At first blush, there is just no information provided to me, as a prospective customer, which explains why I should pay another $20 for another electronic edition to the thousands of dollars of Paizo content I already own PDF copies of.
Note that this is NOT a thread debating whether or not Demiplane’s pricing is sensible, or whether I should have access to everything I already paid Paizo for; while I certainly have thoughts about those topics, I see that there are already on-going threads regarding those items (which I may or may not eventually chime in on).
Rather, this is product feedback for Demiplane: I go to the Pathfinder Nexus, I see a bunch of pricing about how much it costs to purchase the digital content from you, but there is zero discussion for me, as prospective customer, showing what additional value you’re providing that would entice me to pay again for content I already have access to.
This is coming from someone who has been playing D&D since the red box, who has played somewhere around 50-60 different gaming systems, actively uses VTTs, Herolab, has spent tens of thousands of dollars (at least) on RPG content, software, and experiences over 40+ years. If I can’t tell what your value proposition is, I think you’re probably dropping the ball pretty hard.
(I mean that only in the most constructive way possible - just trying to help you see why maybe some of your potential customers are either balking at paying for the Demiplane version of the content, or not converting into paying customers)
As one thought, you might want to see if you can work a deal with Paizo to provide some kind of stripped-down version of the Core Rulebook as a “teaser” (for example, maybe just a couple of classes) to show me what the value of a Demiplane version of a Paizo book is. I’m certainly not afraid to spend money on RPG stuff, but I’m not going to spend $450 (let alone $1500) just to “find out” what your value is.
So it took me almost half an hour of random clicking around, trying to use the system, to uncover that you actually HAVE implemented the above suggestion (the “Pathfinder Primer”). I would suggest putting that right up front, alongside (or even ABOVE) the place where you take me to purchase rulesets and explicitly call it out as an example of what purchasing a Paizo “book” from Demiplane enables. Show me what it means, what it does, why I’d want to pay for it. Make it more obvious, don’t make me guess/dig for it.
We appreciate the feedback. We agree that we have additional work to do on product pages and marketplace organization to provide a fuller description of what is unlocked with a purchase.
We have been laser-focused on tool development, but those kinds of improvements will be something we’ll have bandwidth for in the coming months. Everything comes down to bandwidth and focus. In order to talk about a product, the product has to exist. The product is close to being ready, so our focus can shift to other things on our list.