PDFs vs. Physical Miniatures--It's the 21st century, folks

[jeffgeorge]

Preface/TL;DR
This conversation started in a thread about very nice miniatures offered by a particular publisher, who sells them only as physical goods, and not as PDFs. Not surprisingly, the members of this forum complimented the quality of the artwork, and assured the publisher that as soon as printable PDFs were available for purchase and download, they'd be customers. When my "brief" response to the thread grew into a long essay on a broader topic, I felt it was unfair to hijack the publisher's thread by posting it there, so I'm starting a new conversation here. My intent is not to insult or offend publishers of physical paper minis, but to try to explain why I believe they are missing out on a lot of sales by refusing to offer PDFs of their products.

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Why not sell minis as PDFs?

Jan 31, 2017 5:05:57 GMT -9 cowboyleland said:

I think concerns about piracy is the whole reason they don't offer pdf's. Understandable, really.

I get that, but refusing to offer PDFs is 20th century thinking. Everyone selling printable miniatures through DriveThru/RPGNow (OBS) has moved their thinking about product fulfillment into the 21st century. The piracy thing is a very minor concern, really, so let's consider some real issues before we get distracted by piracy.

Physical products cost a lot to produce, and more over time, and aren't always available
When you sell a set of minis thru OBS as a PDF, you're not selling a physical object, you're selling the right to reprint copyrighted material for personal use. Selling rights is much, much cheaper for the publisher than selling things, because rights can be conveyed digitally, while things have to be manufactured, stored, and shipped to the consumer. These requirements massively increase the publisher's cost to deliver product, which in turn massively increases the price he must charge the consumer.

When the consumer price goes up, sales volume goes down, which just increases the margin the publisher must demand per sale in order to keep his doors open--which starts a feedback loop that just keeps driving the price up until the demand for the product approaches zero. Eventually, the publisher has to cut prices in order to clear physical stock, because physical inventory not only costs money to manufacture, it also costs money to store. Thus, inventory has to be moved out, or it continues to get more expensive over time even after it is manufactured. Eventually, the publisher ends up selling remaining inventory at a loss, just to cut off the continuing cost of storage.

The cost to produce, store and ship a single pack of half a dozen physical miniatures is probably several dollars, and it's a cost that only increases over time. In order to realize a profit, the publisher has to charge even more than several dollars. Even when he does that, he's only netting a small percentage of the cost to the consumer. In the end, he's probably making $1-2 per pack, assuming he can sell them at something approaching his full retail price. And in order to get at that narrow profit, he's first got to sell enough product to cover the original production cost for the entire run--several hundred or a few thousand dollars he almost certainly had to pay to a printer in full, up front. If he's had 1,000 packs manufactured at a cost of $3 per pack, and he's selling them at $6 per pack, he's got to sell 500 units just to cover his manufacturing costs, before he's even starting to cover his overhead and in-house labor (which mostly goes into packing for shipping, and even at minimum wage, probably adds $1-2 to the cost to deliver a single unit).

So the costs to a publisher of physical game products are always being pushed up, while competition and consumer expectations are constantly pushing sales, and therefore prices, down. He's caught in the middle, waiting longer and longer for ever-diminishing income from the sale and delivery of physical products. The longer this goes on, the less money he makes, and the longer it takes him to make it. And there's a cap on how much he can possibly make before having to make an additional up-front investment, because he has a finite number of units to sell before he runs out and has to print more. If he runs out of inventory and can't afford or justify the investment in a reprint--which would require being confident of at least several hundred unit sales within a short period--the product goes out of print at least temporarily, and sales go to zero.


PDFs cost little to produce, and nothing over time
On the other hand, if he's selling rights to a print a PDF for personal use, his only cost is that of producing the original PDF. No matter how many units he sells, it never costs him any more. He doesn't have to pay for print production, storage, or packing and shipping, with either time or money. His products are never out of print, and they are instantly available 24/7, on demand, even when he's on vacation or in the hospital. His cost per unit, which was minimal to begin with, is constantly going down, not up. For all these reasons, he can make more money per unit, even though his price to the consumer is less than half of what the publisher of physical goods must charge just to break even. And because his price per unit is lower, his sales will be higher--and that's ignoring the fact that most consumers feel there's more value in the right to print an infinite number of miniatures themselves than in receiving 5 or 6 physical paper minis, even if they come with reusable plastic stands.

Just as important, PDFs never go out of print. They are infinitely and instantly available. Even if your sales on some items drop to a few units per year, it costs nothing to keep those items available, and keep picking up those few bucks a year, forever, as long as OBS remains active.

You make more money selling PDFs than physical products
Speaking strictly for myself, I will cheerfully pay about $3 for a set of minis as a PDF, and feel like I got a great value, while I won't spend $9, $6, or even $3 for a half-dozen physical paper miniatures. And of the $3 I paid for the right to print those minis for my own use, the publisher will receive close to $2 from OBS. (I believe the split at OBS is about 1/3 to OBS, 2/3 to the publisher. Although this is only a ballpark figure, it's close enough for the purposes of this conversation.)

For example, in recent weeks, I've bought about 9 sets of Trash Mob Minis, cheerfully paying an average of about $3 per set, because I feel that those products are an excellent value to me. (I've bought a lot of other vendors' minis as well, but Trash Mob is what I bought most recently.) I've bought exactly zero sets of physical, pre-printed miniatures, from any publisher at all, ever, and I simply never will, because at $1 to $2 per miniature, they are a terrible value, no matter how good the artwork. You'd have to get them down to $0.20 per figure or less before I'd even consider buying them, which means less than $1.50 per set--a price at which they cannot be profitably manufactured and shipped (See note, below). So Trash Mob Minis has made at least $15 off of me in the past few months, and I'm very happy with my purchases and will continue to buy more, while publishers of physical minis have made $0 from me, and never will, until they offer PDF versions of their products. And even if I were willing to pay $9 or even $6 per set for physical minis, I would buy half as many physical sets or less than I would buy PDFs, but--and this point is key--the publisher's profit of about $2 per unit is roughly the same on both physical and PDF products. So even if I spent the same $25-$30 on physical minis as I have on Trash Mob minis, that would only pay for three units. The publisher's total profit on those three sets would be about $5, because his margins are unavoidably much narrower than Trash Mob's, who pocketed $15 out of the $25 I spent.

Piracy doesn't matter
The piracy concern is a fallacy, despite the fact that lots of publishers make major decisions based upon it. Pirated copies are annoying, but they only represent a financial loss if they cost the publisher actual sales. The overwhelming majority of people who obtain pirated copies of game products were never going to pay money for them, so their possession of these pirated copies costs the publisher nothing. The software industry has learned over and over again that measures to prevent piracy only inconvenience legal purchasers, because their freedom to use the product they legally purchased is compromised, while pirates will always manage to circumvent any protection the publisher can come up with. Thus, copy-protection--even the brute-force copy-protection afforded by not making PDFs available--hurts sales without reducing piracy. Any pirate with a $60 scanner and a copy of Photoshop Elements can pirate a physical set of printed miniatures--charging $9 for the set does nothing to stop him, but it does cost the publisher a lot of honest sales, and massively increases his cost--in both time and money--of publishing. Piracy is completely unpreventable, yet it represents virtually zero lost sales. Therefore, it should be ignored.

