Federation Commander

Looking at existing products and the dollar value to the price I actually pay in the UK that looks like about £50-60 for 72 cards.

If that was 72 unique ships cards (rather than lots of duplicates booster style) then I'd have no problem paying that amount. Though I tend not to bother to much with roms, gorns or tholians, so if they were geography based packs I might not be inclined to spend that amount in one purchase for some of the packs.

That is where PDFs in particular would be something that might get me spending where I normally wouldn't, and providing extra profit without affecting my desire to buy the real packs that I want. Whilst I might have a problem justifying a significant purchase on a largely rom/gorn pack I would almost certainly pay for a color PDF of those if they were say half the price.

Seventy-two ships is a lot of ships, but is this number the maximum number of Middle Years ships that will be introduced into Federation Commander?

The answer to that question would affect how much I would be willing to pay. If there will be other ships, then I would want them all packaged together for one price in PDF mode.

I picked $25 dollars, but with a caveat:

I think 10$ would be more in line with the PDF products I've purchased from other companies (none of which have ever bee shared across a P2P network). The P-O-D version of Breifing #2 is about twice that price and one would expect the PDF to be around half the price of the hardcover version.

That being said, I would still be willing to pay $25 for full-colors PDFs of this product if that price will convince ADB to give PFs a go. If they sell for 25$ and copies do not hit th web within hours of their release, perhaps future products can be sold as PDFs for a slightly lower price.

Only time (and our lotalty) will tell.

I am going to say based on assuming we are buying the PDF of a full book like Briefing #2 I would be unwilling to pay more than the face value of the original book in this case it would be around $20.

But you are comparing Apple to Oranges here with saying 72 Ship Cards. The B&W version is under 20 Bucks but if you were to do it as a Attack style Product with up to 7 Boosters the cost climbs to around $108 and you are sorta throwing the Rules and Scenarios in free. Should the PDF version then be more expensive than a B&W released Book product would be?

The more I think about this the more I like SVC ideal of saying he will could make PDFs available (as in for sale) after he sells enough Physical Product to pay for the development of the product. Then the price of those PDFs could be set at half of the cost of the Original Cost.

The bigger question is is SVC going make the Core Products in PDF available (Bad Ideal) or just make limited run special products available? Things like FC:Briefing#2 or a PDF file of all Ship Cards from Captian's Log like he sails the indiviadual Hard Copies of SSDs and Ship Cards on the Store Cart.

To answer the problem with losing the .PDF files. There are two solutions to that.

1) Use a Hard drive backup service like Carbomite. For $50 a year, all my files are automatically backed up and stored off site. I never have to worry about a hard drive crash again. Every night at midnight, any file that I've changed or added is automatically sent out to Carbomite over the internet. They even keep previous versions of my files.

2) ADB could keep track of what they've sold you and allow you to re-download your lost files.

Here is another possibility. Sell the pdf files the way I-tunes sells music.

$1.00 per PDF. Maybe allow you to download a low res black and white for free.

Maybe bundle some together for a discount. This has many advantages for ADB.

1) They get true feedback as to the popularity of a ship. If nobody buys a ship they would know that nobody is using it.

2) Conversely, if a ship is really really popular, then create variants of it.

It also has advantages for the players.

I'm getting a battle together and oops, I don't have one of the ships called for in a scenerio. No problem, just download it and print it out.

As for Color lasers being $5000.

That is a really really high end color laser.

I bought my Brother color laser with all bells and whistles for about $800. That includes Scan/Fax/Copy/Print and ADF and duplex on ADF and duplex on printer.

It's a real workhorse, although it wouldn't be suitable for printing out thousands of pages.

Another thing that would be nice with PDF that isn't available with laminated sheets is the following.

Right now, for cost purposes, Ship cards have a Fleet Scale ship on one side and a Squadron Scale ship on the other.

If your doing it by PDF, and page count is not a cost issue, why not put an EAF on the flip side.

That way when I print out my ship, I get my EAF on the flip side....

Oh wait this is Fed Commander not SFB... my bad....

nickgb wrote:I voted $10 seeing as how the dead tree version is $20 (IIRC),

Nick, See SVC's first post ... full-color hard-copy version is $108 for 72 cards.

Barry Kirk wrote:Here is another possibility. Sell the pdf files the way I-tunes sells music.

$1.00 per PDF. Maybe allow you to download a low res black and white for free.

Maybe bundle some together for a discount. This has many advantages for ADB.

This is totally the way I would like to see it.

I don't see selling individual cards as a workable model.

Indeed, if you're talking half of retail as a fair price, then you're talking half of $108 not half of $20.

I am not aware of an $800 color laser printer that has the quality required. I am aware of the Phaser-7760 which comes in various models from $4749 to $6,149. We're actually looking at a $15,000 color printer that could in theory do covers.

Well, I just spent $112 for 15 Boosters (I guess that's about 112 cards assuming 7 or 8 per booster).

So, about $1 per card bought from a big discount shop online (they advertise a lot on BGG and shipping is free on big orders...also bought Tholian Attack since my son is really interested in them).

GBC adhesive self-lamination sheets cost .50 each which covers one 5.5 x 8.5 card front and back. It looks very nice and the surface is actually more "dry erase friendly" than the official ADB cards, but it's a tedious process.

So, the difference between "store bought" (discounted) and home made cost is .50 per card not counting paper and toner supplies.

I'd definitely rather spend $112 for ~112 cards ready-made rather than at least $56 (+paper/toner!!!) to manually produce 112 cards. That would take a very loooong time. The extra $50 for ready-made is a no-brainer, especially since I don't put squadron-scale info on the back of my home made fleet-scale cards (which would double print time and toner costs!).

Tim

Blundor,

Anytime I look at a purchase (New/Used/Self produced) I look at what it will cost me in time, if I would bill for my time (it appears many don't take that into account) the cost to me would be higher than the price of the cards themselves ---

Blundor -

Also, please do be aware that those "big discount shop[s] online" do more harm to ADB than good. Search for SVC's previous comments on how they are bad for the game industry.

ADB being so tiny, any harm is bad for continued longevity (especially in this economy).

Bolo_MK_XL wrote:Blundor,

Anytime I look at a purchase (New/Used/Self produced) I look at what it will cost me in time, if I would bill for my time (it appears many don't take that into account) the cost to me would be higher than the price of the cards themselves ---

Same here! An extra $50 for 112 cards is well worth it since it would take many hours that could otherwise be spent on my business.

Okay, I marked my vote for hard-copy version. Not that I would mind having PDFs, but given the time required to duplicate the nice job ADB does (and that my crappy pronter isn't up to it), I'd rather just buy cards.

Now, what would I pay for PDFs version?? Probably $1.00 per color SSD (w/ both fleet and sqdn scale), and perhaps $0.50 for B/W versions.

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