Cobwebbed Dragon wrote:
All the other supplements, like Elven Crystals, Sleeping Gods, Prince of Darkness, etc., are only £6.50. Even the main rulebook is only £13 (although this on sale from it's normal price of £25). Given the Players' Book is a little longer than other supplements, I think it's probably fair to charge around the £10-12 region.
Compare this to other supplements on DriveThru and it paints a grim portrait of greed. The £23 price tag puts it head and shoulders above any other 100-ish-page supplement. In fact, of the 16,912 items classified as 'supplements' on DriveThru RPG, the Players' Guide would fall into the top 200 or so (it's difficult to get an actual ranking, due to postage and sale prices). That region of the table is predominantly bundles or large supplements, consisting of many hundreds (in some cases thousands) of pages of material.
Couple this with the fact that SKG has only released this as a physical purchase - giving the dwindling community of fans no choice but to pay this excessive price - leaves me thinking SKG is taking advantage of a community desperate for new material.
Anyone have an alternative interpretation?
It's no longer appearing on the list of Serpent King products at DriveThru as it was when I posted about it a few hours ago (although it is still available if you go directly to it), which suggests SKG might be making it less visible - as a guess, perhaps because the PDF is meant to be available and isn't. That's a guess on my part, but I was expecting to see the PDF. Remember, there hasn't been any official announcement of the book being available yet - I posted because I saw it on Drive Thru (and I was looking for a reason).
As for the rest - Serpent King is a very small company and there may well be reasons why this book is more expensive than a book from a larger company would be. I doubt it's greed, I suspect it's just reality that this is what it needs to cost. I do think the fair comparison is to the full price (not the sale price) of the main rulebook, and this new book is only two thirds that cost (that is in US dollars, which is how prices display for me in Australia). That actually seems about right to me.
You're comparing PDF prices with hard copy prices. Most of the Dragon Warriors rulebooks are not currently available in hard copy, unfortunately, but these are the recommended retail prices on the back of my hardcopy rulebooks - all of which were released by Magnum Opus/Flaming Cobra, not by Serpent King. I see prices in US dollars, as I've said.
Sleeping Gods (104 pages) - $24.95
Friend or Foes (64 pages) - $19.95
Elven Crystals (80 pages) - $19.99
Prince of Darkness (88 pages) - $19.99
In From the Cold (112 pages) - $24.99
Bestiary (88 pages) - $24.95
These are all paperbacks, all smaller than the Players Guide which is hard cover, and about 144 pages in total - and its price on DriveThru RPG is $29.95
This does not seem, to me, unreasonable compared to the price on release of the other books which were Magnum Opus/Flaming Cobra releases. Not for a hardcover book larger than these paperbacks - and even In From The Cold is now five years old, so inflation also needs to be considered.
As I say, I see prices in USD, not sterling, so I can't say what might be going on with prices in pounds.
The lack of a PDF seems odd to me, but at this point, that may simply be a glitch of some sort. I honestly don't know. I was assuming a PDF would be released personally, but I can't recall if that was something I was told would happen, or just an assumption on my part.
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