10:1 illegal downloads

[BryonD]

Presumably it's the first 30 days, but he's not crystal clear about that, as far as I read the quote. It could also be two print runs, the initial and the follow-up, so it's impossible to gauge the initial print run from that statement.
/M

Yeah, I misremembered the quote on the second page. He talks about the first year of 2E and then restates the 3E sold 300,000 in 30 days statement and says it was in 2000. But not necessarily the first 30 days. Though I would think it is a safe bet.

 

[Scribble]

Ahhh, but you're ignoring the number of customers that are gained through piracy, and yes, that does happen quite often.

Got a study to cite showing this? I know it's a common statement, but I've never seen anything to back it up. (I could have just missed it so if you know of one...)

Without one though, it always just kind of sounds like a way to rationalize downloading free books.

You cannot equate illegal downlads with lost sales, it's simply naive to assume there is a high correlation between those two.

You don't need to coorelate every ilegal download with a lost sale. Going with WoTCs figure of 10:1 lets say we go way low and say just 1 of those 10 was an actual lost sale. So you now had 2 people you were going to sell to, but one of them downloaded it... You just lost 50% of your sales.

Now lets say that those numbers represent thousands of people. So 1000 bought it and then 1000 would have bought it but downloaded it instead. (While 9000 downloaded it but weren't planning to buy it anyway.)

Books were roughly 25 a piece, so that's $25,000 worth of sales you just lost. Think that's insignificant? Go "borrow" that from your company. Or better yet, PM me I'll send you my email and you can paypal me 25k.

That said as a consumer of electronic media, I'm mad about this event. I like PDF books, and the things they allowed me to do. Not having them is a significant annoyance.

I'm not mad at Wizards though. They're just protecting their interests, just like everyone has a right to do. I DO hold them to task, as a customer of theirs, to find something comparable to take the place of PDFs, and to do it quickly.

Really I'm mad at the people who uploaded the books. I think WoTC deserves the money for any of the sales they lost because through WoTC the creative people behind the books, and the people who support the books, get paid for their efforts. (And not just the well known faces, but also the unknowns like the custodial people, the customer service people, and even the people who benefit from the taxes WoTC pays.)

Those people deserve to make money for what they do.

The PDF policy we had for a while with Wizards was AWESOME. I could get an electronic version of the books and all I really had to do was essentially give my word (by putting my name in the pdf) that I wouldn't upload it. Someone did though. That person effectively flipped WoTC the bird, and in the end did to me as well, as now I can't get PDFs. So that guy? THAT GUY I'm mad at. That guy is a word grandma wouldn't like.

 

[Raven Crowking]

So that guy? THAT GUY I'm mad at. That guy is a word grandma wouldn't like.

This I can agree with, but it doesn't excuse identity piracy.

EDIT: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=67312029929


RC

 

[Dumnbunny]

Got a study to cite showing this? I know it's a common statement, but I've never seen anything to back it up. (I could have just missed it so if you know of one...)

In addition to the study I cited, there's also the individual experiences of content producers such as Baen Book and singer/songwriter Janis Ian who found that freely available and shareable copies of their works increased sales.

So that guy? THAT GUY I'm mad at. That guy is a word grandma wouldn't like.

I'm mad at that guy and I'm mad at Wizards. That guy I'm mad at for reasons similar to yours. Wizards I'm mad at because they're following a well-trodden path, pretending they'll wind up at a different place than those who've trod that path before them.

 

[Scribble]

In addition to the study I cited, there's also the individual experiences of content producers such as Baen Book and singer/songwriter Janis Ian who found that freely available and shareable copies of their works increased sales.

Well, then I stand corrected. That's really what I was looking for, somone who actually researched it.

I wonder if the same applies to smaller industries like gaming? (The amounts needed to cause damage I mean.)

I'm mad at that guy and I'm mad at Wizards. That guy I'm mad at for reasons similar to yours. Wizards I'm mad at because they're following a well-trodden path, pretending they'll wind up at a different place than those who've trod that path before them.

I'll be mad at wizards if they don't end up offering me a comparable product. Realy I don't care if it's pdf, as long as it's something that I can have the same functions:

All the info the book has
Ability to cut and paste (with no limits)
Ability to search (both in the file and outside of the file)
Usable offline

The last one is not entirely make or break for me, but it does weigh pretty heavily.

 

[Voadam]

Got a study to cite showing this? I know it's a common statement, but I've never seen anything to back it up. (I could have just missed it so if you know of one...)

Without one though, it always just kind of sounds like a way to rationalize downloading free books.



You don't need to coorelate every ilegal download with a lost sale. Going with WoTCs figure of 10:1 lets say we go way low and say just 1 of those 10 was an actual lost sale. So you now had 2 people you were going to sell to, but one of them downloaded it... You just lost 50% of your sales.

