The Price of Words: Valuing a PDF

 

Recently, there has been discourse on the social medias about the prices we pay (or perhaps rather, do not pay) for our RPG PDFs, including the thread by Chris Bissette of LootTheRoom, and a sternly worded blogpost from Ramona of Alderdoodle. Discussing the value of RPGs is of course something I have done before, and every time I see this discourse, I am tempted to get involved (as indeed I sometimes do). However, I find that my opinions on this issue are too nuanced to be neatly presented in a series of social media posts, hence, a blog post. Another few bits of preamble that I would like to make clear, is that I don't want to dispute what Chris and Ramona are saying. They run tabletop businesses, I do not. I am just a customer and hobbyist creator. Probably the kind who ought to buy more PDFs.

An Outside Look a the Landscape

Let's start with an assumption that we can hopefully all agree upon: A professional RPG writer designer deserves to be compensated fairly for their work. That's "easy" to quantify when you're freelancing for someone else, because then you can set a price per word, per page, or per hour etc. and be paid up-front for your work. When being paid this way, you might lock yourself out of royalties down the line, but you have been fairly compensated for the labour you put in, so your employer shoulders the risk and reaps the potential rewards if the product overperforms. (Of course, there is the issue that tabletop professionals are generally woefully underpaid, but that is a separate discussion.) 

"Fair pay" is a bit more complicated for those who are publishing their own work, since there is no other entity to provide a set paycheck for it. This is where setting a "fair" price for your PDFs are important, because you want people to buy them, and you want to get a decent payout per sale. Of course, if "fair compensation for labour" is really the sticking point, it's not really either of those numbers that individually matter, it's their product. 1000 copies netting you $5 each will pay you just as well as 100 copies sold at $50. Raising prices might reduce number of purchases, the question is whether the increased per-unit income offsets this drop in number of sales (and conversely, lowering the price might lead to more customers, but the question is whether this offsets the lower per-unit price). It requires some complicated market analysis that I do not have the data for to optimize this, but this post with data from DriveThru suggests that the best price point to maximize revenue is around $15-20 (or at least it was five years ago).

What Chris and Ramona are arguing for is increasing the amount we are willing to spend per pdf, hoping to increase the income per sale without the number of sales dropping. I don't want to make assumptions, but the implication to me, is that there is not enough increase (or perhaps even stability) in the number of sales to make continuing at the current sale prices viable longer term: there's not enough money coming in, and there's not enough customer growth, so the prices must go up.

As customers, purchasing the products is what keeps creators afloat, and as such, it is the prices we pay that determine whether they get fairly compensated. At the same time, these are independent businesses, and we are customers: we are not responsible for them being paid fairly, even if it is a requirement for their continued existence. If the neighbourhood cafe is too expensive for people to visit, its going to shut down., conversely, they cannot lower prices or run at a loss,. It is up to potential customers to decide if they can accept paying the "high" prices, because if they won't, they will no longer have a neigbourhood cafe. There is no moral imperative one way or the other, it's okay to accept that you don't need a neighbourhood cafe if that's what its prices are, but the cafe is obviously interested in the customers making an informed decision: pay our prices or lose the cafe.

Valuating RPG Works

To me, there are three immediately different methods of (digital) RPG valuation: labour-based values, inherent value of the text, and utility value. For physical books, there is of course also the material costs per unit. The analysis here is also extremely simplified - adding in the costs of art, editing, and layout makes the equation look even worse for independent publishers.

The labour based value relies on the time and effort it took to produce the book, but when selling digitally via e.g. itch or DriveThru, there is no extra labour per copy sold. Deciding a "fair" price can be done relatively simply, but can be strongly reliant on guesswork: You decide how much your labour is worth, e.g. $25 per hour spent producing the book (I am aware that this is probably not a realistic sum to ask, but in a fair world, it shouldn't be lower), and divide that by how many copies you expect to sell. Of course, digital works can continue selling without any additional labour "forever", and income in 10 years is not helpful for paying for dinner tomorrow, so it is probably wise to price based on the expected sales in the first month to a year. If you're only expecting to toal a few tens to hundreds of purchases, you might have to set the price prohibitively high (further driving down sales) to get fair compensation for your labour, and at the end of the day, this might not be possible. Whether there is a price point that gives enough sales to fund your work is the deciding factor in whether the business of self-publishing RPGs is a viable full-time job. For this to happen, it is helpful if the labour-based price aligns with the perceived value of the book.

