WotC Pulls PDFs
Seth M. Drebitko:
I am speculating that it may slow the revenue of primarily d20 sellers, and make it a bit more important for them to promote and manage things from their own sites. One thing I find interesting is that Palladium has stepped up to the plate and started pushing their products in digital form finally. I am curious if it has to do with seeing the void that wotc left in the market.
Regards, Seth
David C:
I want to make a few comments about this decision.
1) This definitely slowed down the time it took for the latest book, Arcane Power, to being pirated (took 2 weeks instead of release day.)
2) The quality of the pirated book is lower.
3) This didn't save WotC any sales, but probably very negatively hurt consumer relations.
They didn't save any sales, because Arcane Power was sold out the entire time it was unavailable through pirated means. So if pirates were desperate enough to pay for it (I doubt many were) they were unable to.
I'm very skeptical that pirates account for lost (physical book) sales in the RPG market. The people who are too cheap to pay for a book will just borrow their friends if given no other choice. I know one guy who does this, or pirates all of his books. He's never bought a single book in his entire life, despite having a $100k+ income. He's not a lost sale, because he'll never buy under any circumstances. Either a person is too cheap to pay for it at all, or the value of having a physical book is worth the price to them.
As for PDFs, I can definitely see piracy resulting in lost sales - a pirated copy is identical to a non-pirated copy. (minus the moral issues, which isn't really something you can count on.) Unfortunately, for a small publisher, your options are to 1) live with it 2) something draconian and ineffective. I would try and remember though, not every pirated copy is a lost sale. For example, I know lots of IT guys who download Windows XP off of the pirate bay all the time. These aren't lost sales (they own the OS.) But the copy they download has all the latest security patches.
For my last points, I want to address what this move has offered Indy developers.
1) A chance to foster good will, off of the bad will created by WotC (in fact, White Wolf did just this by offering Exalted as a free download.)
2) A glimpse at WotC's sales (they've sold less than 600,000 copies of 4th edition, which is a far cry short of 3.5's boasted 2 million+).
Everything I've discussed I've either learned from Slashdot, or as far as RPG piracy, I learned from RPG forum boards I visit.
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