Community

Cale_Knight wrote:

That's all well and good, but everyone in this thread is making assumptions about WotC's profit margins and income. For all we know, the income from .pdf sales was less than whatever they had to pay some dude to keep track of sales and communicate with the various third-party Web sites that were selling them.

You've got three options here. Either you think WotC is twirling its mustache and laughing evilly as it ties the .pdf download maiden to the train tracks, either you think WotC is run by a bunch of retards who know less than you do about the effect piracy is having on WotC itself, or you think that maybe WotC is acting in its best interests and is testing the waters to see what the effects of halting .pdf downloads are and whether they're good for the company in the short and long run.

I know that many people on these boards prefer to think the worst of WotC because it's fun and chic to bash evil, money-grubbing corporations, but since I love 4e and would prefer to see it continue, I'd also prefer to assume that WotC's marketing department knows more than the collective wisdom of a dozen internet-armchair Alan Greenspans and is doing what is best for their company.

I don't think there is anything weird, sinister or mystical going on. I think it's the same conservative narrow-mindedness that has lost the music industry all credit over the last ten years that has hit Wizards as well.

The problem is that the larger the company the more generic decisions will be taken and the less in touch with the real world will they become. Decision-making is taking legal considerations and IP considerations over market considerations because from a managerial position, the market starts to look more and more like a nuisance to efficient budget planning. It's partly irony ofcourse but it is surprising how accurate it also is.

To get a small inkling of how many .PDFs they were actually selling, you could see that all their .PDFs were Gold or higher sellers on the digital distribution vendor sites. DriveThruRPG alone sold more than 50,000 Player's Handbook in the first month. That's revenue with no cost of transportation, packaging, distribution, printing, storage, handling or anything.

PyroMancer2k wrote:

It can actually be very easy to prevent it as is evident by the decrease in pre-release copies of things. You can encode digital content with encryption so that only persons accessing it from curtain places can use it.

According to the buzz on the newsgroups, 'Player's Handbook 2' was available for download before official release date. That might be boasting though so I don't know.

All the .PDFs I have bought have had a watermark added to them with my order transaction number and my name on all pages (bottom left, outside of any text ofcourse). I am quite sure that people who distribute bootlegged .PDFs simply remove those, likewise, any digital restriction, lock or ID tagged to any digital format can be circumvented, removed, and/or cracked. I would be very surprised if any bootlegged copies originating either from Wizards staff internally or printing staff would have any trace of such countermeasures left in them.

Likewise, I have not been able to find a single court case leading to any conviction of a worker for distributing unreleased material in a digital format. I found a case from Britain where an employee at a publishing house was given a compensation for unlawful grounds for being fired since the company could not prove he had actually done what they charged him for. I could find some newspaper articles mentioning this practice (distribution of unreleased material by employees) as a problem and companies making blanket statements about their intentions to prosecute but no actual cases. They seem to be more propaganda than fact, a form of scare tactics it would seem.

Digital distribution is here to stay. The question is whether companies creating the material wants to profit on that trend and get paid for their products or they want to rigorously deny the realities of the internet. Personally I think the second is a lost cause.

Cale_Knight wrote:

I'd also prefer to assume that WotC's marketing department knows more than the collective wisdom of a dozen internet-armchair Alan Greenspans and is doing what is best for their company.

How about the collective wisdom of a bunch of other game producers? There are some respectable names in gaming that operate on significantly smaller budgets than WotC that produce a lot of support pdfs or even their entire catalog on pdf.

And I'm not talking about 3rd party guys working out of their basements. DOJ/HERO Games (Champions, HERO System) has pretty much their entire catalog available on pdf. Steve Jackson Games (GURPS) does as well and even run their own online store for pdfs. White Wolf (anything angst-ridden) has a pretty sizable presence as well. These might be "big" game companies, but lets be clear -- there's WotC and there's everybody else as far as the money goes.

These smaller guys have a lot more at stake if pdfs screw them out of money. They're all selling their entire product lines in pdf.

I'm going back to my armchair.

