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Wednesday, September 22, 2010

ZAC BELADO'S PDF MARKET SURVEY FOR TABLETOP GAMING NEWS September 2010.

SVC responded to the survey and thought you might be interested in the questions and answers. -- Jean Sexton
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QUESTION: Some people may not be as familiar with all the companies involved so if you could give a brief overview of your company and a quick description of your electronic publishing efforts. Nothing major, just three sentences perhaps?
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ANSWER: We are Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc. We've been around for a long time (starting in 1979 as part of another company, splitting away from the other company in 1982 and incorporating in 1999) and have several product lines (Star Fleet Battles, Federation & Empire, Federation Commander, Star Fleet Armada, Star Fleet Battle Force, Prime Directive RPG, Starline 2400 miniatures). We have only just recently (summer, 2010) started PDF sales, and plan to be porting more and more of our products into PDFs over the next year. I am not sure if we will do all of them, but we might. My answers below are, in many cases, limited by our lack of experience and based somewhat on what we have seen others do. A significant point about our company is that we switched to print on demand five years ago (we have our own printers, bookbinders, and trimmers in the building we own) so we're somewhat unusual in that regard. We sell about half of our dollar volume through distribution and the other half via our website, and of course, most of the profit comes from the website sales because of the wholesale discount structure. (We won't go "mail order only" because we want the products in stores to attract new and returning customers.)
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QUESTION: Do you think that the hobby in general is open to using PDF based rules and materials?
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ANSWER: Apparently so, although we have a feeling that the RPG guys are more used to having such things than the boardgame guys. People have asked us, for many years, to make our starship diagrams available as PDFs so that they can print them as they need them instead of photocopying the one from the book. They have also been asking for searchable rulebooks since we publish fairly thick rulebooks. They will be getting these over the next year.
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QUESTION: Is there one genre or age bracket that is more open to using PDFs? Is there any facet of the hobby that is less open?
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ANSWER: I don't think that openness is a mental decision issue, but a practicality issue. Some games are just easier to use as PDFs. I would guess that people who habitually walk around with laptops are going to be more of a market than those who only use desktop machines. I do expect that as our non-PDF customers get used to using them and discover the joys of searchable rulebooks, that more and more will want to use them.

One point I'll make that doesn't fit any of your questions is that our books are so big and so complicated that we never managed to do one without some mistakes in it, and we think it's really cool that people who bought the earlier version can get a free download of the updated product from the vendor we use.

I will also note that we are also moving into Kindle books, although the technology to make those things work is proving to be a challenge, at least so far.
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QUESTION: Do you release PDF versions simultaneously with print versions, and why?
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ANSWER: Not at this time, although that's more a factor of having just started releasing stuff and having hundreds of products done since 1979. We're discussing the idea of releasing a future hard copy product as a PDF simultaneously with the paper release but haven't reached a decision on which product to use for this experiment. We are also planning to do new updated editions of one entire product line (over 50 books) and to release those books simultaneously as PDFs and hard copies.
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QUESTION: Do PDF releases sell longer than print copies? Has this changed how long you have older rules available for purchase and is your back catalogue now larger than it used to be?
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ANSWER: We haven't been doing this long enough to answer that.
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QUESTION: Has access to PDF versions enabled more impulse purchase of products?
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ANSWER: We have about ten products uploaded so far, but when we uploaded PLANET ALDO it sold like crazy, perhaps because it's a $3 product. We actually plan to change a scheduled series of $10 PDFs into twice as many $5 PDFs because of this impulse element.
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QUESTION: How have PDF releases effected sales?
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ANSWER: We haven't been doing this long enough to answer that.
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QUESTION: What has been your most successful PDF release?
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ANSWER: The KLINGON ARMADA SHIP CARDS, not least because Starmada players (who always wanted to fly Klingon ships and now can) have been used to using PDFs because Starmada wasn't often in distribution through stores (although, now it is, by way of ADB).
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QUESTION: What impact does online piracy have on your release plans and sales?
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ANSWER: It concerns us a great deal. We already have endless problems with pirate PDF sites and torrent indexes using scans of our hard copy products, and our web guy spends four or five hours a week filling out the "remove this copyright violation from your site" forms for sites that should be policing themselves but won't. We haven't seen any of our "sold PDFs" show up on pirate sites yet, but we've only been doing them for a few weeks. We have said that if piracy explodes as a result of PDF sales (since it would eliminating the scanning step and make pirate copies easier to pass around) we will have to rethink the plans for PDF sales. We do, however, also know that some customers who really want PDFs would buy them if we sold them and are forced to get illegal pirate copies as the only way to get what they want.
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QUESTION: If you produced products under license does that affect how you approach online piracy?
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ANSWER: We do, and it doesn't.
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QUESTION: Do you think that piracy is from potential paying customers or do you think that your customer base primarily pays for PDFs?
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ANSWER: I think that most people are honest, and hope that most people who want a PDF will pay for it, but I do know that there are people out there who would pay for it if they had to but steal it if they can. I actually had one "customer" who said we should give him free PDFs so he doesn't have to photocopy the product his friend bought.
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QUESTION: How do you determine the selling price for a PDF release?
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ANSWER: Usually about 2/3 of the printed price, but with the caveat that in one particular case we have two kinds of printed versions and base the PDF price on 2/3 of the more expensive one of those, because the PDF is more like the expensive version than the cheap version. This means that we have one sixteen-page "text" product for $3 and six twelve-page "graphic" products for $10. That seems to be a disconnect but given the way each document is used, it's not.
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QUESTION: Is the current computer technology suitable for using PDFs in a gaming environment? Or do you think that PDF sales are for reference use?
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ANSWER: I am told that my customers want the books to reference during the game, but I guess if I was playing a game with a 2000 page rulebook I might want that as well.
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QUESTION: What additional workflow is required for a PDF release?
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ANSWER: Well, we have to decide what to release and when to release it, which is more than a two-second snap decision and usually involves several people discussing it for an hour or two over a couple of days (by email). I suspect that is a matter of having done so little of this that we are still figuring out those items. The additional work is minimal, since we already have the PDF (we use it on our print-on-demand system) and a suitable product description was already created for the website shopping cart. Now, there is an exception in that we did one 72-page pack of the cheap version of one product, which had to be split up into six twelve-page packs for PDF sales, and that took a couple of hours of extra work creating cover pages, descriptions, and rules extracts. We avoid doing that kind of product, so I don't see that happening again.
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QUESTION: Can you envision a time when you don't release print copies of your products?
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ANSWER: Actually, I can. I think that is at least five years away, but I think it's out there.
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QUESTION: Do you use PDFs in your own gaming?
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ANSWER: No, but then, I am lucky to get three hours a month playing a game, and I usually play Space Hulk because it has cool toys.
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