Adamant Entertainement (não) fixa em 1 dólar o preço de todos os seus PDFs

Arquivo Notícias
1

[quote=Adamant Entertainement]A lot of media producers talk a lot about "piracy" - how to stop it, how to get around it, how to design their businesses to deal with it. This is folly. People want to support the things that they enjoy, and overwhelmingly prefer safe, legitimate sources to do so - as long as you make in convenient and make it reasonably priced. That's all there is - there's no stopping unauthorized file sharing, and it's ridiculous to tailor your business to try and address it. Companies should instead spend their effort figuring out ways to make it easier for customers to purchase... which is what we feel our new experiment allows.

Adamant is dropping the price of all of our tabletop games PDF products to one dollar, across the board.

This is not a "clearance sale", or only on older product - everything we have in PDF, including the new releases coming this week - one dollar, regardless of length. We think that the market has grown to the point where "app-pricing" (for lack of a better phrase) can generate sustainable business. We think that gamers will respond to a model based on ease-of-purchase and no-impact pricing. Most of all, we're putting our money where our mouth is.[/quote]

2

Eh, eh, só vi este artigo depois de ter postado no Muro dos Recados. :slight_smile:

sopadorpg.wordpress.com - Um roleplayer entre Setúbal e Almeirim

3

É pena serem só RPG porque eu seria dos primeiros a apoiar esta ideia. Infelizmente não creio que possa abraçar este outro aspecto do hobby ou estaria certamente a olhar com muita atenção para isto.

Aliás, fica a questão para quem conhece melhor estes produtos: Existe na linha de produtos desta empresa algum RPG adequado para jogo ocasional? E para dois jogadores apenas?

Se sim, serei sério candidato a comprá-los...

4

[quote=Mallgur]Aliás, fica a questão para quem conhece melhor estes produtos: Existe na linha de produtos desta empresa algum RPG adequado para jogo ocasional? E para dois jogadores apenas?[/quote]Não conheço muito bem o catálogo, mas para mim chega saber que são a editora que tem o Icons Superpowered Roleplaying e todo o material para este RPG pode ser comprado por uns míseros 4.48 euros! Quando até basta ter o livro principal.

Não é propriamente um jogo ocasional (apesar de ser bastante simples), nem feito expressamente para dois jogadores. Se é isso que procuras, acho que este é o filler ideal, desde que não o leves muito a sério nem te importes com o estilo meio new-age que a mim me faz torcer um bocado o nariz. Para RPG de dois jogadores, a minha recomendação continua a ser Beast Hunters.

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Supostamente por causa dos custos fixos de cada transacção através de Paypal, o preço subiu para dois dólares.

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[quote=Steve Wieck]In the era of 99 cent apps and songs, it is easy to envision a world where the price of digital content continues to fall. Some publishers have been experimenting with low price points and finding some success. I want to offer a few counterpoints to the low price approach.

First, consumers often base their purchasing not on absolute price but rather on price expectation. If you're not familiar with the term "price anchoring", I recommend you check out Mintlife's article here. Consumers will respond to a $1 RPG sale because their price expectation for RPGs in anchored at $15-$50 for a core rulebook and $5-$25 for a supplement. When the price they pay is far outside of their expectation it ignites interest in grabbing the deal.

If all publishers trended prices down to $1 for an RPG, then customers will re-anchor their price expectations at that level and $1 RPGs would no longer ignite large sales volumes for any single publisher. Instead $15 RPGs will seem expensive, much like any app over $1.99 is "expensive".

Second, low price points seem to be suboptimal for long term total revenue. Our data on sales rates of core rulebooks shows very little correlation between a rulebook's PDF sales rate and the rulebook's price. This suggests that selling really cheap PDFs of your core books won't sell dramatically more copies, and will therefore get you less total revenue.