Another thing that some publishers worry about is sales lost when legal purchasers "loan" their PDFs to people they know personally--either by handing them a digital copy of the PDF, or by printing out a copy of the product for them for them. The theory is that this "loaned" copy represents a lost sale. In practice, I think publishers should look at this sort of sharing as marketing, rather than piracy. If I someone in my gaming group admired my paper minis, and asked me if he could have some, I'd print him a sheet and bring them to our next game session. (Personally, I wouldn't share the PDF, but even if I did, the net effect is not that much different.) If he assembles them, uses them, and likes them, he's likely to go to OBS, see how inexpensive they are, and buy more of them. Sure, he got the first set for free, but he's now a paying customer. In fact, this is actually not much different than people loaning books to their friends. A new player may borrow his GM's copy of the Players' Handbook for a week or two, but he ends up liking the game and buying his own copy--and probably several more books--so the loan represents a no-cost marketing investment for the publisher, not a lost sale. Show me a form of advertising where you can gain a real, paying customer for less than $2--the "cost" to the publisher of a shared PDF--and I'll show you a very, very happy marketing department.

I know this works, because it's how I got into paper minis. Now, I'm not currently involved with an active gaming group (I play occasionally with strangers at my local game shop, as my schedule allows), but I did start out by downloading the free sample sets many miniature publishers make available for free at OBS. I started by downloading and printing everything okumarts offered for free...then I bought Darkfast Dungeons, and a couple of paid Okumarts sets. And then a couple more. And then they were on sale, and I bought most of the ones I hadn't already...as well as some by other artists. And then more. I'm now a Patreon patron for printableheroes as well, because that's a great value, too. All because I got the first couple of sets for free. (Thanks, David!) If no one had offered a free entry into the printable miniature niche, it might have been months before I laid down money for my first set, or I might have gotten distracted before I got to that point, and never bought any at all.

In fact, the only way to fight wide distribution of your product by willful pirates, and to minimize the cost of the limited sort of sharing that will almost certainly occur among face-to-face friends, is to find a way to price your products so low that there is no compelling reason to violate copyright. Similarly, Adobe had massive problems with pirated copies of Photoshop when the only version available was the $500 pro version; that's why the $60 version, Photoshop Elements, exists...to eliminate the motivation to steal the pro version. Since Adobe has continued to offer Photoshop Elements, and added Premiere Elements as well, my guess is that the sale of those much-cheaper products cut into the distribution of pirated copies of Photoshop much more than it reduced the sale of the full, $500 version. In general, people want to be honest, and if you make it practical for them to be so, they will be. If you make it expensive to be honest, a few will steal from you (and those weren't going to buy from you at any price, anyway), but most will simply spend their money on someone else's products...of which there are many.

The power of impulse
Now, if the cost per set for printable mini PDFs averaged between $5 and $10, I'd still buy a few sets, but only a few. And in all honesty, at that price point, I probably would look for personal friends and gaming associates to share costs with, either by partnering on purchases, or trading printed sheets. I find when shopping that $3 is a really psychologically-significant price point. If I see a set I like on OBS, and it costs less than $3, I don't hesitate...I just click "Add to Cart," and keep on shopping. Once it passes $3, though, it rounds to $5, and it starts to feel like real money. It becomes a purchase I have to consider, weigh, and compare, because at $5, I start to feel like if I buy this, I can't afford or justify also buying that. At $2.50 each, I'll probably buy both, and maybe more, but at $3-$5, I'll only buy one, and I'll think hard about it before I do it. I may end up buying nothing at all. 

Add to the price-point advantage that PDFs have over physical miniatures the convenience of shopping through OBS. I have an existing account with OBS. They already have my payment information, I've made many (many, many) purchases through them, and I know them to be extremely reliable and always available. Many or most of their products have ratings and reviews that are at least somewhat useful in evaluating purchases. And they have literally thousands of products available for free to draw me to the site and start me browsing, making it more likely that I'll find something to pay money for as well. And when I buy a PDF, I have it instantly, even if it's 2 am on New Year's Day. (Shut up. I'm a dad. I don't go out for New Year's anymore.)

To purchase a physical set of miniatures, I probably have find a website I've never visited or even heard of before, give my credit card information to strangers, pay for shipping, and then wait for several days to see if I even like what I bought, all the while trusting people I've never done business with before to fulfill their promise to deliver a product to me. That's a series of big hurdles I have to clear before buying a physical product online, and any one of them is likely to cost the publisher a sale. If you want me to buy your product, make it easy for me to buy it, and let me have it now. Don't make me work for it, or wait for it, because I won't.

Then why does WOTC sell books instead of PDFs?
Major publishers sell books instead of PDFs for several reasons. First, in order to move the amount of product they must, the have to be in retail stores all the time. No one shopping in a retail store will settle for a PDF. Second, major publishers are selling books that are hundreds of pages long, and people are much less likely to print out (and bind, somehow) a 200-page book than one page of cardstock miniatures. Third, volume--the big players are selling thousands of units a month. With numbers like that, they can cost-effectively print overseas, cutting their cost per unit to a fraction of what it would cost to print a few hundred units in the US. Fourth, they have consumer awareness the indie publisher lacks--everyone with a television has heard of Dungeons and Dragons (thanks, Big Bang Theory), and everyone in the hobby has heard of Pathfinder. This allows them to reach the mass market--Wizards of the Coast makes their money selling a few large, expensive books to lots of tens or hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom are playing tabletop RPGs for the first time. Independent publishers make their money selling lots of different products to the same small group of people--those already in the hobby--usually at a lower price point. An independent publisher not only can't compete with WOTC at selling game books, he even can't get into brick-and-mortar stores to try.

Bottom Line: If you're not WOTC or Paizo, you should be selling PDFs, not physical products
Although the retail price-point of printable miniature PDFs is lower than that of physical pre-printed minis, the near-zero cost of goods for PDFs means the absolute profit per unit is the roughly the same, with far fewer barriers to sales. I don't have any figures to prove it, but I would bet money that any of the "major" PDF-based mini publishers--several of whom are active in this forum--probably sell far more units of each of their sets through OBS than publishers selling only physical paper miniatures, with far less hassle fulfilling orders (again, zero hassle, or close to it). Unless you can realistically expect to have your line stocked not just in a few specialty game and comic shops, but also in chain book stores, hobby stores, and discount stores nationwide, there is no compelling reason to manufacture and distribute physical products. And the piracy thing is simply not a worry at all.

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Note: There is one place to get printed minis for a price I'd pay: the Pathfinder Pawns sets. The NPC Codex set, for example, costs about $30, for which you get 300(!) printed miniatures AND 25 plastic bases (5 large bases, 20 "regular" ones). At that price, they're charging about 10 cents per mini, and throwing in about $10 worth of bases (roughly compared to the cost of Litko bases) for free. So, $0.10 is the going rate for physical, pre-printed minis, AND I can walk into my local game store--whom I know, like, and want to support--and have them in hand in less than an hour. Compared to that, the $1.50-$2 that independent publishers are charging for similar products are getting killed, and they're making me wait several days to get them shipped to me.

