Dresden Files RPG: Your Story

The PDF is a high fidelity, gorgeous, fully laid out presentation of the game in a format that matches the print book.

The Kindle/Nook versions are stripped-down & bare-bones, lacking much of the contextual layout, artwork, and other graphical features of the PDF.

There is no call to lecture me about pricing, especially when you have no basis nor knowledge of the licensing agreements that may play into it. If you'd like to see some of the thinking that goes into our general pricing strategy, you can learn about part of it at my personal blog http://www.deadlyfredly.com/2016/08/value-of-content/

You are very welcome to buy the inferior, lower-priced product, or not purchase at all.

Costs I can imagine Evil Hat incurs for these books, be they electronic or printed:

UpFront:
-Pitching and negotiating the licence
-Fully designing the game rules
-Drafting the game rules
-Full Edit for logical order
-Flavour edit, to seem a part of the Dresden world
-Layout Work (Which is a huge pain and very time consuming)
-Initial testing/response testing
-More Editing
-Final proofing
-Nope, probably a couple last-minute edits
-Negotiating with printers, distributors, and e-distributors
-Web design and self-marketing

OnGoing:
-Jim Butcher & Publisher royalties
-Artist royalties
-Distribution fees (Ya don't think maybe DriveThruRPG makes some money somwhere?)
-Advertisment, marketing, review copies, conventions, etc.
-Product support after the sale, often including freebie extras, plot hooks, flavour bits, worksheets, more artwork, etc.
-Fred taking time to reply to people...See more personally in comment sections below products
-Investment towards future game supplements, books, or revisions.

So, even without me knowing a darn thing about the exact circumstances of Evil Hat's licencing agreements and cost factors, I can safely assume that the Dresden RPG, which appears to be very professionally produced, cost and continues to cost a fair whack of cash. I can also assume that kindle and epub versions, being tiny files without artwork, are cheaper to distribute and carry a smaller royalty price-tag. Further, many people buy the ebook versions of these texts as an additional copy, for easy reference at the gaming table, rather than as a primary purchase; or they buy them as a cheap way to get a peak at the meat and potatoes of the game before buying the full-colour version. Publishers know this, so the price might be adjusted accordingly and be artificially low.

So, while some part of me still has trouble accepting costs for intangible assets such as PDF files, I know this is silly since the same reluctance isn't applied to video games, which I have not physically bought in nearly a decade. So, when the day comes that I actually -READ- some Dresden novels, I will happily purchase these RPG books in PDF for easily half of what the printed versions cost around me...or I'll man up and just buy them in hardcover, especially since Evil Hat is so awesome they would then provide me the PDFs for free.

Or I could whine about how broke I am, and how these darn publishers just price-gouge everybody. (Just so ya know, market forces don't really let this be a thing.)

Yow. Good call. I must have been having a bad reading day two and a half years ago (obviously I can't remember the details from then), but I absolutely shouldn't have responded like that. My apologies.

... Oh wait! Gmail has a good archive of comments I received. Turns out the reply you're seeing was in reply to a comment that is no longer displayed here. So it looks like I'm responding very nastily to something that was completely reasonable. What happened, instead, is that the original commenter replied to my first reply, to say this:

"Thank you for the reply, but that does not justify the price gauging that some companies do when it comes to PDFs or any electronic publications. I understand the cost of books, and I really don't mind paying a few extra dollars to gaming companies for the electronic versions (say $15); but the price Evil Hat Productions, LLC and others tend to charge is greedy. The "high fidelity, gorgeous, fully laid out presentation" for the PDF is what...See more you already use to have the books made, so it does not cost you any more to provide the product at cheaper price. And I doubt the expense of storage fees come close to that of the physical copy. It's a shame for I really wanted to check this out, but it appears Evil Hat (fitting name in this case) seems to think RPGers are loaded with money; and maybe they are and I just happened to be the minority that is poor."

So my second reply was to that, which ... honestly, definitely was someone trying to lecture me about pricing practices.

Nice! Gotta love long-term archives of everything.

Looks like Ralph T tried to pull a fast one there but got owned in the end, beautiful!

First, I want to thank the publisher for posting my response to their first post. I'm not sure what happened to my second post.

Second, I had no intention of responding to any of these posts because this is not a forum for nasty, knock-out, drag-out comments and I was trying to take a higher road from the comments I had already made, and from what I have seen of the community for this product I now know the decision to not purchase and participate was a good solid choice.

To Andrew K and Paul B. If you are not going to provide anything useful (and no Andrew K your info was not useful) just shut up.

P.s. Go ahead and have the last word. I'm not planning on responding for if I could I would ignore this page.

Some guy's attempt to theorize to some other guy why x costs x is not useful, therefore he should shut up? Woof. Methinks you were not missed Ralph. Hope you found the product and the community you were looking for.

"I was going to take the high road! I swear! I'm just telling random people I don't know to shut up ONLY because I didn't take the high road. But don't worry, I WAS going to take the high road! So I'm still a good person! I'm a good person who normally takes the high road it's just that THIS time I decided to tell strangers to shut up."

Don't worry, capitalisms wears a lot of us down, it's not your fault, and 2020 was an especially awful mess. I just couldn't help but poke a little fun.

Anyway, this RPG looks dope. But if I buy it I'll probably just get the PDF. The REAL horror is trying to navigate an RPG book with a kindle... **shudders**