Third, lots of $1 sales transactions kill us in micro-transaction payment processing fees. When an exclusive publisher sells a title for $1, we pay .31 to Paypal (or nearly the same to credit card processors) and pay the publisher 70 cents. We're already down a penny before we cover any other operating expense. Customer purchase frequency and habits are not the same for games and comics as for music, nor do we make profits selling hardware devices, so what works at i-Tunes/Apple won't work for us. A race to the bottom in pricing would force us to make some type of change in royalty structure with publishers or fee structure with customers, neither of which we want to do - ever - unless forced upon us by too many sales where we take a loss on every sale.

For those reasons and others (like affording decent art), we encourage publishers not to see lower prices as a long term way to raise your total income.

[/quote]

7

[quote="Gareth-Michael Skarka"]I know that a lot of people have been watching Adamant's recent shift to an "app-pricing" model, where everything we released in PDF was priced at $1.99.

Well, I'm not going to bury the lede here: The experiment was a failure. I don't believe that the model is a sustainable one in this market.


As I reported earlier, the experiment started strongly. Actual dollar income was up more than 200% in both January and February (223% in January, 218% in February). Adamant was making twice as much money as we had at the same period last year. On the surface, that's great news - and seemed to indicate that we were on the right track. More money = better model, after all.

Unfortunately, the situation wasn't that simple. March took a nose-dive (more on that in a minute), and while wondering aloud on Twitter about the data I was getting, John Rogers asked if I was cross-referencing with release frequency data.

They say that the devil is in the details. Well, that's where this particular devil was lurking. The missing piece that I wasn't seeing.

Yes, January and February were up, making twice as much as we'd done last year. Last year, however, we had barely released any product during that period -a THRILLING TALES adventure in January, and a THRILLING TALES serial video in February. The adventure, which moved OK, was priced at $5.00. The video, which didn't move that well (to the point where I haven't bothered to finish releasing the series) was only priced at $2.00.

In January and February of this year, Adamant released 2 products for ICONS - our hottest line, whose releases (whether through Adamant or via Adamant's licensees) are always in the top 20 "hot products" lists), AND a release for PATHFINDER, and a THRILLING TALES adventure. All priced at $1.99.

In other words - we released twice as much product. The 200+% began to look more like a function of release, than pricing. (And that's not even taking into account the popularity of the ICONS titles).

I said earlier that March took a nose-dive. Traditionally, the first week of March is when we participate in the "GM's Day" sale - and for the past few years, the overwhelming response to that sale (where we would drop our prices down to $1.00 from their regular levels) would earn Adamant as much in one week as we normally make in more than three months of regular sales. That one week has been enough to make March our second-highest sales period of year, behind only the week following Thanksgiving (when we run our Black Friday/Adamant Anniversary sale).

This year? In order to be listed as a GM's Day participant, we had to actually run a sale - even from the $1.99 app-pricing which we now occupied. So everything was priced at $1.49 - 25% off. We participated, as we do every year, with dozens of other publishers.

The result? That week made barely 20% of last year's take.

My stomach sank. I began to suspect that having our regular pricing at $1.99 had made the Event Sale largely meaningless. We had, essentially, cut our own throats. No March windfall.

The rest of the month? We released two hot ICONS adventures, and an adventure for MARS. Last March, we had only released one installment of the video series for THRILLING TALES, priced at $2.00, to disappointing sales. Yet even with that - the non-sale weeks for March 2011 were only 35% higher than the non-sale weeks for March 2010. Three times as many releases, and only a 35% increase in income.

It's become pretty obvious to me that the app-pricing model doesn't really work for us - perhaps the consumer pool is too small in this market to drive the kind of numbers where it would work. Perhaps Adamant's audience base is fairly static, and we'd move roughly the same number of units regardless of our pricing. Who knows. The number of units moved in a month by ICONS adventures under the app-pricing model weren't massively higher, on average, than the number of units that ICONS products would move in a month under the old pricing. It was higher, yes - but not as much as you'd expect.

The only inescapable fact is that the increases we were seeing were explainable by increased releases over the similar period, not by pricing. And even worse, by engaging in this experiment during the month of March, we made a huge mistake - completely taking the wind out of the sales of our second-best sales period of year, completely removing a much-needed cash influx. Even worse, it's entirely possible that we could've have moved similar unit numbers, at the old pricing... which means that for every sale, we were essentially leaving an average of $3.00 on the table.

