Why do we have to rebuy digital books we already own?

General Discussion
42

So I came here looking for the Marvel Multiverse material. I’m not really that interested in playing online I just wanted access to any additional resources that might be available here. Character write-ups by fans, errata for the physical books and all of that kind of thing. For the record I bought my books brand new from Amazon and got them for a good at least a big less than what Demiplane is wanting to charge for the “digital” content offered here. I don’t even know what that looks like is it a full book with all of the rules or what?

It’s too risky. I don’t have a good preview of even what I would be getting through Demiplane. $49.99 after I’ve already bought the physical core books that are available is simply too much. I used Hero Lab for Pathfinder 1e and for D&D 5e and I never had to pay near that much for datasets. I’ve been playing role playing games since D&D boxed editions folks and I’m telling you this is highway robbery. If this was back in the days when we played 1st, 2nd or even 3rd edition D&D trying to make players pay twice for their rpg books would have went over like a lead balloon. You guys wouldn’t have even survived long enough to even have a business model.

If you continue to charge these outrageous prices people are going to start ignoring you, especially in today’s economy when things are expensive enough that we don’t have as much to burn as they used to. I think the Marvel Multiverse RPG is great from what I’ve seen from it so far. I even bought both the Hardcover and Kindle Edition of the core book but you guys are smoking crack or something if you think I’m going to pay you yet another $50 for every Marvel RPG book I buy. It’s ashame too because you are going to lose me as a customer that would have stuck around for reasonable prices. You are probably going to lose a lot of other people too. I don’t even bother to look at Fantasy Grounds or Roll 20 for the same reasons probibitive cost. I honestly like to play face to face and I want game aids that help me make Characters easily and things like that kinda like Hero Lab.

I also have copies of some of all of Renegade Games World of Darkness books and I’m seeing that you also support at least Vampire the Masquerade 5th edition. I won’t be paying your high prices for any of the WoD material either.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if within a years time you guys are a bad memory and the Marvel Multiverse RPG is still going strong for years to come. You are really trying to capitalize on Marvel Multiverses work and I hope they are charging you a hefty sum for doing so especially if you are going to try to rob their players the way you are now.

It was a bad bad day for D&D 2nd Edition when D&D etools came out because the people who made it didn’t know what they were doing and they charged waaaay to much for it. The absolute best days for game companies and gamers were the days when people could write absolutely free software that actually worked with the game system people were playing.

Easy access to that free software meant that new players had easy access to character creation and the like and that practically guaranteed that new players were going to be coming in all the time.

I have no doubt that you guys have a great product that would help new players learn the rules and make up characters easily but most of them will never see it because of your prohibitive pricing. The game companies will go on just fine but you won’t because you will price yourselves out of business. If you charged like $29.99 for each core book instead of a whipping $50 I know some gamers that would still ignore you because they have kids to feed and house payments to make and you are just not necessary. I would buy in at that lower price though and I think others would too.

It’s kinda like even when the game companies charge $10-$20 for a few dice because they have the Marvel die in there or the special WoD symbols on them. It’s utter stupidity because folks have been gaming just fine with regular old low priced dice for years. Companies like Chessex probably love it when game companies do stupid stuff like that but hey don’t let me get in the way of you putting yourselves out of business as fast as you can maybe the next guys who come along will realize that customers don’t like to be price gouged and who knows if you are blessed maybe when you are looking for you next job they might let you work for them but probably not in the marketing and finance department.

Don’t mind me though I’m just a gamer who has been at this on and off for around 35 years. What do I know right? Oh did I mention that you are changing too much? Oh yeah I think we covered that.

43

Guarantee it’s expensive because of the license fee which is of course getting forwarded on to the consumer. It’s often not the third party vendor who controls the price. In this case Marvel will be setting their fee for usage of the IP.

Pathfinder 2e is better specifically because Paizo are awesome and consider ownership of the pdf to be the digital license you need to use their content online. I’ve yet to find another company to match the awesomeness of that arrangement.

That arrangement though, has nothing to do with Demiplane. They are just third party company playing within the rules as defined by their contracts.

3 Likes
44

Always astounds me the passion some people have about not paying people for their work

3 Likes
45

Hi!
Good luck with your project!
Im sure a bright future for it, world will be full of people ready to pay even more for the same content but without any beneffits at all!
I see no problem, isn´t it?

46

The benefits is that you can use it here as an online reference, that is updated quickly, as well as with the Character Builder they’re currently coding, that will be part of the various tools for GM to play campaigns like in DDB

It’s not like you can simply load the PDF in Chrome and you get a full feature Character Builder by AI Magic.

The other option is that you have to code & debug your your own tools and host everything on your own servers. You’ll have to take care to block Everyone else from accessing it though, as you do not have a licence to share it digitally and it would be copyright infringement.

You pay for Ease of Access, for Someone Else’s time to code it and troubleshoot/ the various bugs, to host it online and figure out all the legalities. You pay for something that you wouln’t otherwise have.

You’re free not to want to pay, not to want to use it. There are other tools, some free, some not. You can use pen & paper exclusively if you fancy that.

I don’t. I don’t have the time nor knowledge to replicate these tools, so I’m willing to pay a bit more to have them all at hand.

1 Like
47

If you own the PDF you get a discount. Yeah that’s wonderful for the consumer. I buy hard cover books primarily if they are available. I get PDFs if I can for a reasonable price or for free. I do not believe that a pirchaser of a hardcover book should have to pay again to get a PDF of the same blasted book.

