Plans for PDF ship packs on e23.
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Steve Cole
- Site Admin
- Posts: 3846
- Joined: Wed Oct 11, 2006 5:24 pm
Yes. All new cards in the .pdf releases, please. As to the list of products, anything not deemed worthy of a printed/laminated release is on the 'must-purchase' list for me (Frax, Omega, booster 93+, BoM, Jindarians, EY... you get the idea).pinecone wrote: Already Laminated cards with one bonus ship would be "probably not's" for me.
Mmm , I thought I had already posted this, but maybe it didn't submit properly.
Ignoring price the ships I woud like are:
B2 ships - I already have these, but I'd like color and in a format that is easier to print from than dead tree format.
CC only ships - I already have these, but an easier double side printable format woud be nicer, as would higher res, as would them all being in the same file.
CL only ships - I do not have these, as I do not get CL.
Ships I have no interest in:
Ships in existing products that I have 3 of already.
Ships that are not from the existing empires. I have only ever been interested in the empires that were in SFB when I played it as a teen. ISC and Andro are now out rounding that set of empires off. I have no interest in frax or other quadrants or other galaxies.
As to price, well you did ask what sort of product people wanted.
I have been thinking a bit about price though. Given I still have to print and laminate them myself I do feel the price is a bit high. I'm an all or nothing type of buyer, and although I'd like the B2 ships, I'm not sure I would pay $60 for pdf versions, that is something like 3 times more than I paid for B2 itself. If I'm not going buy the lot I wouldn't get any, if I got any I'd get the lot.
Ignoring price the ships I woud like are:
B2 ships - I already have these, but I'd like color and in a format that is easier to print from than dead tree format.
CC only ships - I already have these, but an easier double side printable format woud be nicer, as would higher res, as would them all being in the same file.
CL only ships - I do not have these, as I do not get CL.
Ships I have no interest in:
Ships in existing products that I have 3 of already.
Ships that are not from the existing empires. I have only ever been interested in the empires that were in SFB when I played it as a teen. ISC and Andro are now out rounding that set of empires off. I have no interest in frax or other quadrants or other galaxies.
As to price, well you did ask what sort of product people wanted.
I have been thinking a bit about price though. Given I still have to print and laminate them myself I do feel the price is a bit high. I'm an all or nothing type of buyer, and although I'd like the B2 ships, I'm not sure I would pay $60 for pdf versions, that is something like 3 times more than I paid for B2 itself. If I'm not going buy the lot I wouldn't get any, if I got any I'd get the lot.
storeylf, a question. Yes, you have to print them off yourself. However, you are also getting unlimited prints and if a card is destroyed (my evil cat has a thing about paper and will bite corners if corners are available to puncture), there is no issue in that you can just print a new one with no shipping or waiting for you to have enough purchases to justify the shipping. Also, with e23, if your computer dies or you want to have the file on your computer at home and your traveling laptop, you can with no nasty DRM.
Is the convenience (and safety net for ownership) being factored into your perceived worth of the purchase?
(I'm not being critical, just curious.)
Is the convenience (and safety net for ownership) being factored into your perceived worth of the purchase?
(I'm not being critical, just curious.)
Business Manager/RPG Line Editor
Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc.
Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc.
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dreamingbadger
- Lieutenant JG
- Posts: 29
- Joined: Tue Apr 27, 2010 7:27 am
not really asnwering for storyelf, but I will answer the question for meJean wrote:storeylf, a question. Yes, you have to print them off yourself. However, you are also getting unlimited prints and if a card is destroyed (my evil cat has a thing about paper and will bite corners if corners are available to puncture), there is no issue in that you can just print a new one with no shipping or waiting for you to have enough purchases to justify the shipping. Also, with e23, if your computer dies or you want to have the file on your computer at home and your traveling laptop, you can with no nasty DRM.
Is the convenience (and safety net for ownership) being factored into your perceived worth of the purchase?
(I'm not being critical, just curious.)