Cale_Knight wrote:

The smaller guys also have to accept situations where profit margins are smaller, whereas WotC has the luxury of not necessarily putting itself into a position it doesn't like. That's one of the benefits of being the most successful guy in the business.

On Steve Jackson Games releasing GURPS 4e on pdf:

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/archives.htm … ruary&d=11

"We were concerned, as were many retailers, that PDF sales would reduce the number of print sales. After observing the market, we have concluded that, in general, the sales of a PDF version of a product do not affect the sales of the print version. Therefore, we can satisfy the growing number of PDF-using customers without harming the retailers who have supported us for so long."

Cale_Knight wrote:

Look, the point I've been trying to make this whole time is that at the end of the day we don't actually know anything about WotC's internal numbers, its profit margins, or what its marketing and sales department's statistics say about .pdf sales. But WotC is still at the top of the heap when it comes to RPGs, so I think it's safe to assume that they know what they're doing. Stop taking every move they make as corporate greed/stupidity, because shouting down the sky on the forums isn't really going to change anybody's mind about anything.

This isn't about demonizing WotC as some giant, evil corporation. WotC is a business that produces very good products and employs some very nice people. They're also a business that doesn't seem to do well with marketing and communicating with their customers right now.

If you look at the reasons they gave for stopping the pdf sales in the interview on ENworld, they were crap. I'm sorry, but they were. In all likelyhood, this is a necessary action for whatever legal action they're pursuing against the guys they're suing for pirating PHB2. I understand that, even if I don't like it. But to say this was to protect the retailers and the community is a complete dodge.

And for what its worth, I'll bet everyone thought TSR knew what they were doing in the late 90's, too.

Cale_Knight wrote:

My personal opinion, as I've already said in this very thread, is that WotC is testing the waters to see what their sales figures look like after pulling .pdf sales. If there's a sizable dip in income I'm sure they'll go back to it, or maybe even put up their own online store instead of selling through third parties. But you can be 100% sure that what they're NOT doing is blithely ignoring the effect that the lack of .pdf sales is having on their bottom line. The company isn't run by idiots (as much as a lot of people on these forums, I think, would love to believe).

I'd be just fine with bringing things in-house or becoming part of DDI. They should just come out and say so. As far as 4e is concerned, their mismanagement of PR is probably a much bigger problem for their bottom line than piracy. This is a community based business they're in.

When you make a controversial decision and just let it hang there with no explanation, you're failing the community. That doesn't mean they're evil. That doesn't mean they're stupid. That means they're making some bad decisions.

WolfStar76 wrote:

Just to be clear - they gave an explanation. 

It was their analysis that they were making it too easy for people to pirate their products, so they chose to halt PDF distribution in an attempt to curb piracy.

Now, one may choose to accept that explanation or not - and we're certainly free to debate it (I both see how foolhardy it is AND how I would have done the same thing in their shoes).  I would advise we be careful, however, about creating the impression that PDFs just disappeared one day and nobody from WotC commented on the issue. 

And I should clarify.

WotC did make a public statement / press release.  WotC President Greg Leeds also did a short interview on ENworld.  Unfortunately, Mr. Leeds' own words tell me the official explanations are having a tough time holding water.

For example:

While we understand that our actions will not eliminate piracy all together, we don’t want to make it easy to acquire illegally, either.

All that has happened is that it takes a couple more days for a pdf to show up on these sites.  The only dent they could possibly have made is to avoid a situation where pirated pdfs show up before the print books even arrive at the store, as happened with the core books on release.  Whoever is/was in charge of pdf sales had to have told them this.

We need to have a strong retail base in order to support (and grow) the hobby industry. We hope to deter future offenders – or at least slow down their path to obtaining illegal products.

If they genuinely wanted to support hobby stores, they wouldn't sell to amazon.com or walmart.com.  I have a hard time believing online discount sales haven't hurt mom-and-pop game stores a lot more than pirated pdfs.  By Leeds own admission, the piracy will continue.  This will have no real effect on the FLGS.

So, yes, an explanation was issued and I chose my words as poorly as the official explainers did.