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We know very well what the rate of sales are on a Face Card or Item Card deck that was released several years ago. *Best* case is we'd sell maybe a few hundred copies in the next year or two, and those sales wouldn't come close to covering the reprint costs.
The Adventure Card Game offers a Print-on-Demand option with respect to errata cards. Do you think you could sell enough of the old, out of print Face Cards and Item Cards to justify a similar program?
Even at the higher price of using Print on Demand to get a full set of Urban NPCs, it would save me considerably over the $175 that seems to be the going rate for that product these days, so I'd jump on a chance to order.
Likewise, I'd love to be able to get Face Cards and Item Cards of some of the user-submitted characters and items for the ACG.
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That's awesome news. I was a hard core 3e player, but the switch to 4e sort of turned me off of the whole F20 scene for a few years, so I was late to the game on Pathfinder and post-Dragon Magazine Paizo in general. Now that I've found my way here, I am trying to buy he products I missed on first run, but some of the after-market prices are just too high to justify.
Yeah, the prices for Urban NPCs on eBay and Amazon is outright ridiculous. There are even sellers that troll buyers by claiming to offer sets such as Urban NPCs but then don't even have it in stock. I messaged a seller once to ask if they actually had Urban NPCs in stock and they responded that it was in fact out of stock. That said, their listing for the product remained active for other unsuspecting shoppers.
Chief Technical Officer
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We don't plan to ever bring back any out-of-print Map Packs or Flip-Mats—at least not in the exact same form.
As many of you know, our policy here has changed a bit, resulting in the Flip-Mat Classics line. I think some of you might be interested in me addressing my earlier points with an explanation of why things changed for that line. (When I'm quoting myself in this post, it's from the first post in the thread, six years ago!)
First of all, the printing costs are usually the highest costs associated with most products. And since print costs are based strongly on volume, that means for a reprint, we pretty much need to print—and sell—almost as much as we did the first time around so that we can charge the same retail price.
The number one thing that changed here is that our printer found a way to offer us much better pricing on much smaller print runs. We print a lot fewer copies of a Flip-Mat Classic than we do of a new Flip-Mat, and our unit cost is only a little bit higher. (This is also why we're only reprinting Flip-Mats—small runs of books or cards still have impractically high unit prices.)
Next, keep in mind that most sales for a new product happen in the first month or two, and then taper off over the next couple of months to—hopefully—a slow-but-steady trickle. (You might notice that it usually takes a few years to sell out most of our products. And we've planned things so that that works for us.) Past sales—and our current subscribers—give us the knowledge we need to set print runs and retail prices to ensure that that first burst of sales pretty much covers our costs, allowing the profits to come in slowly over the next year or two, or three. That's one of our primary strategies for staying in business: Cover your costs on the launch.
Now, reprints don't get that "new product" burst at the front end. For one thing, we wouldn't be sending it to subscribers, so that's a huge loss in immediate sales right there. Also, our distributors generally place much, much smaller orders for most reprints than they did the first time around. Without that initial sales bump, it would take much longer to sell out the run—and more importantly, we wouldn't be generating the instant cash that lets us pay the print bill out of the product's own cash flow.
The maps we're choosing to reprint have been unavailable to our distributors for years. As a result, they are ordering them in much larger quantities than they would for a simple restock of a product they've had in their warehouse recently. So we're able to recoup our print costs pretty quickly, even though we're not automatically sending them to subscribers.
We're also being really careful about what we're choosing to reprint—a Flip-Mat that originally sold out in a year or two will definitely be considered for the Classics line, but a Flip-Mat that took several years to sell out isn't likely to return anytime soon.
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Thanks once again for the peek behind the curtain. It's good to know that you keep track of what your fans want and try and figure out ways to make that work economically.
Thanks for the insight, Vic. I had wondered how it was working out (and why you weren't doing the same with map packs) - the cheaper costs for smaller print runs was the missing piece of the puzzle. Cheers.