Now lets say that those numbers represent thousands of people. So 1000 bought it and then 1000 would have bought it but downloaded it instead. (While 9000 downloaded it but weren't planning to buy it anyway.)

Books were roughly 25 a piece, so that's $25,000 worth of sales you just lost. Think that's insignificant? Go "borrow" that from your company. Or better yet, PM me I'll send you my email and you can paypal me 25k.

According to the Harvard Business School 2004 Study on file sharing impacts on record sales at page 3:

We find that file sharing has only had a limited effect on record sales. OLS estimates indicate a positive effect on downloads on sales, though this estimate has a positive bias since popular albums have higher sales and downloads. After instrumenting for downloads, most of the impact disappears. This estimated effect is statistically indistinguishable from zero despite a narrow standard error. The economic effect is also small. Even in the most pessimistic specification, five thousand downloads are needed to displace a single album sale. We also find that file sharing has a differential impact across sales categories. For example, high selling albums actually benefit from file sharing.

So let's say it is the way high number of 1 lost sale for each 5,000 downloads ("the most pessimistic specification" for record sales, with popular ones being boosted minorly by downloads).

What was WotC saying the PH2 downloads were? 8,000 or so in a short amount of time? Lets extrapolate out to say 80,000. That comes out to 16 PH2 lost sales. Let's say it is 800,000 downloads. That would be 160 lost sales. Say WotC makes $20 net profit on each PH2 sale, that would be $3,200 loss.

 

[Dumnbunny]

I'll be mad at wizards if they don't end up offering me a comparable product. Realy I don't care if it's pdf, as long as it's something that I can have the same functions:

All the info the book has
Ability to cut and paste (with no limits)
Ability to search (both in the file and outside of the file)
Usable offline

I'd be stunned if we don't see the first item, and I'd bet on the third showing up as well. The second and third I'd be very willing to bet against. They're looking for more control, and those two items undermine it.

I'm hoping to see the back-catalog show up. I'd love to finish my collection of selected D&D items from the 70's and early 80's, and many of these items are rarely on eBay and cost a pretty penny when they are. While I hope to see them, I suspect they won't be there at first and maybe not at all, and that's a deal-breaker for me.

I also hope it will be in some format usable on operating systems other than Windows. Again, I suspect it will not be. I suspect it will be locked into Windows. I haven't decided yet if this would be a deal-breaker for me; it just might be.

 

[Scribble]

According to the Harvard Business School 2004 Study on file sharing impacts on record sales at page 3:

One thing I do question, in this report is that it is studying the effects of downloading music on physical CDs, and indicating it's negligable. Does it study the effects of downloading on purchasing downloadable music though? (Haven't read the entire thing.)

How does the ability to download a free copy of the same pdf effect someone who ony wants the pdf and not the physical book in the first place?

If it's significant then what incentive does Wizards have to continue offering PDFs (that can be easily turned into pirated PDFs with no quality loss.)

 

[Stoat]

As roguerogue mentioned in another thread:

Summary: A joint study by the Harvard University Business School and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill proved that the RIAA’s argument is not as strong as they would like. Harvard professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee’s results showed that it took 5,000 downloads for the sale of an album to be reduced by one copy. In addition to this startling discovery came an even bigger one: when it came to popular artists, record sales actually improved from downloading music – sales increased by one copy for every 150 downloads.

Interview: Music Downloads: Pirates—or Customers? — HBS Working Knowledge
Study: http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf

Other rigorous studies by third parties have produced similar results.

That's an interesting read. Thanks for bringing it to the conversation.

 

[Voadam]

One thing I do question, in this report is that it is studying the effects of downloading music on physical CDs, and indicating it's negligable. Does it study the effects of downloading on purchasing downloadable music though? (Haven't read the entire thing.)

How does the ability to download a free copy of the same pdf effect someone who ony wants the pdf and not the physical book in the first place?

If it's significant then what incentive does Wizards have to continue offering PDFs (that can be easily turned into pirated PDFs with no quality loss.)

I believe the study only analyzes the contention that decline in album sales is linked to music downloads.

The study will not be a perfect fit as there are differences between music and RPGs as well as the fact that it analyzes the situation five years ago.

I would think though that there would be a closer link between music downloads to CDs than between pirated pdfs and physical books as you can do the same things with CDs and music downloads (Copy them onto blank CDs, copy them onto your computer or mp3 player etc.) while books and pdfs have some different functionalities (non-screen reading, reading in bed, in a living room, at a game table, versus search, copy and paste, print out only the selection you need, portability on a laptop).

What incentive does WotC have to sell legal pdfs if there are people who only want pdfs and some of those will get the free pirated ones instead? This seems like a self evident answer to me but their incentive is to get the sales of PDFs from those who buy legally. The only way to get any money from the pdf only pool of purchasers is to sell pdfs.

Not selling pdfs means losing all the sales WotC would have gained if they were for sale.