I might do this reactively to an event, e.g. if a card got damaged and my choices were "buy the product again" or "buy the pdf" then I would likely buy the PDF that contained it. But it is unlikely I would pro-actively purchase them if I already had them in dead tree fromat.It depends on what we are talking about. I'm lucky enough to have enough disposable cash to not be massively bothered about the difference between £5 and £6.50 for a set of 12 (say of CL ships) even though it feels a bit steep "whats £1.50 between friends".Jean wrote:storeylf, a question. Yes, you have to print them off yourself. However, you are also getting unlimited prints and if a card is destroyed (my evil cat has a thing about paper and will bite corners if corners are available to puncture), there is no issue in that you can just print a new one with no shipping or waiting for you to have enough purchases to justify the shipping. Also, with e23, if your computer dies or you want to have the file on your computer at home and your traveling laptop, you can with no nasty DRM.
Is the convenience (and safety net for ownership) being factored into your perceived worth of the purchase?
(I'm not being critical, just curious.)
However, I am not lucky enough to be in a postion to justify £40 for a set of cards that I already have in B2. I do see them as a set, I either get them all or I get none. The other factor with the MY ships is that we do not do much MY, so paying £40 seems even more irrational from my perspective.
[edit] even if I didn't have B2 I would have to think twice before getting the pdfs and just getting B2. Again I'd probably be biased by how much we play that era and just go for B2.
I would not want the pdf packs to contain 'main-era' ships that will never appear as laminateds. I feel that one of the best selling points of FC is that the game is ready to pick up and play with the laminateds ready to go. Printing out pdfs is ok for some circumstances but I would not want the pre-existence of the pdfs to preclude a card beng published as a laminated card.
As for the Briefing #2 ('early years') cards, I agree that these would look nicer as colour pdfs; this would be far better than the monochrome cards in B#2. I think it's an unwritten consensus that Briefing #2 was a bad idea (in fact I may even have seen it written somewhere) but hey, we live and learn. So the pdfs would be better than the monochromes. But I'd still feel well sore to have to buy the cards again, despite having bought B#2 already, even as pdf files. In fact, personally, I wouldn't buy them; a player would have to spend about $60 or so to get all the B#2 cards, something I'd not be prepared to do since I already have the product.
Scenario pdf: I'd perhaps buy this as an interim but would also hope that it would end up in print at some point. I much prefer to have a printed booklet. But if the scenarios have already been published as pdfs, would people buy the printed product, so would it ever be printed?
The final thing with pdfs is that I'd have to get out my laptop every time I wanted to print one out. This would eat into my playing time, and would be a major deterrent to starting a FC game, at least with that pdf or pdfs. Remember that one of the main things about FC for me is the pick-up-and-play functionality. I'd never want to get away from that.
As for the Briefing #2 ('early years') cards, I agree that these would look nicer as colour pdfs; this would be far better than the monochrome cards in B#2. I think it's an unwritten consensus that Briefing #2 was a bad idea (in fact I may even have seen it written somewhere) but hey, we live and learn. So the pdfs would be better than the monochromes. But I'd still feel well sore to have to buy the cards again, despite having bought B#2 already, even as pdf files. In fact, personally, I wouldn't buy them; a player would have to spend about $60 or so to get all the B#2 cards, something I'd not be prepared to do since I already have the product.
Scenario pdf: I'd perhaps buy this as an interim but would also hope that it would end up in print at some point. I much prefer to have a printed booklet. But if the scenarios have already been published as pdfs, would people buy the printed product, so would it ever be printed?
The final thing with pdfs is that I'd have to get out my laptop every time I wanted to print one out. This would eat into my playing time, and would be a major deterrent to starting a FC game, at least with that pdf or pdfs. Remember that one of the main things about FC for me is the pick-up-and-play functionality. I'd never want to get away from that.
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JimDauphinais
- Commander
- Posts: 767
- Joined: Sun Nov 22, 2009 7:33 pm
- Location: Chesterfield, MO
Many of us already make archival scans of our laminated cards and make a backup copy of those scans. We are not gaining anything by getting a high resolution PDF of a laminated card we already have.However, you are also getting unlimited prints and if a card is destroyed (my evil cat has a thing about paper and will bite corners if corners are available to puncture), there is no issue in that you can just print a new one with no shipping or waiting for you to have enough purchases to justify the shipping. Also, with e23, if your computer dies or you want to have the file on your computer at home and your traveling laptop, you can with no nasty DRM.