None of this is certain. I've got data - sales, income, release, etc., but it's far from conclusive. I can only play my gut here. I've got bills to pay and freelancers who need payment as well, though, so I can't really afford to extend this further than I've already done.

There's an old saying that goes: "When you find yourself in a hole, Stop Digging." So that's where I'm at right now. Everything seems to be pointing me at the conclusion that this model just doesn't work for us. Maybe it's just not for Adamant - but my hunch right now is that it's market-wide. I think tabletop games may be too small of a niche for the model to work as intended. Again, that's just a hunch - I can't afford to keep up the experiment to prove it one way or another.

Maybe I'm wrong, and another company will make a go of it, and it will work for them. But it won't be Adamant.

As of today, our prices will be returning to their usual levels.

Thanks for reading.[/quote]

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A história é triste, de facto, mas óptima para exemplos para aulas de marketing... tipo os erros básicos que NÃO se devem cometer. Como NÃO utilizar informação de gestão.

Depois de dar a aula sobre preços aos meus alunos usando a Adamant como exemplo reportarei a resposta que tive.

9

Entretanto, a verdade é que outras editoras como a Nevermet Press estão a considerar avançar ou já avançaram para uma espécie de app-pricing dizendo que o fazem inspiradas pela iniciativa da AE. No caso da NP, o preço já é 3 dólares e, se calhar, o catálogo disponível e os clientes já não são bem os mesmos. Como diz o Sérgio, experimentar só para ver no que é que dá e desistir ao fim de três meses é bastante estranho e fiquei surpreendido com esta notícia. Apesar da transparência que o Gareth-Michael Skarka demonstra ao revelar estes dados todos, há muita coisa que não sabemos e que até terá a ver com a própria RPGNow/DrivethruRPG.

10

A verdade é que me parece que houve ali uma grande falta de competência de gestão. Fui reler a discussão na RPGnet e a Adamant começou por fixar o preço único em $1. Só depois disso é que se deu conta de que não estava a levar em consideração de forma devida a comissão para distribuidores e que tinha que alterar o preço para $1.99. Agora vem dizer que tomou a decisão baseando-se numa análise incorreta da informação, mais concretamente no facto de não atender ao impacto do lançamento de novos produtos, etc... Há por ali demasiado amadorismo.

O que é ótimo de um ponto de vista comparativo para candidatos a empresários de jogos. Aprende-se mais com casos como estes do que com os sucessos e insucessos das WotC.

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[quote=smascrns]mais concretamente no facto de não atender ao impacto do lançamento de novos produtos[/quote]Sim, já que está a comparar, podia olhar para os meses de 2009 e determinar qual é o efeito que o lançamento de novos produtos ou os saldos de Março podem ter nas vendas para, de facto, ter uma ideia de quanto elas foram afectadas pelos preços terem sido fixados a 1.99$ em 2011. O que é que queriam dizer quando consideraram que "the market has grown to the point where "app-pricing" (for lack of a better phrase) can generate sustainable business"? Aparentemente, não há gente suficiente para lhes comprar material a preço da chuva ou, pelo menos, não a tempo de dar para pagar as contas.

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Pois, pois. Olhando de fora há no domínio dos jogos de personagens e similares algumas empresas que vou seguindo (à distância) porque me parecem interessantes, em particular as mais antigas. A SJG, a Chaosium, a Flying Buffalo são deveras curiosas, em particular a segunda. Parece-me que é aí que, apesar de tudo, se podem encontrar os exemplos de sucesso, se medirmos este pela perspetiva de um negócio sustentável no tempo, mesmo que não seja muito grande nem esteja na primeira página.

A Chaosium interessa-me particularmente. Depois de uma era de ouro nos anos 70-80, caiu a pique devido a uma série de más decisões empresariais. Levou quase 20 anos a dar a volta mas neste momento vai construindo um espaço próprio quase sem que se dê por isso. Houvesse um Atkinson interessado em investir na empresa - mas sem tomar o controlo da mesma - e a Chaosium podia tornar-se uma coisa muito séria.