To Charge or Not to Charge?
Stregheria:
I read somewhere (might have even been on this forum) that some writers give the .pdfs of their games away for free with a view to making money if people buy the proper book version. Is this a good idea, or financial suicide? My game's being released soon and I'm toying with the idea of just giving the .pdfs away for free to increase my customer base and the game's awareness with the hope that they'll then go and buy the books
Thoughts and experiences?
Eero Tuovinen:
I do this, sort of: you can read the HTML versions of Solar System and the World of Near in the Internet, download and distribute them, or even reuse them for your own game design or other projects according to the Creative Commons licensing terms. This tradition of openness for Solar System was started by Clinton R. Nixon, the designer of the original Shadow of Yesterday; I'm just following his lead out of respect.
This sort of thing is not a commercial suicide for an unknown game; far from it, in fact, as you're benefiting more from the lowered threshold of checking the game out than you're losing in sales to people who wouldn't have bought a no-name game anyway. As much as the designer would like, the audience won't know an unknown game from a banana tree, which means that your game will only gain in reknown slowly at first unless you find a way to attract larger numbers of people to your game. Giving the game out for free is not a bad way to start gathering a fan base when you remember that the greatest enemy of the unknown artist is obscurity.
The above assumes that you know what you're getting into in terms of publishing plan, though. I don't recommend going free out of a random whim. Better to think through the short and long term effects of the decision and how it affects the other facets of your publishing plan.
Stregheria:
How about just giving the core rulebook .pdf away for free and charging for everything else (including the hard copy of that book)? I read that WOTC were stopping selling .pdf versions of their books because it was hurting sales of their hard copies. Someone on this forum said though that no matter what you do, your game will have its .pdf copied anyway, or the actual book will be scanned in and turned into a .pdf and get distributed around the net, so you may as well give it away for free in the first place.
This is a big decision for me to make. On the one hand, distributing a free core rulebook .pdf could gain my game a wide audience that might go on to buy hard copies and future supplements that get released. On the other hand, it might mean that nobody bothers buying the hard copy because they're just happy to have the free .pdf.
What should I do?
Eero Tuovinen:
The thing about your game ending up pirated anyway is true for the really big productions. It is not true for a small press game simply because it's actually quite a bit of work to scan and distill a distributable file out of a paper book, and somebody needs to care enough to do it if there's no pdf version in existence in the first place. Of course if you're selling a pdf version of the game, then the threshold is much lower for somebody to start pirating it. I'd say - remembering what I know about your operation - that if your game faces the sort of success that inspires somebody to pirate your book, then that piracy is going to be the last thing on your mind. In general this piracy thing tends to work in a way that makes it a commercial problem only for the most insanely successful culture industry outfits: the rest of us won't see much piracy of our stuff due to that obscurity factor, and the piracy we see might very realistically be seen as free marketing for our thing instead of lost sales.
For the sake of argument, go ahead and try to find a pirated version of some suitable small press roleplaying game in the Internet. Some game where we have a sense of the sales record and that is not available as a commercial pdf... how about Elfs, it's the first thing that springs to mind that might be fairly comparable. It's been available for ages and it's sold several hundred copies (no humongous commercial success), I think, so it should be reasonably comparable to your game in many ways.
One observation I have on this is that complex games of traditional heft are rarely played out of pdf files due to usability issues. This means that giving out a pdf of your game should not ultimately impact your sales negatively if you have a game like that: some rare individuals might be stingy enough to get by on the electronic file, but most anybody else will spring for the real book if they decide that they want to actually spend time playing the game. If this was the only issue here, of course, then more publishers would be doing the free content thing; the balance of the matter is in the fact that many games rely on the curiousity factor for their sales - the game's idea is not to sell you on the experience of playing it, but rather on the experience of reading it. If your game is like this, that it's mostly about satisfying customer curiousity, then it might take a heavy impact when people get to satisfy that curiousity for free. As publisher you might well ask yourself: will the average customer be more inclined to buy the book unread than he is to play it after reading it? If you think that you're selling only to people who'll want to play, too, then free distribution should be profitable; if you think the opposite, that people mostly won't want to play the game once they've read it (a truly sorry thing if you ask me, but who knows), then it makes no sense at all for you to allow them to read the book without paying for it.
This is a complex enough issue for there to be no right answer to it. The choice influences your entire market strategy and is influenced in turn, so we can't tell you the right answer without being inside your head and knowing your goals and expectations in intimate detail.
Stregheria:
Thanks for the really informative reply. I guess the fact of the matter is it could go either way. The sensible thing to do would probably be to initially charge for the .pdf and if that ended up being a dead end, then give it away for free.
I need to give it some serious thought.
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