The "inherent" value of the text is of course entirely arbitrary, and personal. Is a single copy of the text worth the cost of the labour put into it? You would need to really want it to pay the hundreds or thousands of dollars to justify that. At the end of the day, it's just vibes-based. It may have some relation to the labour value, in that longer texts are often perceived as having higher value, as well as additional bells and whistles like art and layout. The perceived value of course also depends on the sale price of similar works - if other works of the same perceived quality are sold for $5, you would need to make a good case for selling your work more expensively. I read Chris and Ramona's posts as attempts to do this: saying that they are going to sell more expensively because that is the only viable option, and that's why their works may be more expensive that the competitors. Pay it, or lose your cafe.

The third, and perhaps most deciding valuation, is the utility value. What is it worth to the consumer buying it? I think this is where the big challenge lies in selling PDFs. The consumer might say, the marginal cost to the author of selling another PDF is zero, so the price should reflect that and be low. I don't think this argument is without merit, but it has two significant flaws: if the price is not high enough that the author is getting paid for their labour in a reasonable timeframe, the price is not viable, and if you would significantly lower your prices on products after they have been "paid off", that could lower the perceived value of your future works, making it harder for them to paid for themselves. It is a much more reasonable argument when it comes to bundling with a physical purchase: the physical book is paying for the text + materials, since it is free to provide a PDF with it, why should I pay for the text twice? (neglecting of course, that there is some labour involved in producing a nice PDF vs one for printing).

The Barrier to Purchase

Speaking only for myself here, the barrier to buying PDFs at "fair" prices lies not so much in paying a fair price for the PDF, but in buying the PDF at all. When buying physical books, a (too) large part of the purchasing decision relies on FOMO. If a print run is being produced, who knows how long until they are sold out, or if there will ever be a second print run? Buying the book as soon as available, rather than waiting until I am actually going to use it, is (maybe) necessary to ensure that I have it when I want to use it later.

A physical book also sits on my shelf, and can act as an inspiration. Every time I look at my bookshelf, I am reminded that I own this book, and I should pull myself together and play it. Or at least read it. Even if it is already providing value by looking nice on my shelf.

A PDF generally has neither of these qualities: there is little reason for me as a consumer to buy it before I actually need it, as it will just languish on my hard drive, or perhaps even in the cloud in my digital library, until I wish to use it. I might even forget that I own it, in a way that would not happen if I saw it on my bookshelf every day. Thus, there is very little reason to purchase it until I actually need it.

In terms of needing it, whether that day would ever come is an open question. With a variety bundles from Humble, of Holding, and from itch, I already have a digital library of games and modules larger than I expect to be able to play in my life. And they keep coming. I have stopped buying the Bundle of Holding, because I simply do not need more PDFs of games I am probably not going to play (I still buy the itch charity bundles because of the charity). There is also the "competition" from the forest of free and pay-what-you-want PDFs out there. I am contributing to this myself! There are so many options to not spend money.

A PDF has to be specifically what I want right now in order for me to buy it, because otherwise it will simply be lost in this endless pile of PDFs that I barely ever look at anyway. With instant availability, there simply isn't really a customer facing argument for "buy now, play later" for PDFs. And often, "later" never happens, because I already buy too many physical books to play them all. Of course, this is bad, because then the neighbourhood cafe closes.

A fourth value?

While buying a bunch of PDFs at "high" (meaning fair) prices, that you don't know when you're going to use (if ever) may seem foolish, there may be a fourth value inherent to this: the continued work of writers and designers whose art you enjoy.

As Chris and Ramona tell us, if we're not going to buy their work, they're going to stop producing it, because they need to be doing something that pays for their continued existence: we live in a world where being alive costs money, and so, most of us need to devote a lot of time to earning it.

Saying "you should pay me $20 for this, because that's its worth" means I will do that whenever I actually need it, saying "you should pay me $20 for this, because otherwise it might be my last game" might be a more effective call to action.

In truth, the way that is most likely to work for getting me to pay is more of a patronage model: it's easier to convince me to give you a few dollars every month so you can keep doing work I like, and then send it to me whenever you make something, that it is to make me buy your PDF. Not because I don't think the PDF isn't worth it, but because it's a purchase I can make anytime, I don't need it now, and it will drown in the avalanche of stuff. This is evidenced by the fact that I rarely buy PDFs (sorry), but do support multiple RPG writers on Patreon. Perhaps this is a viable alternative, or at least supplement, to fairer PDF pricing?