[aleks]

Hi jeffgeorge.

I completely agree with you.
To make it short, I got into paper minis after discovering papercrafting, which led me to Dave Graffam Freebies, which later led me to OBS sites (there's more in between, but I'll spare you all the details)...
Like the majority of the people on this Earth, I don't have a lot of money, but I have a lot of kids, so I need to carefully choose my expenses.
I'm glad to give 1 to 3 dollars for a PDF set, in fact, I always wait for any kind of sale to give someone a little of my money.
I'll probably never spend 5-10$ for a pre-printed set of minis; additionally, I dislike to pay a lot of money for shipping (I live in Europe and sending goods from USA or Canada to us costs a LOT of money).
Personally, I prefer to save that sum for metal or plastic minis (ok , I'm totally addicted to small soldiers in any form), something it will never be available in any other form.
This led to the piracy problem... once again I agree with jeffgeorge, if I could buy a legal copy of a PDF for a small sum, I'll save myself even the hassle to search a pirated copy. I want to be a honest hobbyst, so this mean that I'll probably give up and buy nothing if it costs to much for my pocket...

My two cents...

[chiefasaur]

This is all legit and I agree. Nothing I can really argue, just reinforce points.
Cost analysis aside, I think a point that I like to stress when considering the benefit of PDF vs. physical orders, is PDFs provide an infinite amount of figures. Need 5 orcs? That's $2. Need 50 orcs? Still $2! I think that option alone makes print & play a valuable option, and an option I am happy to supply.
That is why I started making these, so GMs could field as many mobs as they needed, within a reasonable budget. I originally never intended to make any powerful, solo monsters or heroes, hence the name "Trash Mob Minis." Well... that plan changed.

[Christopher Roe]

PDFs are awesome for customers, less so for sellers. Unless they're a side thing that supports your actual cash cow, or it's a product that lends itself to endless expansion and also tickles the fancy of the mass market.

Pricing low also doesn't affect piracy as much as one would think. Free is free, and you don't have to fish out your credit card or fill out forms to download something for free, and the number of people willing to pay for downloads are a tiny fraction of the total number of people who only want free stuff. Doesn't matter if it's 100 bucks or 99 cents, it's gonna get pirated just the same. That's why I generally treated piracy as an annoying nonissue.

It's not all roses in PDF-land. Let's say you sell something for a buck. If you're selling through OBS, they keep like 30% of that, leaving you with 70 cents. Multiply that by, let's be wildly generous and say 100 sales in your first month, and you've got a whole 70 bucks. That drops sharply after the first month, so you gotta churn, churn, churn that butter just to keep that 70 bucks coming in. If you charge more than a buck because you like frivolous luxuries like food and a roof over your head, you end up shrinking your market to just the people willing to pay more.

Generally, that tends to be just the people who are enthusiastic about your stuff, and new customers are harder to acquire. Now, you're basing your estimated revenue around that group of enthusiasts, because it's a relatively stable number, and filing new customers under the "gravy" column. There's another problem you have to deal with: each one of those enthusiasts only buys a new product exactly once. It's extremely difficult to make that into a viable business model because you have to constantly create new products to sell, and you now have a zero sum problem in the sense that your effective output is bottlenecked by shorter and shorter turnaround times, and shortening turnaround reduces the amount of content you can squeeze into a product, which in turn limits what you can charge.

If you were selling plastic figures or preprinted models, you actually have more financial security because if someone wants to buy a squad of 10 Zardozian Red Bikinators, they're buying 10 of them instead of buying one PDF and printing it 10 times. If they get trounced in the next game because their opponent's Trogdorian Burninator phalanx rolls 10 dice at 2+ to kill, they'll come back and buy another 10 Zardozian Red Bikinators and a crew served Killemgood Turbo Hamburgerizer, rather than just printing out another 10 Zardozian Red Bikinators and then buying one PDF copy of Zardozian Heavy Support Weapons. Yay, now you can have a pizza instead of crackers and free ketchup packets for supper.

Also, a bunch of the guys who were making a living off downloads bowed out of the market years ago because the money ultimately wasn't worth the hassle. The ones selling preprinted stuff? Still around, and those preprinted models weren't even on the same level visually as the downloads. Make of that what you will.

[nolabert]

Wow jeffgeorge ! Thanks for the extensive discussion on the issue.  Don't know if my input adds much, but I'm one of those few who has bought both pdfs and the publisher's in question physical paper minis.  In fact, I've bought at least one set from almost every major paper minis publisher that is represented here at this forum.  In many cases I've bought every single set or most every set offered.  I even throw a dollar or two at one publisher when he offers free sets on OBS. And I'm a Patreon supporter of another publisher.  I want the flexibility provided by all the different sets and I love the art.

But why even buy sets at all?  We have good tutorials on how to grab images aplenty from the web and make our own minis.  I know of at least two Youtube channels focused on rpg crafting that have highlighted that method. My gaming group has shown a lot of interest in my papercraft but as yet haven't really invested in either paper minis or terrain except for one who has only downloaded the freebies offered.  The others probably don't want to spend the time to print, cut and glue papercraft.  They would probably be more likely to just buy printed product.  Sort of like why did prepainted plastic minis take over the traditional gaming minis market.

[mesper]

Feb 1, 2017 1:52:03 GMT -9 Christopher Roe said:

PDFs are awesome for customers, less so for sellers. Unless they're a side thing that supports your actual cash cow, or it's a product that lends itself to endless expansion and also tickles the fancy of the mass market.

Pricing low also doesn't affect piracy as much as one would think. Free is free, and you don't have to fish out your credit card or fill out forms to download something for free, and the number of people willing to pay for downloads are a tiny fraction of the total number of people who only want free stuff. Doesn't matter if it's 100 bucks or 99 cents, it's gonna get pirated just the same. That's why I generally treated piracy as an annoying nonissue.

It's not all roses in PDF-land. Let's say you sell something for a buck. If you're selling through OBS, they keep like 30% of that, leaving you with 70 cents. Multiply that by, let's be wildly generous and say 100 sales in your first month, and you've got a whole 70 bucks. That drops sharply after the first month, so you gotta churn, churn, churn that butter just to keep that 70 bucks coming in. If you charge more than a buck because you like frivolous luxuries like food and a roof over your head, you end up shrinking your market to just the people willing to pay more.

Generally, that tends to be just the people who are enthusiastic about your stuff, and new customers are harder to acquire. Now, you're basing your estimated revenue around that group of enthusiasts, because it's a relatively stable number, and filing new customers under the "gravy" column. There's another problem you have to deal with: each one of those enthusiasts only buys a new product exactly once. It's extremely difficult to make that into a viable business model because you have to constantly create new products to sell, and you now have a zero sum problem in the sense that your effective output is bottlenecked by shorter and shorter turnaround times, and shortening turnaround reduces the amount of content you can squeeze into a product, which in turn limits what you can charge.

