No Dice <Nerd Rage>

[MrMyth]

So, you can draw in a ton of new players, but if they don't become dedicated gamers, it's only a gonna be a temporary boost to your bottom line. It really makes me scratch my head, initiating policies that only serve to drive those that would otherwise be dedicated buyers away.

I'm doubtful that every new player, or even the majority of them, leave the game right away. I've seen a lot of players from D&D Encounters - or even just the more casual LFR - who have become regular players of the game.

But even so... even if only a handful of the new players stay, isn't that still a net profit for the game? Or do you actually believe that the existence of D&D encounters and the advertising WotC has done for it is somehow a policy that will "drive dedicated buyers away"?

If you don't believe that, then what are we actually talking about here?

 

[renau1g]

Sure. New players might only have a passing interest in the game, or might have a bad experience that puts them off gaming. It happens pretty often, in my experience.
Old players (often) have some personal investment in continuing to game, as it (often) becomes a part of their identity. How many hours have older DMs put into DMing? Constructing monsters, challenges, encounters, plots... it's alot of work and effort. TTRPGing is a commitment, and many new players aren't interested in having to work for their own enjoyment.
So, you can draw in a ton of new players, but if they don't become dedicated gamers, it's only a gonna be a temporary boost to your bottom line. It really makes me scratch my head, initiating policies that only serve to drive those that would otherwise be dedicated buyers away.

I'd love to see how many players from OD&D are still playing regularly now. If at least 90% of them aren't playing anymore I wouldn't be surprised. So you're saying Wizards should stop attempting to bring in new customers because they may drop out at some point in the future and those new customers bring in $'s but won't be long term, like every who's been playing since 1e? Please don't ever attempt to run a business with this mentality. If you aren't growing the business you are dying. If WOTC sat around and only catered to those "old gamers" they would be in huge, huge trouble, because guess what happens to older people? They die or stop playing.

D&D came out approx. 1974, say average gamer was 18-20 or so at the time, some older, some younger. So it's been 36 years since it came out. Now those players are 54-56 years old and I'm sure that as people enter retirement age there's not too many of them sitting around the old age home pulling out their DM screens and running adventures.

So you've got a mad-on for Wizards and this e-mail was the trigger? I wonder what you do when non-related e-mails come to you? Do you call your state representative and demand that they boycott Nigeria or Britain? Have you launched a tirade on forums about pornography about all those damn enhancement e-mails that come? I wouldn't even classify this e-mail as spam, it's not even trying to sell you something directly.

 

[Umbran]

I call shenanigans^
The costs to produce and release a PDF is less than the cost of producing a large volume of physical copies. Furthermore, many books are PDFs before they are ever printed, as part of the editing process.

Yes, but let us be clear: 2e was released in 1989. PDF format came out from Adobe in 1993, and did not become standard in print publishing until well after the format's release.

So, WotC does not get pdf support for early editions for free. It gives electronic support for the current edition - just not in pdf. And pdf is not the end-all, be-all of electronic support for a game.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

Sure. New players might only have a passing interest in the game, or might have a bad experience that puts them off gaming. It happens pretty often, in my experience.

Since we're talking personal experience here, my entry into the hobby did encounter a bad experience that almost drove me away from the game. The bad experience came from an "old" gamer. It was only the continued interest from my group of friends, who were all new gamers, that kept me in the game.

I thought the piracy notion was one of their factors for ceasing to sell PDFs? While piracy affects profit it does not by default lead to the product being non-profitable.

The legal costs of defending their IP against piracy could be another one of the factors Hussar and others are thrying to point out.

@Chrono - I understand the points you are trying to make, but the way you tried to make them has hurt your cause. You might as well dress up as a gnome and march up and down WotC's sidewalk with a "I am NOT a monster" sign in an attempt to state your postition. I too am disappointed with WotC's decision on PDF sales and am still awaiting the alternative solution they promised when the PDFs were pulled. I actually LIKE their 3rd Party Licensing approach. It is less restrictive than anything that was in place before 3E, while not being as "hog wild" as the first attempt of opening their license to the greater publishing community. Many quality companies seem to be functioning perfectly well under the new license.

 

[Acmite]

What expands the hobby is Gaming, not advertisements, not physical copies. People get involved with D&D (and RPGs) because they have friends or family that participate and draw them in.

I'm going to go ahead and ignore the conclusions you're drawing based on anecdotal evidence.

Here's where I think you've lost what little support you had...

Where is the evidence that PDFs expand the hobby? Seriously, where? I'd love to read a well-research document that compares the growth of "brand-new, never gamed before" populations wrt to PDFs vs. dead-tree.

I think, since the hobby started and grew with dead trees (to levels in the 80s we haven't seen since), you'd find it hard to make a credible argument that PDFs are more effective at developing new gamers than hardcopies.

The *one* thing I do agree with is that people become involved in gaming through friends/family. However, like many of your arguments, you've over-generalized. Let's break it down.

Joe hears about this awesome new game from Vince and Scott where your imagination is the only limit. Plus, it's like WoW without having to have a credit card! Yay!

Vince and Scott had heard about it from Jamie, who in turn had played with his weird Uncle Mikey (there's always a weird Uncle Mikey).