I will buy all six B2 ship packs because I commited myself to doing so. However, at $60 I think ADB is going to lose a lot of potential sales. If it were posted as a single big PDF priced no higher than $10 over the list price of a bound, printed B&W copy of B2, the sales would be much better and ADB could have avoided the layout work necessary to split B2 into 6 ship packs plus a rules pack. However, I realize that ADB likely has bound copies of B2 that it would still like to sell and future products with as many ships as B2 likely cannot be priced at $10 over the printed B2 price because of the amount of layout work involved.
I believe future 12 packs at $9.95 will sell provided the ships included are not ships already available in laminated form or predominately rereleases of Communique ships.
As an aside, I have printed both Communique PDFs and the new B2 e23 pack PDFs. For practical purposes, I have found the higher resolution of the e23 packs does not matter unless you are resizing the cards.
Jim Dauphinais, Chesterfield, MO
St. Louis Area Fed Comm Group: http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/STL ... Commander/
St. Louis Area Fed Comm Group: http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/STL ... Commander/
I commented on Facebook, but I'll add something here.
No interest at all in Frax, Omega, Mellangenics, etc.
Only the most minimal interest in Middle Years (enough to buy paper Briefing #2 as a reader, but probably not enough to ever play that setting. Almost certainly not enough to buy pdfs of all the ships).
Pretty much no interest in Early Years.
I have some interest in pdfs of existing ships, particularly ships like the "bonus" cards in the Boosters. I could see myself buying digital versions of the Boosters, to have duplicates of the "chase" cards and/or to make mass printings for conventions/teaching/etc.
I have high interest in pdfs of the Captains Logs ships (there's some great ships in CapLog, but b&w is a no-go for my group, once you've gone color and laminated there's no going back for us).
If new Communiques at some point no longer includes ship cards, I won't feel wronged. There's already an immense amount of free ship content in Commander's Circle. Charging for the ships is entirely appropriate, especially given the economy.
If ships that would have gone to Communique now (like the recent Gorn DBC) went to a paid pdf pack instead, it wouldn't bother me. Money well-spent.
No interest at all in Frax, Omega, Mellangenics, etc.
Only the most minimal interest in Middle Years (enough to buy paper Briefing #2 as a reader, but probably not enough to ever play that setting. Almost certainly not enough to buy pdfs of all the ships).
Pretty much no interest in Early Years.
I have some interest in pdfs of existing ships, particularly ships like the "bonus" cards in the Boosters. I could see myself buying digital versions of the Boosters, to have duplicates of the "chase" cards and/or to make mass printings for conventions/teaching/etc.
I have high interest in pdfs of the Captains Logs ships (there's some great ships in CapLog, but b&w is a no-go for my group, once you've gone color and laminated there's no going back for us).
If new Communiques at some point no longer includes ship cards, I won't feel wronged. There's already an immense amount of free ship content in Commander's Circle. Charging for the ships is entirely appropriate, especially given the economy.
If ships that would have gone to Communique now (like the recent Gorn DBC) went to a paid pdf pack instead, it wouldn't bother me. Money well-spent.
I like the Frax so much I'd buy them as laminated cards. I would certainly buy them as .pdf. Same for Borders of Madness. I will probably pick up the B#2 pack containing the generics to have colour versions of the armed freighters. Omega I'm curious about, and since I don't think they'd sell well enough to justify spending thousands of dollars printing dead tree cards, I'll take a pdf version of those when it's ready and be happy with that.
"Captain" Terry O'Carroll, fourteen papers published including six best of issue
"Man, Terry, you are like a loophole seeking missle!" - Mike West
"Man, Terry, you are like a loophole seeking missle!" - Mike West
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Carthaginian
- Lieutenant SG
- Posts: 156
- Joined: Thu Nov 13, 2008 5:12 am
If it was 2 packs, I'd be happy to buy both.Steve Cole wrote:For marketing and production reasons, all PDF packs will be 12 ships and $10, so please stop "designing" packs that are $12 or $15 or whatever. They won't happen. The Frax will probably be done in two packs, maybe three or four.
Stretching it out to 4 packs would start to make it expensive.
Wouldn't all the basic types of ships that are in FedCom fit into 2 packs?
"Surface" ships
Dreadnought
Battlecruiser
Command Cruiser
Heavy Cruiser
*Drone Varriant
Light Cruiser
*Drone Varriant
War Destroyer
*Drone Varriant
Destroyer
Frigate
Police Frigate
"Submarines"
Not sure how many of these there are... but there can't be more than 12 even with variants.