Again I’m talking primarily about the Marvel Multiverse RPG I haven’t played Pathfinder since 1st Edition which was great during the whole time 4e pretended to be actual D&D. I’m not a fan of having to pay $50 a pop for access to a book that I already own in some cases in both print and digital format and if I didn’t have a format it would be the digital one. From the start it was the work of the fans that made the online offerings for role playing games great.

If we wanted a Character Generator someone who knew how to code made one and then somewhere down the line people got the idea that they needed to be paid for people using their intellectual property not to profit from but to support the game system.

In those days we weren’t interested in making a profit we were interested in helping each other just have fun with a particular game system. Slowly the data for making Characters became considered as intellectual property that someone had to charge a fee to get access to.

Most of us had never heard of intellectual property in those days. Computer users had user groups that actually had the audacity to share code. I have nothing against people making a profit but please find a way to do it that doesn’t involve making someone pay two or three times for the same content. People, customers need to wake up and put these companies out of business. Vote with your wallets and just say no when they ask you to pay again for content you already have.

Am I the only one here that’s been around long enough to see this as totally wrong? It’s theft. It’s like double jeopardy in a criminal case charging someone twice for commiting the same crime.

Except there is no crime being committed and we are still being charged twice anyway. We buy the freaking books and one would assume that we have paid the price of admission only to be told that we have to pay for it again in some cases more than what we paid for it the first time. Charge a reasonable price for the use of your service sure but stop making people pay for the content twice or in some cases three times for those who bought print copies, digital copies and then would like to use the Nexus for whatever the Nexus does. There’s not even a real preview of what it does. There is just this thing that says buy your books again and you can play basically. What am I paying for? Am I going to love the product or hate it? No one knows from what we get to see from the outside.

I know it’s a difficult situation because if you are going to run a business you have to make a profit. But at the same time it’s not right to make your customers pay multiple times for content they already own. It’s wrong on the part of Demiplane and it’s wrong on the part of the game companies ss well to insist to be paid multiple times for the same content.

There has got to be a way where a reasonably priced option can be reached. Game companies you have customers that have already bought your books stop trying to charge them again for what amounts to the same product. Demiplane come up with a reasonably priced subscription option for access to your service. The content may cost extra but not $50 extra like buying the books all over again.

I don’t know what goes on in making these deals but if you want to do well you are going to have to make it appealing to your customers. I don’t know what others think but $50 for every book released is not very appealing to this customer especially when I already own the book in question. The problem at hand is how to set a price point that is appealing to your customer and at the same time turns a decent profit.

Right now Fantasy Grounds definitely doesn’t do this, Roll 20 doesn’t do it and at the moment Demiplane doesn’t do it either. If you can be the guys that break the cycle guess who the customers will come flocking to?

I admit I’m not a business man but I know what turns a customers head, a good product at a good price and right now none of the players are doing it. So offer us something. Offer us something much more attractive than the next guy. I’m not talking about a sale but something that starts out good and stays good.

48

Yeah. unfortunately t’s still mostly the Far West and there are a lot of parts that doesn’t fit together cleanly, some less than others.

Each publisher is different. Some are more greedy than others and want a bigger cut. There aren’t any “standardized/agreed upon rules”

For Paizo, you only get the “free pdf with the hardcover” if you buy directly from them with a subscription. Many other publishers have ways for you to get it even if you buy it from your FLGS (Chaosium at a minimum does). Some make you re-buy everything at 100% the price, w/o even giving you a digital copy, just an online tool to “look things up” (DDB).

for Demiplane, the issue is that it’s not “only” the PDF, and that’s why you have to pay more (than just the PDF). It’s the whole “same but Online” thing again.

At least you actually can get a discount if you had already bought the PDF (if your account is link in any way) or you get the PDF if you hadn’t bougt any version of the book before. Not perfect, but not the worst.

The shitty stuff is that if you had bought the physical book only before, or that there is no way to link your account. Then Demiplane is Stuck to charging you the Full Price.

What pisses me off more are those publishers charging the same price for the PDF or the Hardcover. One cost a lot less to create and has the advantage to be Instantly and Easily duplicated at the click of a mouse by said publisher. If the stand-alone Hardcover is 60$, I can’t believe that the Digital version should be 60$ also. If that’s the case, I’ll get the hardcover: at least I can put post-it or some kind of page marker, and it doesn’t need charging or Internet access.

49

Did your hard copy or kindle edition of the Marvel TTRPG include a character builder? I have the demiplane copy, and for one purchase I can share the content with my table, and it becomes the electronic character sheet with dice roller.

Your complaint disregards that this can be considered a table purchase- not that every user needs a copy. You mention 1st, 2nd, 3rd editiion D&D- I have to ask, did every player buy every book? No. I know because mine were frequently lent out. In the same way, this content can be shared and its interactive features make it more useful at the table than a hardcopy.

50

I don’t begrudge Demiplane for charging. It is, after all, a for profit corporation. It is up to the product user (gamer) to determine if they want to purchase the books, again, for the Demiplane platform.

I had made a sizable investment in HLO and used used it often despite detecting issues (and testing) with their dice roller - long story for another forum topic. I really like the Demiplane interface and how linked it is across the GUI. Unfortunately, I won’t be re-investing in another VTT for PF2e unless HLO goes under or becomes unstable.

Basically, you can’t hold Demiplane responsible for charging for the digital books. Maybe someday Paizo will be the central storage center for the digital content and charge licensing fees from the VTT’s out there and the VTT’s will charge monthly or annually for access to their platform allowing one to move from platform to platform with their owned content; a very difficult model to establish and support.

Just my $0.02.