Here's where your argument breaks down. *where did Mikey hear about this awesome new game?*

Advertising.

 

[fanboy2000]

3rd party support brings about zero people into the hobby. There's a reason that for much of the history of the game, it's been D&D, White Wolf and then WAYYYYY back, everybody else. Paizo has apparently made great strides, mostly by picking up those who didn't go to 4e. But, note, that's by picking up existing gamers. Not by bringing in new ones.

Actually, I know a gaming group who started with Pathfinder last year. Their DM bought the rulebook and the Bestiary and next time I saw them, they were in a regular Pathfinder campaign.

How many people actually come to the hobby by way of a 3pp? How many people, what percentage of gamers, started gaming with Mutants and Masterminds? Or the Conan RPG?

In college, I new a girl who'd only played Mutants and Masterminds and OWoD, the games she was in now.

I suspect these people are outliers.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

I just plowed through this whole thread and I'm still a little confused about the nerd rage and where exactly it came from.

Chrono22, if the link to remove you from the mailing list had worked on the first try, would you still have the nerd rage issues you do, or was that just in the OP as yet one more example of how The Man (aka WotC) is keeping us down?

I will readily admit that I personally disagree with several of the business decisions WotC has made over the past couple of years, but WotC is a business. As a business they need to make decisions that are good for them so that they will grow; not the hobby, but the business.

Now each person out there can make their own decision as to whether WotC has gone so far as to no longer deserve their support by purchasing products, but don't waste your time trying to work up some kind of rage from me about it.

WotC is a company that makes a product that is meant as a fun pasttime. They don't provide essential things like food or energy that we need to live. They don't deal with terrorists, human trafficers or political lobbyists. In the end gaming is not worth even a tiny bit of my rage, although I really hope that someday gaming-related issues are the most important things there are to get upset about.

 

[Mistwell]

I call shenanigans^
The costs to produce and release a PDF is less than the cost of producing a large volume of physical copies.

We went through this when the PDF debate was fresh. Apparently, people have forgotten.

Here are costs associated with selling PDFs:

1) Time to upload PDFs at Seller Site
2) Time to monitor sales at Seller Site
3) Time to Account for sales in accounting
4) Time to answer customer service questions for listed items
5) Time to post some sort of marketing within the general WOTC marketing scheme for all items sold
6) Time to document the project in internal company reports for internal reporting and cost accounting measures
7) Time to monitor pirating sites to see if they are offering your PDF scans
8) Time to enforce copyright policy on those sites (if you do not enforce on products you are selling, you can damage your intellectual property rights).
9) Time to report copyright results in internal company reports
10) Time to scan additional content (they had not scanned all of it)
11) Time to pay for the portion of overhead costs associated with all of the above tasks

There are other costs, but those are just a few off the top of my head. It's not just "Offer them and then count your dollar bills". There are in fact costs associated with the sales of those older PDFs. And I promise you, if those PDF sales were worth $100K to them in profits, they would continue to do it regardless of any piracy issues. It's a company - they do things which are profitable. They didn't just end a profitable line purely for piracy issues - there was also the fact they were a very small, niche item not bringing in much money relative to the cost (and opportunity cost) of doing it.

I could go on, but most of what you are saying is ludicrous. There are really only two rational explanations. Either WotC got rid of PDFs because they didn't want their newest edition to compete with the draw of previous editions/material, or the decision was simple incompetence.
I think it's a little bit of column A, and a little bit of column B.

How about C, you've never run a company anywhere near the size of WOTC and do not fully know the costs associated with undertaking such an endeavor and have under-counted the costs of it and think it's just a lot easier than it really is (like most things in business).

I don't mean that personally...I am responding to you saying anyone who disagrees with you on this is ludicrous. It's not ludicrous. There are real costs, and I think it is quite safe to say it just wasn't particularly profitable and a hassle relative to the benefits they gained from it.

As for "old players vs new". It's a false distinction. Old players draw in new players simply by deign of participation in the game.

Old players who won't spend a dime on WOTC products because they don't offer PDFs of older-edition games are not going to draw new players in to new products. They might draw a few (not many) new players into old products, but as I said above those are not particularly profitable. A new customer drawn in through an email about a new product is likely to be much more profitable.

 

[Umbran]

They didn't just end a profitable line purely for piracy issues - there was also the fact they were a very small, niche item not bringing in much money relative to the cost (and opportunity cost) of doing it.

The opportunity cost may well be the biggest issue here. Any time an employee is spending on supporting those pdfs must be compared to what else that employee might be doing, and what value it might have for the company.

Even if the pdfs were profitable, if the other stuff they might be doing with that same manpower is more profitable, the pdfs lose.

 

[Mistwell]

At my company we don't do layout in PDF, but today everything we deliver to our printers are PDF:s, and I believe it to be pretty much a standard procedure, i.e. layout is done e.g. in InDesign, but the file that is sent to the printer is a PDF.

Good point about 1st and 2nd edition not being in digital format.

/M

I do not think PDF allow for the highest level of graphics actually. I know when we do high-end printing that requires fine color separation, it has to be in a different format than just a PDF. PDF is good for text and minor graphics, but I do not think it's adequate for full page color images intended for print binding on a final product.