If you were selling plastic figures or preprinted models, you actually have more financial security because if someone wants to buy a squad of 10 Zardozian Red Bikinators, they're buying 10 of them instead of buying one PDF and printing it 10 times. If they get trounced in the next game because their opponent's Trogdorian Burninator phalanx rolls 10 dice at 2+ to kill, they'll come back and buy another 10 Zardozian Red Bikinators and a crew served Killemgood Turbo Hamburgerizer, rather than just printing out another 10 Zardozian Red Bikinators and then buying one PDF copy of Zardozian Heavy Support Weapons. Yay, now you can have a pizza instead of crackers and free ketchup packets for supper.

Also, a bunch of the guys who were making a living off downloads bowed out of the market years ago because the money ultimately wasn't worth the hassle. The ones selling preprinted stuff? Still around, and those preprinted models weren't even on the same level visually as the downloads. Make of that what you will.

This!
for the most part sad but true...

[radoslawkamil]

Like I said somewhere it will be reasonable to sell physical product at start and after year or so start selling pdf version. This way fans and people who whant something new badly will buy physical product and after that other people will have oportunity to buy pdfs for lover price.
I dont like physical product is another but only personal opinion. It remind my of time when i actually have a lot of money and buy many many things and that not make my happy. Now I have other job, much less money but I enjoy every single minis I make with paper,scizzors and olfa knife.

[cowboyleland]

I generally find jeffgeorge 's argument compelling but I have two quibbles and one has no choice but to respect @christopherroe 's extensive real experience.

My first quibble would be the "cost of storage" argument. A small run of paper figures will probably fit in less than a dozen boxes and there is probably space enough even in an apartment to stash them without adding to your costs.

Secondly, although I generally agree that people want to be honest, many don't perceive the problem with getting digital products for free. People know that sending an existing file to their computer costs almost nothing so they don't feel like they are taking anything from anyone when they do it. They don't see that charging for that (costless) download is the only way the producer has of being compensated for the time,energy and intellectual property embodied in the creation of the original. I have had many pointed conversations about this with my own teenage children who persist on streaming pirated movies even though I have pointed out to them that the only reason they have a roof over their heads is that people paid to watch the performances I was in.

The foundational difference to the "argument" in this thread seems to be jeffgeorge advising how to maximise online sales while @christopnerroe points out "maximising downloads probably doesn't give you enough to live on." They are probably both right.

[radoslawkamil]

Most pirates will not buy official product-that a good point.It mostly true for all kind of staff not only miniatures. But most if not all pirate copys are not best quality and is much harder to make pirate version of laser cut miniatures than pdf. cowboyleland said is hard to explain to people that digital products are not free. Many many people think if something can be find in internet is free no matter where they find it. Intellectual property is something not many understand specially young people who just think it is normal to download movies, files etc. because they out there, free to take. Also they are people who dont whant to spend money on product of type:'cat in a box', so they pirate to see if it worth buying. And they last group that dont have money for something but cost of pdf minis are so low that argumment is fail.

[radoslawkamil]

I realize one more thing: In order to make pirate copy the pirat have to first buy orginal product lol. And since people who looking and download pirate pdfs version will never buy oryginals anyway the all piracy thing is a mind trap with no end. Cheap and always avaliable pdf rules! Lol

[glennwilliams]

People do underestimate the amount of work on new products required to create a stable revenue stream, but I think that's true of any type of product in the hobby. Look to Games Workshop's new releases page and you see it's frequently full of shiny new toys. There's an enormous amount of work behind those new models. They try to leverage effort by creating add-ons or conversion kits mainly through Forge World. I found that successful...to a degree. I disagree (quibble really) with my mentor (Christopher Roe in his persona of Mel Ebbles): new releases bring in new customers, not a lot unless the new product breaks ground, but enough to help with that stable revenue stream. For me, there's no way I would ever sell physical products. I don't want hassles with printing shops, inventory storage (I've got 178 products in my line--no way I want the boxes in my garage), I want to be free to travel and not worry about missed sales or shipping while I'm gone. PDF publishing is a perfect side line for those of us who do not need full time income from it. Piracy is no different from inventory shrinkage in brick and mortar stores. They try to reduce it, but know it's a cost of doing business. Here's the bottom line for me: it is a business and must be treated as such.

[bravesirkevin]

I'm going to weigh in here because I think I have something to add!

Jan 31, 2017 23:06:33 GMT -9 jeffgeorge said:

Physical products cost a lot to produce, and more over time, and aren't always available

There's a massive economies of scale argument to be made here. Pre-printed minis like those Pasiphilo produces are produced in incredibly tiny runs and that means the unit price of production is really, really high and likely involves a lot of labour on his end when it comes to handling the packing and shipping. Large companies that can guarantee sales of hundreds of thousands of figures can produce hundreds of thousands of figures of extremely high quality at an incredibly low unit-price and they already have the infrastructure to handle the packing and shipping in a very efficient way.

PDFs cost little to produce, and nothing over time

PDFs technically cost absolutely nothing to produce, because if you were going to print, you'd need to make a PDF anyway because that's what print companies use to make their printing plates. That said, you wouldn't be creating a fancy multi-layered PDF with clickable buttons powered by Javascript and doing that actually does take a bit of time.

You make more money selling PDFs than physical products

Maybe. Maybe not.

I think small producers like Pasiphilo likely would make a ton more money selling PDFs than they would selling physical products simply because so much effort has to go into the process of completing the order and thus all profit gets sucked up in lost opportunity. With an efficient distribution chain set up, and the ability to actually sell the large volumes of product you'd need to take advantage of the economies of scale, I imagine one could actually make a lot more money selling physical products rather than digital ones, but that sort of infrastructure is difficult to set up and running it would be a full time job, and you'd also need someone doing the marketing which would also likely be a full time job, so you couldn't quite pull it off as a one-man operation and you'd need to start with a fair bit of capital.

Piracy doesn't matter

Piracy does matter... It matters quite a bit actually. The culture of piracy is quite damaging as a whole... Spend an afternoon on reddit and see just how many people feel entitled to get everything for free, even going so far as moaning about adverts because not only are they not happy with paying their own money and they're annoyed that some corporation is willing to pay the money for them. It makes my blood boil! They might buy one of your products, and then trade it with a friend who has bought another, then share both to get a third and fourth set and after a while 20 people have 20 of your sets each and share them with everybody and from that you only got the money from 20 sales of an individual product each.

That said, I agree with you that the folks who pirate stuff rather than buying it probably aren't your customers anyway. They pirate because they're broke kids or because they're scrubby adults who don't actually want to give you money. The truth is that worrying about piracy costs you a lot of lost opportunity, and that is a far bigger hit than you take as a result of that piracy, and so you kinda just have to accept that it's going to happen and get on with things.

Feb 1, 2017 1:52:03 GMT -9 Christopher Roe said:

PDFs are awesome for customers, less so for sellers. Unless they're a side thing that supports your actual cash cow, or it's a product that lends itself to endless expansion and also tickles the fancy of the mass market.

