I just wanted to post here to say that I was wrong. Many months ago, this subject first came up (for
4E, anyway) and I said that the core books would be scanned and available through downloads within 48 hours. It seems that the pirates beat the street dates!
...and that goes to show you that
you can't stop piracy. I don't endorse it at all (I believe ENWorld still lets you see PDF purchases, and if you look at mine you'll see I've purchased hundreds of dollars worth), but it's real, and a company needs to figure out a way to deal with it.
Spending time trying to get torrents pulled down is a complete waste of time. A particularly well known site keeps a log of all of the legal threats they get, and if they ignore the RIAA, Microsoft and Apple (not to mention publicly insulting the people who send the letters)
WotC is going to do nothing to stop it. Seriously!
So should we just ignore it and pretend it doesn't happen? No way!
WotC (and RPG publishers in general) need to come up with a way to market PDFs in such a manner that they're attractive to consumers. That way they can make money off of the legitimate customers, and encourage those who are on the fence to be legal and behave properly. One way to do that is through a company like RPGNow, but is that the be-all-end-all of electronic PDF publishing? In it's current form, certainly not...but it's a start!
Sell me PDFs of the D&D books for a reasonable price and I'll buy 'em. Sell them to me for cover price and I won't, it's just that simple, which is why I don't have any
WotC PDFs other than what they released for free RPG day.
Make money off of electronic downloads and don't waste time telling people that illegal downloading is wrong. Why? Because everyone knows it's wrong, and the ones who do it just don't care.
As I'm writing this, it occurs to me that it may come off as a bit confrontational. That's not my intention, and mods can feel free to modify it or even delete it.
--Steve
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