Friday, June 7, 2013

Tempting Fate and Pay What You Want

So Evil Hat has released their two new Fate game and also released a new model of how they would like people to pay for their games.

Fate Core System and Fate Accelerated Edition are now out.
And YOU decide how much you want to pay for them.

Think Fate Core is worth $20 (at 308 pages that is a steal for a core book) then pay 20.  You only want to pay 5?  Pay 5.

It is an interesting concept really and I am curious on how it will work out.
Tenkar has listed a number of OSR Pay What You Want books including the very popular Teratic Tome and his own Minor Magiks & Miscellaneous Arcana Volume I.

I can't wait to see how all of this plays out really. I think it will be a success.  You may say but won't people pay less than what you should be charging? Sure, but I think there will be more people buying. Honestly which one is better? Five people paying $5 for a pdf or 50 people paying a $1 for it?  And you will get people that believe in supporting authors and game companies, so they will spend $10.

How about you all?
Would you do "Pay What You Want" for you books (game or novels or otherwise)?

6 comments:

Jason Zavoda said...

I think it will only end in tears and bad feelings, but who knows, maybe it will work better than a tip-jar.

Jeremy [Retro] said...

i have been to a few places that say... pay what you want, sadly "0" is an option... and sadly i wanted something and had nothing... i feel really bad, so i wish this project well...

Rob Barrett said...

Evil Hat also brought in $433K from the Fate Core kickstarter, so I suspect that any money they make from the PDFs is gravy. Note that the hardcopies of the game still cost actual moola.

Timothy S. Brannan said...

Right.

Evil Hat is going to be doing ok.

I like the Anime inspired art of the Fate Accelerated Edition. At 50 pages (ver. 350) it might be the better choice for me.

Doctor Futurity said...

Well, this model seems to work for Indie computer gaming, but I admit to being suspect about the purchasing crowd for PDFs, who are often quite vocal about what they see as the perceived lack of value in digital books.

Rob Barrett said...

In Raggi's case, I wonder if his sales figures indicate that the "pay what you want" books are far enough into their life cycle that it makes more sense to use them as ways of encouraging purchases of new products than to charge full price for them any longer.