Strangely, I have the complete opposite opinion. I think PDFs can be your cash cow, in the sense that you can make the PDF, put it up and make money off of it forever without putting in a single bit of extra effort. Sure it's a mere trickle rather than a constant rushing river, but that PDF will provide a perpetual passive income. Making a living off of them is a considerably more difficult feat, of course, and like you said, you would need to keep working and adding sets to turn those tiny trickles into a substantial cash flow, and you'd likely need to get some other cash streams going to keep your bank balance positive, but the fact that there is revenue coming in from a product without the need for any further labour or expense makes it the perfect cash cow!

If you were selling plastic figures or preprinted models, you actually have more financial security because if someone wants to buy a squad of 10 Zardozian Red Bikinators, they're buying 10 of them instead of buying one PDF and printing it 10 times. If they get trounced in the next game because their opponent's Trogdorian Burninator phalanx rolls 10 dice at 2+ to kill, they'll come back and buy another 10 Zardozian Red Bikinators and a crew served Killemgood Turbo Hamburgerizer, rather than just printing out another 10 Zardozian Red Bikinators and then buying one PDF copy of Zardozian Heavy Support Weapons. Yay, now you can have a pizza instead of crackers and free ketchup packets for supper.

While I can see the logic here, I'm not sure it's really that much of an issue. Sure folks will buy multiples for a game of Warhammer and GW's business model actually depends on that. Our business model depends entirely on the opposite... It costs us nothing if people print out a hundred copies of the set they bought from us, but they fact that they could have a hundred soldiers for the price that GW charges for just one is a massive selling point in our favour. We get our $3 for an infinitesimal fraction of the investment that it took GW to get their $35.

[Christopher Roe]

Feb 1, 2017 7:12:06 GMT -9 glennwilliams said:

I disagree (quibble really) with my mentor (Christopher Roe in his persona of Mel Ebbles): new releases bring in new customers, not a lot unless the new product breaks ground, but enough to help with that stable revenue stream. For me, there's no way I would ever sell physical products. I don't want hassles with printing shops, inventory storage (I've got 178 products in my line--no way I want the boxes in my garage), I want to be free to travel and not worry about missed sales or shipping while I'm gone. PDF publishing is a perfect side line for those of us who do not need full time income from it. Piracy is no different from inventory shrinkage in brick and mortar stores. They try to reduce it, but know it's a cost of doing business. Here's the bottom line for me: it is a business and must be treated as such.

Your quibble isn't actually off target at all, the one thing PDFs bring to the table is being good for a long-tail trickle that adds up over the long term, provided you're letting someone else deal with the headaches (like OBS for example).

The issue I have with downloads is they just don't pull as much weight as physical goods do. You remember when I was running the Supply Depot and selling papercraft tools and supplies? That was an eye-opening experience for me because the revenue from the physical goods (including the DVDs) was so far in excess of what the downloads were bringing in that the only thing the downloads would have been good for was offsetting shipping costs. I'd have loved to expand the scale of that operation, but inventory space was an issue in our tiny duplex, and that puts a hard ceiling on scalability.

Feb 1, 2017 9:05:03 GMT -9 bravesirkevin said:

Strangely, I have the complete opposite opinion. I think PDFs can be your cash cow, in the sense that you can make the PDF, put it up and make money off of it forever without putting in a single bit of extra effort. Sure it's a mere trickle rather than a constant rushing river, but that PDF will provide a perpetual passive income. Making a living off of them is a considerably more difficult feat, of course, and like you said, you would need to keep working and adding sets to turn those tiny trickles into a substantial cash flow, and you'd likely need to get some other cash streams going to keep your bank balance positive, but the fact that there is revenue coming in from a product without the need for any further labour or expense makes it the perfect cash cow!

I'm gonna butcher a saying attributed to the late, great Seymour Cray: if you need to plow a field, which would you rather have, one strong ox or 1024 chickens?

PDFs, for me, were very much cash chickens and not a strong cash cow. Sure, they're upload-and-forget and they pull in a long-term trickle that adds up, but it's a trickle that adds up to a cute little stream compared to when a product is released for the first time. It's high enough that they're almost worth keeping on sale perpetually, but low enough that when tax time rolls around it's just not worth my time to deal with the bookkeeping on them in states like Texas and Washington where digital content is taxed.

Sure, there's OBS and places like that, but I kind of don't like the distance they impose between me and the customer. It feels very impersonal, like doing transactions through a glory hole in a bus station restroom. I liked being a boutique shopkeeper who knows their customers by name and what they like, but OBS and similar places are more like selling your stuff in Wal-Mart or something. Flip side, there's no extra bookkeeping needed beyond tracking your royalties because OBS would be responsible for the sales taxes/VAT, so...there are pros and cons to both approaches.

I guess what I enjoyed the most about my stint in papercraft was the boutique shopkeeper aspect, more so than the money I'd be collecting if I just let OBS do all the heavy lifting. That, ultimately, is one of the reasons I made all my stuff available for free. I get to feel like a boutique shopkeeper again, kind of, and there's no paperwork headaches to deal with for trivial sums of money anymore.

bravesirkevin said:

While I can see the logic here, I'm not sure it's really that much of an issue. Sure folks will buy multiples for a game of Warhammer and GW's business model actually depends on that. Our business model depends entirely on the opposite... It costs us nothing if people print out a hundred copies of the set they bought from us, but they fact that they could have a hundred soldiers for the price that GW charges for just one is a massive selling point in our favour. We get our $3 for an infinitesimal fraction of the investment that it took GW to get their $35.

It also leads to the perception that your glorious, lovingly crafted, beautiful PDF of Zardozian Red Bikinators is only worth $3. You've got ten manly warriors in crossed bandoliers and banana hammocks with customizable colors, customizable weapons, and your choice of inappropriate footwear, and it's all yours for three whole bucks. You spent days lovingly crafting each aspect of those ten figures, and a lot of time setting up a zillion PDF layers and what have you. And you only get to sell it once per person. Three bucks for a lifetime, per customer. That's a lot of value dilution right there.

Paper is "only" worth small amounts of money to customers because everybody in the papercraft industry over-milked the "it's cheaper!" cow to the point where you can't charge a realistic price without customer pushback. GW stuff is overpriced, sure, but it doesn't have the same "cheap, disposable stuff for poor people who can't afford metal or plastic" stigma that papercraft has been suffering from for years. Over the short term, "it's cheap!" is a great selling point, but over the long term, it's a hindrance to your bottom line as a business if you're perceived as a cheap, inferior alternative to "the real thing", whatever "the real thing" may be.

I mean, if your largest customer demographic is "people who don't like spending a lot of money" and your smallest customer demographic is "people who really like papercraft", and each customer only buys each product you make once forever-ever-and-amen, you're putting a number of constraints on your profitability that you wouldn't otherwise have if you were selling, like, cupcakes or Alibaba-sourced knitted beards on Etsy.

[nolabert]

I think papercraft publishers should push the "it's faster than painting minis and looks better than prepainted plastic minis" line at least for minis. For terrain, it's still hard for me to see any alternative as flexible as papercraft and papercraft terrain looks so good. Paper can essentially do any terrain. For example, you can make cliffs with paper terrain and they fold flat. Are people really going to buy plastic cliffs or 3-D print them or make a mold of them? And can you get different skins/layers to make your cliff look like it's winter or a desert locale?

