My good friend Tom was showing me these today. World Works sells PDFs of fold up castles, villages, and dungeons. They also sell sets for the interiors of pubs, inns, castles, and keeps. Tom owns all the sets that are the exteriors of buildings, and he says they're awesome because 1) you get to build really big, cool buildings and 2) the printed details are very well done, and add a sense of complexity to the setting without requiring a lot of work. (Though he did tell me that the complex pieces can take a good amount of time to assemble.)
I love this idea because World Works is a pure data company, they sell bits. I don't know a lot about them, but they look like the model for a high tech small business. They just have one artist doing his thing, and their main cost for overhead is bandwidth and server space. They know their niche, and they keep improving their product. The one problem that I see them encountering, (and it's hinted at in this thread on their message board) is that when you sell a low cost product, that's highly targeted at a specific audience (gamers and fantasy fans with computer access), and there are low barriers to distribution (very easy to buy, people who want the products hear about them right away), then your revenue stream is very short lived. He's seeing sales drop off dramaticly in a couple of days.
It's interesting because this is the same sales pattern that we see with video/computer games where there is a long period of market anticipation, a market consensus on quality is reached very quickly (via online reviews and message boards), and a large percent of sales (90% in the first month? I can't remember exactly) occur very shortly after market launch, and then sales quickly plummet. (Exceptions are games like Myst or The Sims where continued sales are driven by interest from markets outside the core demographic.) I wonder if this is the future of all non-impulse and non-commodity markets - people know what new products are coming to market, they buy it when it comes out, and then sales drop to oblivion because all the demand is used up. Come to think of it, that describes the market for summer movies doesn't it? It seems like there's a new film at the top of the box office every week- sales decrease logarithmicly. Does anyone know if this is some sort of known economic pattern? It's weird, because it's the opposite pattern of consumption from what we see with "renewable resources" like blogs.
My brother John and I were fortunate enough to get into the public Beta of a new online game, 
