The info Plaag posted is indeed from the AGP Subscriber Letter sent out with Campaign Installment #2. I was able to coax a bit of information out of Bob Jr on works in progress for the letter; he had also sent the images, but there was no room for me to include those in the newsletter...

I wanted to make sure the subscribers knew that Judges Guild was still alive and kicking; the same news piece is in the February AGJ Monthly Chronicle for non-subscribers (though thanks to the dearth of orders, that hasn't even gone out once yet!)

The three items mentioned are all being worked on by Bob Jr and his team at Judges Guild; AGP is not involved with any of the projects, save for providing moral support. If only Decatur and Iola weren't umpty-ump hours apart...

Rock and Roll!

Now for the hard copy....

That was what I was thinking. I'd consider buying at $8, but at $16 it's way too steep. At that price it'll be pirated and distributed quickly, and the price is what encourages piracy. At a reasonable cost, a lot of people would prefer to pay and support a company. The price here is excessive ans the buyer gets no product and the seller sells nothing except data which has no cost in distribution or manufacture.

This appears to be a poorly considered launch, and there is no sample file to boot, so the buyer is expected to shell out $16 blind for 32 pages of completely unknown content of undivulged quality or worth?

Don't see this selling until the company corrects the errors.

It was there half and hour ago. Seems to have been deleted now.

Would the printed version be sold through Necromancer in a month or a different company?

btw, is there any news on the revised Tegel Manor other than that it's still in limbo?

edit: I noticed the pdf price is now $14

My first 30 second view shows the first two keyed encounters numbered 'X'. Haven't gone into the body of the text yet, but the number flaw is disconserting. Is it meant to be this way, or is it a numbering error? Is the actual product numbered like this?

$14 is too high. What happens is those who are desperate buy it at $14 and then they drop it to $8-10 and everyone else buys it, and those who bought in at the beginning and are supporting the venture feel like they got screwed.

$14 is also a price point that encourages propogation by pirate means. Someone will buy it, feel they were ripped off, and then strip the watermark and publish it on Torrent for everyone to download for free. At $8 people either feel like they took a chance and got a fair product for a fair price, or they feel like they got a bargain and are likely to recomment to product to others,"It's only $8!" and are likely to buy other products.

This is what a lot of companies just don't get about piracy. Piracy is driven by excessive pricing by the seller of software. If the seller is perceived as being greedy, the buyer's think, "F"ck'em" and distribute for free. Windows OS and Adobe Photoshop are a case in point. The is far less of a piracy issue with MacOS and Paint SHop Pro per se, because pricing is far more reasonable for what the user gets.

Yes, it is always a problem and will always occur, but pricing at a point that encourages large numbers of buyers to consider waiting for a free copy to appear online is just stupid.

In my experience, everything ever published in PDF eventually is available free of charge from one unscrupulous source or another on the internet. It is as inevitable as taxation.

The way to make money with PDF release, is to either give away hardcopies free (of for a nominat postage charge) to all PDF buyers and charge hardcopy prices for the PDFs; or to sell PDFs at a drasticly lower cost and hit buyers for hardcopies at full price.

Lulu have great success in the latter, and by all accounts FGG are making shedloads with the former. But you can't screw the buyer and then screw them again later.

Most people will wait for the free copy online, and I'd be willing to bet it'll be available for free before Xmas at that price. That said, I'd be willing to bet there're a dozen or more casual browsers here that's drop $8 without batting an eyelid on a PDF that they think will be worth that sort of money.

misterspock wrote:I do agree, I think even at $14 it's high for a 32pg pdf. I'm just planning on waiting for the actual hard copy to be released.

I do kind of think that if you release the pdf version before a hard copy, you'd want to put it at a teaser price to get people to come back to buy the physical copy later. If I were to purchase at the higher price first, I'd be much less inclined to buy the hard copy later. The only other thought I'd have for rationalizing the purchase for the higher price pdf is that I might go for it if it were to contain some extra material not included with the hard copy.

Actually, I would hope the opposite and yet agree with you in general. The pdf should be the teaser and not contain everything that is in the hard copy. In my view, a pdf is a non-product, a glimpse... it should be nothing more.

That said, though, I will never spend money on a pdf. Ever.

Unless the hard copy is priced at something silly I will certainly be buying it.

<Edited following intelligence check>