We need to get oldschooldm and vwilliams32407 more publicity to really show how awesome papercraft can be.  Hey oldschooldm have you thought about starting a Youtube channel?  You could be the DM Scotty of Papercraft.

[bravesirkevin]

Feb 1, 2017 11:35:14 GMT -9 Christopher Roe said:

I'm gonna butcher a saying attributed to the late, great Seymour Cray: if you need to plow a field, which would you rather have, one strong ox or 1024 chickens?

I don't disagree with you at all, it's just that when you're talking about a strong ox, you're talking about a steady paycheque... AKA a day job. For me, I was a self employed graphic designer and that job was always feast-or-famine. I'd get big jobs that paid a lot, but work on them for 3 months and be broke around the end of month 2 because I couldn't take on smaller jobs and the big jobs wouldn't pay out until about 30 days after I'd issued the final invoice. After the big job was done, I'd then have to spend all my time canvassing to get clients to give me some work, often having to undercut just to get some cash flow in, what I needed was something that kept the money tap open and keep the cash flowing in, and that's what my definition of a cash cow is... an asset that keeps the money coming in even without you having to do a tedious fetch quest just to get the first penny. For me, it worked well enough that I no longer have to canvas for work... I am far from wealthy, but I do have a steady cash flow which means I can fearlessly charge my full rates when quoting on jobs because I'm not desperate to get that money in, and it won't be a devastating blow if they choose not to accept it.

As for the one strong ox, it's great if you happen to have that, but 1000 chickens ain't that bad... If one strong ox has a particularly bad week, then you might be kinda screwed, but between those 1000 chickens, you're still going to get something even if a lot of them aren't doing too great, because the others might be doing well enough to pull you through.

Like I said though, it is really difficult to make a living doing nothing but papercraft PDFs, but as a part of a more thorough business model, it is definitely quite helpful. Even Paizo and WotC are selling the PDFs in addition to their physical copies precisely because it is a very good low-maintenance revenue stream.

Paper is "only" worth small amounts of money to customers because everybody in the papercraft industry over-milked the "it's cheaper!"

I'm with you there... I've never been the one to use cheapness as a selling point, and hate it when others do. No, for me the selling point is value! My kits have something to offer that pre-printed kits do not. Reprintability isn't something I fear... it's something I embrace and so I offer tons of customisability precisely so they'd want to reprint, and then I offer other sets that work well with the first set so that people will leap at the chance to own the second set as well.

[Christopher Roe]

Ah, by your definition we're both on the same page, then!

I also completely agree about pushing value instead of cheapness, and showing customers why they're getting their money's worth from digital content. You just laid out one specific case that demonstrates value for money, and being able to customize something is a genuine selling point that fits the model. That wasn't an intentional pun.

[Vermin King]

Value is something that needs to be emphasized.

A quality mini shown in the same image as a pain-in-the neck, have-to-be-painted cast mini should be enough motivation for the viewer to see the value, but for some reason they don't usually.

Any ideas?

[jeffgeorge]

Holy crap! You guys actually read that entire post? Your lives must be almost as pathetic as mine...

Actually, though, a whole lot of really good points have been made in this thread, and I'm learning a lot from it. And though it may not seem like it at first read, I don't think anyone here is actually disagreeing with one another--in a few cases, folks are looking at the same issues from different perspectives, but both perspectives seem perfectly valid to me.

I've got a lot of things to reply to, and I feel a duty to do that, since I'm the one who spilled the milk in the first place, but I'll have to do it in chunks, on breaks from the actual work project I'm cranking 24/7 on for the next few weeks. So please don't feel slighted if I don't respond to something you said right away, or if I come back to you several posts later. I'll try to address separate points and people in separate posts.

[oldschooldm]

Feb 1, 2017 12:31:43 GMT -9 nolabert said:

We need to get oldschooldm and vwilliams32407 more publicity to really show how awesome papercraft can be.  Hey oldschooldm have you thought about starting a Youtube channel?  You could be the DM Scotty of Papercraft.

I have one - I just don't post to it often. I've been thinking about a stream for when I make stuff, and maybe posting excerpts.

[jeffgeorge]

Before I say anything else, Christopher Roe , let me begin by thanking you for sharing your wisdom on this topic, which I know is gained from real-world experience over many years. It may seem at first like we disagree on certain things, but I am pretty sure that we aren't very far apart on most aspects of this topic. If anything, I think we may be addressing slightly different aspects of a broader topic, which make it sound like we have differences when we really don't. I meant to be talking specifically about (and to) very small publishers, with very limited resources and very limited catalogs--the kind of operation that is most likely a hobby-related sideline for someone with a day job. I infer (though I may be wrong in this inference) that you are addressing issues affecting publishers operating on a slightly larger scale, working full-time in the tabletop game market, and expecting to make a decent living for their effort.

Feb 1, 2017 1:52:03 GMT -9 Christopher Roe said:

PDFs are awesome for customers, less so for sellers. Unless they're a side thing that supports your actual cash cow, or it's a product that lends itself to endless expansion and also tickles the fancy of the mass market.

I get that the market for tabletop gaming aids of any sort is limited, but is the market for PDFs inherently more limited than that for the kinds of printed products that tiny, independent publishers can afford to produce and sell? (That is an honest question, not intended to be rhetorical or snarky.) When you have little or no distribution through brick-and-mortar retail stores, selling a manufactured, physical product online can be a really difficult marketing challenge. At the very least, offering PDFs lets you enter OBS, an existing, Amazon-style ecosystem dedicated to the tabletop gaming marketplace. Just being on OBS seems like a form of marketing to me.

Pricing low also doesn't affect piracy as much as one would think. Free is free, and you don't have to fish out your credit card or fill out forms to download something for free, and the number of people willing to pay for downloads are a tiny fraction of the total number of people who only want free stuff. Doesn't matter if it's 100 bucks or 99 cents, it's gonna get pirated just the same. That's why I generally treated piracy as an annoying nonissue.

Maybe I ran together two points which I should have been more aware or more careful to keep separate. First, as you say, people who are going to pirate your stuff are going to pirate it, no matter what you charge--that's no doubt true. But if there's no way to price it low enough to get would-be pirates to pay for it, then those were never potential sales anyway. So no matter how aggravating it is to have leeches taking your intellectual property without paying for it, they don't represent a significant financial loss to the publisher. I think we're actually pretty close to agreeing on this point, even if we state it slightly differently.

Perhaps the more important reason to plan your products to have a low price point is to encourage impulse sales. As I mention in my original post, I'm pretty sure I'm more likely to buy two sets of 6-12 minis at $3 a set than to buy one set of the same 12-24 minis for $6, or even for $5, because the price of the larger set is above my personal no-second-thoughts, impulse-buy limit. That's got next to nothing to do with piracy, but it does speak to why it might be better to arrange your catalog to offer lots of little packages, instead of fewer, larger ones.

It's not all roses in PDF-land. Let's say you sell something for a buck. If you're selling through OBS, they keep like 30% of that, leaving you with 70 cents. Multiply that by, let's be wildly generous and say 100 sales in your first month, and you've got a whole 70 bucks. That drops sharply after the first month, so you gotta churn, churn, churn that butter just to keep that 70 bucks coming in. If you charge more than a buck because you like frivolous luxuries like food and a roof over your head, you end up shrinking your market to just the people willing to pay more.

