Against value propositions

Bear with me folks, I'm going to do a discourse. Nobody asked for my thoughts, but what is a personal blog, if not a soap box for me to yell them out anyway. As always, but this time in particular, feel free to tell me that I'm wildly off base, and the things I say are bad are good actually.

Recently, I read a post on Gaby Fermi's excellent blog, rolling d6 (go read it, it's good), about the price of tabletop RPGs. Here, she argues that RPG books are not too expensive because they offer a good value proposition in terms of how many hours of fun you can get from a book. While I solidly agree with her conclusion: No, RPG books are not too expensive, I'm not a huge fan of her reasoning to get there.

As a preamble, I will just acknowledge that I am writing this from the relatively privileged position of having a job that gives me enough disposable income to buy many more games than I will ever have time to play. I understand that people with lower incomes will of course want to stretch their money further than I, but hopefully I can argue that even then, playtime per dollar is not really a great metric for making purchase decisions.

The "dollar per hour of fun" has long been a staple of discussions of video games value propositions, fueling the existence of sites like HowLongToBeat and the popularity of "replay value" as a term in games reviews of previous eras. It makes sense at first glance: if you're a kid spending your meagre allowance on an expensive boxed game, which one you can keep playing for longest is a very valid question, or at least it was before the advent of countless full-featured free games, such a s Fortnite, League of Legends, Dota 2, etc. (We can absolutely talk about predatory microtransaction practices in these games, but I think everyone would agree that it is possible to have fun playing these for countless hours for free). The rise of digital distribution, with the bundles and steam sales that followed, means that even for paid games, you can get countless hours of entertainment for very little money: the quality of each of those hours starts to matter a lot more than their total number.

Estimating the value of something purely by how many hours of entertainment you get from it, in my mind, means reducing these hours a slurry of "content". Watching the 2019 Lion King remake becomes better "value for money" than the 1994 original, because it has a two hour runtime rather than the original's 90 minutes. That's 33% more movie for your dollar!

I think this method becomes even more fraught when it comes to tabletop RPGs. While film, video games, and books are all activities that you can just sit down and "extract entertainment" from, RPGs (of the non-solo variety) require you to gather your group of friends, and the fun largely comes from hanging out and doing an activity with them. The RPG book is a catalyst that enables fun, but it is very hard to quantify how much of that fun is a direct result of the RPG book, and how much is a result of hanging out with your friends playing make-believe.

Of course, the RPG book provides value in helping to set up a rules system and giving us inspiration, but there is a wealth of (good) free or extremely cheap options available out there. At the time of writing, itch.io lists 36,026 free physical games. While many of these will be supplements, these can usually be adapted to whichever system you are playing, and this list includes acclaimed games such as Mausritter, Honey Heist, Liminal Horror, Cairn (and its second edition), Lancer, Ironsworn, MÖRK BORG, as well as personal favourite Songbirds 3e. I think it is fair to say that this should satisfy anyone who is looking for hours and hours of tabletop RPG fun, and this is before we even start talking about games with community copies. These are all available entirely for free, and thus, by definition, offer infinitely more value per dollar than any book you might want to buy. Thus, basing your value estimation of RPG books by how many hours of fun you get per dollar, buying a book is always going to be bad value, just because of the sheer money of (good!) gaming content you can get entirely for free.

Ask yourself, am I really going to get "$50 worth of hours" more out of buying Electric Bastionland than printing Cairn? I hope I have been somewhat convincing that the value of the RPG book is not really meaningfully quantified in terms of "potential hours of fun". When I look at my stacked shelves of books, I am certainly not thinking "Fuck yeah, I have so many hours of fun in the bank here". Probably something more like "Oh man, I wish I had the time to actually play all of these games."

The metric has also often been used to compare the "value for money" different media, a practice that I find particularly meaningless. At some point it's not even apples to oranges, it's apples to combustion engines. At the end of the day, you could compare everything to staying home on the couch watching Netflix. Going out for drinks with friends? Cheaper so stay home with Netflix, so that's better value. Vacation to another country? So expensive, much cheaper to stay at home watching Netflix, so much better value for money, etc. Not all hours of entertainment are created equal.

"Why then", you might ask, "would you buy a book if not for the hours and hours of content it offers?" And there is a myriad of reasons for this! An obvious one is that the book might be beautiful. However, I find that generally, the value in an RPG book is much more nebulous and hard to quantify. I might buy them for their ideas, or for their prose, or just because I am looking for an adventure to run and this one seems cool and means I save some time not making one up myself. This is of course annoying, since it doesn't give us a neat stat to tell us whether a book is worth it or not, but I think it is a much healthier and more productive way to think about it. Does the book seem cool enough that you want to spend whatever it costs? Then buy it!

Gaby's blogpost does go into the reasons RPG costs what they do, and I do like this part of her post. RPGs (usually) cost money to make, and if you're hiring artists, writers, editors, etc. you absolutely have to pay them a fair wage, and this means a certain minimum price if you aim to make that money back in the first print run (and realistically, for many games that is the only print run). Ideally, you can also pay yourself, but that part could also come out of the long tail of pdf sales. While physical releases must be priced at least so they break even (and then some), the marginal cost of PDFs is zero, so you can set that however you want.

While you can absolutely make an analysis of the cost of producing the pdf and then price it whatever you think it is "worth", that's really a meaningless number. If your goal is to maximise your income from selling pdfs, the market is really what matters. There are a myriad of games post-mortems out there, letting you know how well various games have done, and one particularly valuable resource is this data-informed series of posts on pricing products on DriveThru. If the gross sales of pdfs are much higher at $20 than at $30, it is simply better for your business to sell at $20, even if your book is "worth" $30. The same is in principle true for print product, except the number to look at is the net profit, since you have to pay for actually printing and shipping the book.

In addition to this, there is of course the fact that many RPG creators do it as a hobby, because it is fun. If you are making games in your "fun time" rather than your "earn an income" time, there is not really a need to pay yourself a fair wage (though of course any professionals you ask to do work for you should still be compensated, unless they are explicitly choosing to donate their time!). I personally think that the RPG scene would be healthier if more people accepted that they are hobbyists, rather than trying to be full-time RPG professionals with all the stresses that entails, but that is pure speculation on my part.

In summary, I agree with Gaby that RPG books are very fairly priced, but I do not think that the value of a book can be meaninfully boiled down to easily quantifiable metrics. Furthermore, I think that if you want to make RPGs as a business, then external market factors are much more important for setting your price point than any attempted objective estimate of value. And yes, go and do all the things that Gaby suggests to support creators!