Peter Newman, the Buyer for Bosco's in Anchorage, Alaska, read Marcus King's comments (see "Marcus King of Titan Games & Music on RPG PDFs") regarding the recent RPG PDFs news and had this to say:
I knew Mr. King many years ago when he ran a game store in my home town, Anchorage, Alaska. I've always had respect for him, but I think that he may be wrong on this one:
"In response to the White Wolf announcement that their Exalted 2nd Edition book will be free on PDFs -- I want to know, can they please send my store four free copies of the actual printed book? I mean, if the PDF is free, why would anyone ever need the printed book? And although I have several copies on hand, in stock at both my stores, evidently I am just a schmuck for stocking this title! Golly, thanks White Wolf!"
I've been playing games for over 30 years, and been buying them for a store for over 15 years. I've been hearing good things about Exalted since its 2001 First Edition. In all that time I have never bothered to look at it myself. I downloaded the free PDF this morning. Within an hour I knew that this was a great game that I should have looked at before. I also knew that it was so hard to create a character from the PDF, because "flipping" pages is difficult, that I would be buying a paper copy very soon. I also knew that -- even if the PDF was enough for me -- the game was so good that I'd want to buy some supplements for it.
Maybe it's not just me who thinks that. The proper question is, "Will the added exposure for Exalted mean that we will make more on sales of the core book, to people who want more than a PDF, and on sales of the supplements to people who will want more, than we will lose from people who would have bought the hardcopy, but will now be satisfied with the PDF?"
We'll have to wait and see what the answer is.
The opinions expressed in this Talk Back article are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
'He may be wrong on this one'
Posted by ICv2 on April 9, 2009 @ 11:00 pm CT
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