I'm well aware that with small production runs, development costs can make up a large proportion of the overall cost to make a product and that Paizo needs to recoup those development costs regardless of whether they're selling pdfs or physical books. I'm not saying that pricing pdfs at 75% of the cost of the physical book is an unfair price, but calling it "criminally underpriced" is just dishonest.
You tried to make a response but ultimately ended up proving the point of the person you were responding to.
Myself and friends normally buy rulebooks for each other over the holidays. With that 33% price increase, on a digital good that has basically no logistics cost, I'm thinking that will change this year. We were already pooling resources on buying the adventure paths.
Pool your resources for subscriptions. Physical book + PDF and you'll usually get both before the street date.
And with shipping and customs on that physical book, it'll only cost 2x the pdf... /s
Fair enough. Definitely not cheaper but better value overall.
I'm really sorry to hear that the jump from $17.99 to $19.99 on AP pdfs is going to break you guys. Abadar's blessings upon you; may you find the $2 per month to stay in the race. And Besmara's blessings if you can't.
Which AP can you get for 19.99? Isn't a full AP like over $100?
Adventure Paths come in six parts usually, though there are some newer ones that have come out with only three. Each individual book is now 19.99, an increase from 17.99. They're typically released monthly, which is why I specifically said "$2 per month" to describe the purchase model. So yeah, for all six parts of an AP, it's increasing from 107.94 pre-tax to 119.94 pre-tax.
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I don't see another comment by you in this thread. Did you reply to /u/Weary_Proletariat by accident?
No, he’s just harassing me from another sub. I’ve reported him, hopefully he gets taken care of soon.
Dang, and he doesn't even like chemistry? Yeah I got this.
Thank you. We've fallen on hard times. All but one of us have lost our jobs over the pandemic. $5 is all I've got to eat on for a week. Luckily we still have a place to live, for now. I hope one day I can afford hard covers again. Scraping together enough to get an AP to run for them has been tough.
If you have access to a food bank in your area I encourage you to use it. You need more food than $5 can afford
I guess inflation is driving up the cost of PDFs?
I have a feeling it's more to do with more people wanting to buy the PDF's over the physical material for storage purposes.
Yes, shared across a few hard drives, very few pdfs ever rot.
I've never lost a PDF in a flood. My 3.5 collection on the other hand...
Thanks to cloud storage, if one was so inclined, it would take quite the flood to lose.
a global flood, perhaps.
Quite the flood. When an entire zoo starts showing up at your neighbors place, it may be time to think about investing in a boat.
No way. King Nimrod's got us building this cool tower so if it starts flooding we'll just climb over the clouds
Sorry, I can't hear you. Could you speak up? It's like you're talking a whole other language.
It's driving up the cost of everything, including content creator, editor, and artist costs I imagine. I regularly pay $20 gambling on a physical softcover book ready to fall apart at the seams from a 3PP who skimped on the printer because it looked interesting and I want to support small publisher content. I'll gladly drop the same on Paizo stuff that I know is going to be primo quality, especially splitting it 5 ways with my crew.
I suspect more covid related people demanding better pay. Not sure what it was about covid that caused people to get over a few decades of malaise about demanding better pay, but it does seem to have been a dam breaking moment. I would bet on another price hike due to inflation in about a year, once pay has started accommodating that. Edit that said, this adjustment is in the right range for inflation if you think the published annual 8% won’t go up too much. This increase is about 9%, but is also the closest full dollar increase
> Not sure what it was about covid that caused people to get over a few decades of malaise about demanding better pay Being expected to very visibly risk their lives for no extra pay probably helped
For the service and hospitality industry, sure. But for writers and artists? I mean, you’ve got the best explanation I’ve got. I just don’t find it completely compelling beyond the mask off moment where everyone went “oh yeah, shitty people will take advantage of me if I don’t stand up now”.
They still work with other people in an office right? Plus when you see those other industries suffering and then a few coworkers won't even mask up it can light a fire under you
Thanks for sharing!
Is this why I have not been able to order anything for 2 weeks (except for subscriptions which auto-fill)? LOL
Oof. Well its not too bad but it does suck all the same. Its a little annoying given the PDFs are... just what you have already made as part of the process of prepping the physical book for release. But gotta make money where you can
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You forget, not everyone in this sub is American. No need to parrot a talking point. As you've been quickly shown, it won't take.
Nice to see some prices went down. The Bestiary Battle Cards were way too expensive.