Generally, that tends to be just the people who are enthusiastic about your stuff, and new customers are harder to acquire. Now, you're basing your estimated revenue around that group of enthusiasts, because it's a relatively stable number, and filing new customers under the "gravy" column. There's another problem you have to deal with: each one of those enthusiasts only buys a new product exactly once. It's extremely difficult to make that into a viable business model because you have to constantly create new products to sell, and you now have a zero sum problem in the sense that your effective output is bottlenecked by shorter and shorter turnaround times, and shortening turnaround reduces the amount of content you can squeeze into a product, which in turn limits what you can charge.

I totally get what you're saying in this section, though I think it may have more to do with limited volume of sales possible in a market that is a niche within a niche, as papercraft minis for tabletop games are. I'd guess that most of what you're saying applies equally to part-time publishers with physical products who are limited to small lines and short production runs.

If you were selling plastic figures or preprinted models, you actually have more financial security because if someone wants to buy a squad of 10 Zardozian Red Bikinators, they're buying 10 of them instead of buying one PDF and printing it 10 times. If they get trounced in the next game because their opponent's Trogdorian Burninator phalanx rolls 10 dice at 2+ to kill, they'll come back and buy another 10 Zardozian Red Bikinators and a crew served Killemgood Turbo Hamburgerizer, rather than just printing out another 10 Zardozian Red Bikinators and then buying one PDF copy of Zardozian Heavy Support Weapons. Yay, now you can have a pizza instead of crackers and free ketchup packets for supper.

Okay, fair enough. There is one sub-niche within the niche of a niche that might buy multiple packs of the same miniature--tabletop miniatures gamers (the Warhammer/Kings of War crowd). But supplying physical minis to that market requires a (relatively) huge capital investment, storage facilities, and fulfillment capacity, which in turn calls for a level of investment in wholesale distribution and marketing, and retail advertising. I'm not suggesting that Reaper or Games Workshop stop making metal miniatures and just sell 3D printer files instead--they have the capacity to operate at a scale where physical products can be profitable. I think the mistake that some indie publishers with very small lines of paper miniatures are making is committing to providing a only physical product when they don't have the catalog, the capital, the brand-awareness or the infrastructure necessary to be of interest to the brick-and-mortar wholesale/retail distribution system. When your only products are a small handful of small and relatively expensive sets of printed paper miniatures, it's going to be hard to generate much sales volume through your website, which no one's ever heard of.

Also, a bunch of the guys who were making a living off downloads bowed out of the market years ago because the money ultimately wasn't worth the hassle. The ones selling preprinted stuff? Still around, and those preprinted models weren't even on the same level visually as the downloads. Make of that what you will.

Again, the volume possible for a small publisher in a niche market makes it hard to make a living solely off of gaming paraphernalia, whether PDF or physical in nature. I infer that most of the publishers of paper miniature figures active in this forum have day jobs, so they aren't expecting to make their living from PDF sales through OBS. But OBS relieves them of most of the logistical and bookkeeping hassle of selling their products, so the business-side of the business should be somewhat less burdensome for them (as bravesirkevin seems to suggest, in his post in this thread, if I'm not misinterpreting him). As for publishers of printed models, who is out there? I haven't noticed any, apart from offerings from big-leaguers like WOTC and Paizo. Point me towards them--I may be missing products I'd like to buy!

In any case, thanks for sharing your experience and wisdom with us, Christopher Roe . Again, if it seems like I'm quibbling with you, I apologize--I don't intend to be. Everything you say makes perfect sense, especially considering that it's all based on real experience and not just the kind of armchair quarterbacking that I subject everyone to in my less thoughtful moments. If there seem to be differences between our "positions," I think they have more to do with scope or perspective than actual disagreement.

[jeffgeorge]

Feb 1, 2017 9:05:03 GMT -9 bravesirkevin said:

I'm going to weigh in here because I think I have something to add!

Please do!

There's a massive economies of scale argument to be made here. Pre-printed minis like those Pasiphilo produces are produced in incredibly tiny runs and that means the unit price of production is really, really high and likely involves a lot of labour on his end when it comes to handling the packing and shipping. Large companies that can guarantee sales of hundreds of thousands of figures can produce hundreds of thousands of figures of extremely high quality at an incredibly low unit-price and they already have the infrastructure to handle the packing and shipping in a very efficient way.

That is exactly my point. Pasophilo has positioned himself to compete not with you and the rest of the publishers in this community (who are more fraternal towards one another than competitive anyway), but with the Pathfinder Pawns line...and they will use Chinese printers, vast retail distribution, and a huge, existing fan-base to crush him. And that's sad to me, because his figures are really nice. He is exactly the kind of publisher that I believe is making a mistake by risking a lot of time, money and heartache on physical products.

I think small producers like Pasiphilo likely would make a ton more money selling PDFs than they would selling physical products simply because so much effort has to go into the process of completing the order and thus all profit gets sucked up in lost opportunity.

Exactly. Every second an artist spends promoting and maintaining a website, taking orders, packing and shipping orders, banking and accounting, etc., is a second he didn't spend creating more new miniatures to sell. Do you want to be an artist, or do you want to be a shipping clerk?

Piracy does matter...

Well, yes, piracy is a cultural cancer, and as a society living in an information economy, we need to evolve our thinking to the point that we have the same respect for intellectual property that we accord to physical stuff. I only meant that since piracy is unavoidable, and has relatively little impact on legitimate sales, it shouldn't shape a publisher's business decisions.

I think PDFs can be your cash cow, in the sense that you can make the PDF, put it up and make money off of it forever without putting in a single bit of extra effort.

Elsewhere (in a later post, I think), you talk more about how your PDF sales affect your income, providing a reliable if modest base cash flow that supplements your main income and puts you in a better position to negotiate with graphic design clients. I think that's a very useful perspective on the whole issue, for whatever my opinion is worth.

It costs us nothing if people print out a hundred copies of the set they bought from us, but they fact that they could have a hundred soldiers for the price that GW charges for just one is a massive selling point in our favour. We get our $3 for an infinitesimal fraction of the investment that it took GW to get their $35.

This speaks to a key advantage printable miniature PDFs have over physical miniatures. A set of physical miniatures is and always will be six miniatures, even after the customer loses one, or leaves his whole miniatures collection on a bus and loses it entirely. PDFs are infinite and forever. Customers aren't paying for six little pieces of printed paper, they are paying for the right to print game pieces for the rest of their lives. That's a value that is lost when a publisher decides to try and sell physical printed minis instead of PDFs, and all he has left to sell is six little chunks of colorful paper in a ziplock bag...and to cover his costs, he has to charge $1.50 per chunk.

[jeffgeorge]

Feb 1, 2017 13:27:57 GMT -9 Vermin King said:

Value is something that needs to be emphasized.

A quality mini shown in the same image as a pain-in-the neck, have-to-be-painted cast mini should be enough motivation for the viewer to see the value, but for some reason they don't usually.

Any ideas?

