Tuesday, March 31, 2015

LotFP Webstore News

'allo all...

Effective immediately, LotFP is no longer selling PDFs from its webstore. You can find the full PDF catalog over at RPGNow. (Don't forget several of our releases are behind a "mature content" filter so they aren't visible if you're not logged in and have set your account to see such content.)

There are several reasons for this decision:


  • Fluctuating Currencies. It's one thing if the dollar gets strong and suddenly LotFP Webstore prices are cheaper than your local game store on print items, because after you factor in shipping time and costs it's not a big deal. However, this does make a difference in PDFs when all you had to do was compare two prices in your web browser and then pick the best one. I can't undercut my outside vendors (they get pissy and rightfully so) and I'm not going to constantly adjust PDF prices to keep parity between myself and other vendors.
  • The whole "minimum order" thing. Some of the cheaper PDFs, after Paypal fee was factored in, were really delivering worse returns (in some cases much worse) than letting RPGNow take a 30% cut, so I instituted a 'small order fee' which applied to orders under 5€. I thought it would encourage people to just add another PDF to the order and everything's OK, but what actually happened was that people seemed to be OK with paying a penalty fee which in some cases was just as expensive as the PDF itself! I felt guilty.
  • LotFP's PDF sales through RPGNow are more than tenfold greater than what I sell direct anwyay, so why am I worrying about any of this?


(The whole "VATMOSS" thing doesn't really factor into it, by the way. It's an extra couple hours setup and some yearly maintenance to keep up with a bunch of different VAT rates, and less than a half-hour's extra effort a month for reporting. Not that big a deal when you're already up to your ass in VAT reporting every month.)

Print purchases through the LotFP store will still include PDF downloads.

And as always, if you buy the physical version of an LotFP release anywhere, we will send you the PDF version when you send us proof of purchase.