We’ve had two long-standing pricing practices that often raise questions, so today I thought I’d consolidate both into a post about pricing. One is about why we don’t reveal the exact price for new products before they launch on our webstore, and the other is about why we charge full MSRP at conventions. I don’t think we are alone among publishers for these practices due to the reasons explained below.

Launch Secrecy

Since 2017 we have not announced the exact price in advance of a launch for the following reasons:

1. There are three different prices (MSRP, launch discount price, and Champion price) across multiple currencies (USD, CAD, AUD, GBP, and Euro). This greatly increases the potential for confusion about which price is being discussed online (i.e., if you hear me say, “The game’s price is $50,” there are 15 different ways that could be interpreted). But it’s very clear when you’re looking at your price in your currency on your webstore.

2. Sometimes I make small adjustments to the discounted price leading up to the launch based on the continual influx of industry information: Products that other publishers launch around the same time, reviews, buzz, instinct, and the many other random inputs I try to observe during this critical time.

3. As soon as the MSRP is made public, some retailers will start to list the game for preorder even if they don’t have other important pieces of information. We want our games to do well in retail, and I think it’s fair for retailers to wait until the publisher has launched a new product before they start to sell it. Withholding the MSRP helps to facilitate that goal.

People have asked for a rough estimate of the price in advance, so I’ve come to provide a high-threshold answer. For Braided Skies, I said that if you set aside the equivalent of $100 USD, you would have more than enough to order the game on our webstore. As you now know–the game launched last week–Braided Skies has an MSRP of $75 USD.

Convention MSRP

We charge full MSRP for our products at conventions, including the products we’ll have at Essen Spiel this week. Here’s why:

Selling games at a big convention like Gen Con or Essen is a huge investment. There are personnel costs (travel, lodging, and food for my coworkers and payments to all demo team members), booth fees, and freight shipping/logistics expenses to get the products to the convention hall. On a per-product basis, these costs triple the landed cost of most products.

It’s for this reason that every cent matters when we have a booth at a convention–this is why we charge MSRP. The silver lining is that customers don’t pay shipping fees when they buy games at a convention, and there are other perks as well: You can learn a new game from our demo team and sometimes get it signed by the designer or artist (both designer Dan Germain and artist Andrew Bosley will be at our Essen booth).

Also, even more importantly, this is why we don’t offer free games at conventions to content creators. I really appreciate reviewers–we send thousands of review copies each year–but if you want to see publishers invest in conventions, please consider buying a game from their booth instead of asking for a complimentary copy. I promise that we’ll have review copies for our new Essen games available later in the year.

I hope this helps to answer some questions around our pricing practices. I’d love to hear from other publishers–is there anything I’m missing here?

Also read:

• Price Secrecy: Flexibility and Patience
• 4 Most Popular Questions Asked About Any New Tabletop Product

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