Sure. A side-by-side video showing a papercrafter finishing out twenty paper minis in the time it takes a metal-mini hobbyist to paint a single goblin.

[jeffgeorge]

Feb 1, 2017 5:48:40 GMT -9 cowboyleland said:

My first quibble would be the "cost of storage" argument. A small run of paper figures will probably fit in less than a dozen boxes and there is probably space enough even in an apartment to stash them without adding to your costs.

The problem is that a single, small run of one set of paper figures isn't enough to base a business on. If you're selling physical products, you really need to be selling them in physical stores, not on obscure websites (in this context, OBS is the opposite of obscure, btw). In order to be of sufficient interest to the brick-and-mortar wholesale/retail distribution system, you have to have a much larger array of products, produced in quantities that drive the unit price down to a point where you can sell printed minis for a few cents each, as Paizo does. You're going to need a decent sized warehouse to store that much product until you can sell it through. And if you can't operate at that level, the brick-and-mortar stores won't talk to you, so you're going to have that dozen boxes in your bedroom closet for a long time, waiting for them to sell out, before you have room to store the production run of the next set of minis you need to make, to meet the demand of your existing customers.

Secondly, although I generally agree that people want to be honest, many don't perceive the problem with getting digital products for free.

I agree that piracy is a significant moral and ethical issue. I just believe that very few pirates were likely to become paying customers, so their immoral behavior shouldn't determine how you decide to produce, price, and deliver your products. Selling a physical product to prevent pirates from passing your PDF around imposes a huge host of burdens on both the publisher and the customer without significantly affecting piracy, but potentially having a serious negative impact on sales. This is especially true if your anti-piracy measures reduce the value of product, or increase its price, and selling printed paper minis instead of PDFs does both.

The foundational difference to the "argument" in this thread seems to be jeffgeorge advising how to maximise online sales while @christopnerroe points out "maximising downloads probably doesn't give you enough to live on." They are probably both right.

I agree. Chris is saying don't plan on making your living selling game PDFs, while I'm saying you're hurting what little sales you're going to get in this market by refusing to sell PDFs. Two very different aspects of one broader topic.

[bravesirkevin]

Feb 2, 2017 0:23:18 GMT -9 jeffgeorge said:

Feb 1, 2017 13:27:57 GMT -9 Vermin King said:

Value is something that needs to be emphasized.

A quality mini shown in the same image as a pain-in-the neck, have-to-be-painted cast mini should be enough motivation for the viewer to see the value, but for some reason they don't usually.

Any ideas?

Sure. A side-by-side video showing a papercrafter finishing out twenty paper minis in the time it takes a metal-mini hobbyist to paint a single goblin.

This video (which features me and has already been posted elsewhere on this forum) actually does cover a lot of these points. Towards the end it has paper minis standing alongside some fully painted GW figures, talks about the benefits of compact storage, mentions the fact that you can reprint, and is actually meant to be all about how quick and easy it is to build the minis, (though it sort of fails on that front because we take almost half an hour to build a single mini each due to being very silly and inefficient in the process)

[jeffgeorge]

Feb 1, 2017 4:37:19 GMT -9 nolabert said:

But why even buy sets at all?  We have good tutorials on how to grab images aplenty from the web and make our own minis.  I know of at least two Youtube channels focused on rpg crafting that have highlighted that method. My gaming group has shown a lot of interest in my papercraft but as yet haven't really invested in either paper minis or terrain except for one who has only downloaded the freebies offered.  The others probably don't want to spend the time to print, cut and glue papercraft.  They would probably be more likely to just buy printed product.  Sort of like why did prepainted plastic minis take over the traditional gaming minis market.

"Why even buy sets at all?"

If I had to answer your question in two words, they would be "Back art." If I had to answer it in one word, it would be "Time."

I've spent a lot of time in GIMP making and modding printable minis in the last few months, but I won't waste my time or my ink on a figure with a mirrored or silhouetted back. I will print and use figures--usually animals--made by mirroring a profile view, but I can't stand minis with two fronts.

And as much as I enjoy modding and customizing minis, it takes time. I'm really proud of my modded minis, but most of the (several hundred, at this point) minis I've printed and assembled in the last 6 months were printed directly from the publisher's original PDF. If I had to search for art, or draw and color it myself, for every mini in my collection, I might have 100 minis by now...maybe. And they'd be all over the map as far as art style is concerned...and none of them would have back art!

As far as your gaming group liking your papercraft minis but not jumping in themselves... in my experience, that's pretty typical of most gaming groups, whether it's papercraft minis, or 3D ones. Although most players want a mini of their main PC, there's usually only one or two in the group who are excited enough about miniatures in general to accumulate and paint (or glue) all the minis the campaign needs for NPCs and foes. The other members--particularly if the GM is not the main minis guy--may invest in some pre-painted WOTC minis or pre-printed Pathfinder Pawns, but there's rarely more than one per group who cares enough to spend time crafting, whether the medium is lead, plastic or paper.

So congratulations. You're your group's minis guy. Mazel tov!

[bravesirkevin]

Feb 2, 2017 0:59:50 GMT -9 jeffgeorge said:

If I had to answer your question in two words, they would be "Back art." If I had to answer it in one word, it would be "Time."

Time is the big one... even if you skip the back art, it actually takes quite a long time to set up a single mini when you have to scale it down to size, get rid of backgrounds, mess around with the levels and sharpness and contrast and add in the black outline. You could spend an hour and get a couple minis done to a decent standard, or you could spend like $3 and have a page full of minis ready to print, with all that work done for you at very high standard. Doubt there are many people out there that think their hours are worth so little... sure it's worth it if you want to do something special but in terms of savings, it's actually cheaper to get the PDF.

[shep]

Wow, what a drama!

Basically, I'm totally d'accord with the PDFs are better than printed sets sentiment. However, when you are a designer participating in the conventions circus, you will need to produce sets, so you have something to present and sell, since – as has been stated above – customers won't buy PDFs in retail...

[bravesirkevin]

Feb 2, 2017 1:39:24 GMT -9 shep said:

Wow, what a drama!

Basically, I'm totally d'accord with the PDFs are better than printed sets sentiment. However, when you are a designer participating in the conventions circus, you will need to produce sets, so you have something to present and sell, since – as has been stated above – customers won't buy PDFs in retail...

Anecdotal, but having done the convention scene a few times, I sold quite a few DVDs full of my PDFs, but the pre-printed sheets and the pre-cut minis were mostly shelf warmers.

[Vermin King]

As one of the folks who purchased Chris's Ebbles Collection DVD, I would think that those would do well

[nolabert]

Feb 2, 2017 0:59:50 GMT -9 jeffgeorge said:

"Why even buy sets at all?"

If I had to answer your question in two words, they would be "Back art." If I had to answer it in one word, it would be "Time."

But that's one of the selling points of Pasiphilo's minis.  I realized with this discussion that I had never put my copies together.  How long did it take to "make" one Pasiphilo mini? 20 seconds.  Add an additional minute for edging.  Here is the first one I put together next to a Permes barbarian (shrunk down to approximate 28mm).




I'd buy more sets if he offered the rest in black trim (there is an ongoing sale on the remaining sets of black trim--half price and those are Canadian dollars).