Forum

[Westwind]

Originally Posted by Cirex

Let's ASSUME that the 25% is caused, enterily, by downloading. Isn't it weird that the country with the most (we compare USA with Europe now) restrictive laws is the one suffering more from free downloading?

USA is also facing an economical crisis...and that affects it. But it's easier to blame "internet thieves".
I really need to go. I would love to keep discussing it, since civil discussion is great for idea reviewing and so on.

Creative Commons is the way to go. Future will prove me, and over 150 million people, right.

I'd like to think I'm balanced on this issue--and I'll happily concede that piracy isn't responsible for even half that decline. And obvious, any consumer industry is going to get hurt when disposable income declines, although the record industry's decline predates America's economic woes. I haven't found any study (probably since the control group is so small) but I'd be very interested to see the market-specific impact of piracy. If 5.5% (getting that number from the Edison study) of lost record sales are due to piracy, it's a big hit but one a healthy record industry could absorb and, with creative marketing, adapt to--all that's lacking at the moment is a healthy record industry. However, the book market is a very different animal than the media market in terms of margins, etc. On top of that, the role-playing market is not huge, so it's less able to absorb any sort of hit.

Here's a somewhat extreme example to illustrate the point:

Author A writes a book called "Trains." Nice pictures, good book. It gets pirated. I'm willing to bet that it won't make a huge dent in overall train book sales since there are a ton of books in the marketplace about trains and, within the category of trains, a lot of people have different tastes.

Author B writes a book called "Great Finnish Holiday Food." It gets pirated. Now, before this book was written there was no such thing as great Finnish holiday food (I should know, I'm a Finn--I have a recipe that involves putting a whole fish inside a loaf of bread, no joke) so if you want to know anything about this topic, you're essentially forced to buy the book. As soon as this is pirated, you're going to see a much bigger decline in the genre's sales in relative terms than you would with Author A's book.

The RPG market is not a big one and I'm inclined to believe it would be more vulnerable to revenue loss than, say, historical fiction. On a purely anecdotal level, I also believe any market populated by tech-savvy geeks is more vulnerable to piracy simply because they posses means and opportunity out of the box and only need motive.