They were ages ago. There's giving retailers time, but you don't give them 18 months.
No, it's not that. It's simply keeping old customers but not funnelling new customers to old stuff. Simple, sensible stuff.
D&D 5E So why no PDFs? Is their fear of piracy -that- bad?
They were ages ago. There's giving retailers time, but you don't give them 18 months.
No, it's not that. It's simply keeping old customers but not funnelling new customers to old stuff. Simple, sensible stuff.
My local game store has several copies of each of the Premium reprint series right on the shelf. 18 months isn't that long for a book.But I would also agree they are funneling people toward the 5E rule-set.
Sounds like your local game store needs to try harder to sell its stock! If something's been sitting there for 18 months, they're screwing up somewhere.
Beleriphon
Totally Awesome Pirate Brain
TSR made some pretty boneheaded moves as well. Its not like any company is immune from making mistakes given hindsight is 20/20.
I have some faith that there's some kind of business plan for D&D, and a good portion of that business plan is honestly not in the actual game production. Think of the Disney model, sure Aladdin was a great movie but the money is in sell Princess Jasmine bed sheets and t-shirts to little girls. Its the reason that Disney bought Marvel, Disney exces don't gives a rat's ass about comic book sales compared how much money Avengers makes at the boxoffice or how many Spider-Man underoos get sold. Hasbro execs wants D&D to do that for them, and they believe that WotC is the team that is going to make it happen. PDF sales are honestly a drop in the bucket, and I don't think they actually care that much about them in the big picture.
thalmin
Retired game store owner
Some of us are still restocking these books!
Jester David
Hero
True, but at the end of the day, they were in the business of making D&D and related games. So if they did poorly they were incentivized to do better.
However, WotC's primary purpose is selling Magic cards. That's their business and they can be excellent at that and it doesn't transfer to being good at D&D as the product lines are so very different. And there's very little incentive to be better as the money D&D brings in is pretty much insignificant. The money D&D makes in its best year is a tenth what Magic brings in during a slow quarter. There's no reason to bother working hard to learn the business of D&D, because every hour spent making an extra dollar could be spent making ten times as much via MtG.
MtG is apparently doing very, very well. It's a good time to be a MtG player, and most gaming stores I know rely on that card game money. But that doesn't transfer to knowing how to publish a Tabletop RPG any more than that skill would transfer to publishing a board game or a mobile app.
Disney/Marvel is pretty much a good comparison. You think any Disney executives care at all about what makes a good comic book? About keeping the comic book fans happy?
That business is peanuts. It's insignificant. It's an audience of 250,000 people that makes a few dozen million each year, compared to the billion dollar franchises. The comic companies can run around doing their own thing and so long as they don't lose money no one really cares. Most Disney, even the ones that have dealings with Marvel, very likely have few ideas of the nuances of actually publishing a comic or what makes a good comic versus a bad one. (And given the state of the comic industry, this kinda shows.) And Marvel only has one business (selling comics) compared to WotC's multiple divisions. It'd be like if 95% of Marvel was dedicated to comics and 5% was dedicated to, oh, postcards. Even if there were people who were really invested in learning the business of comic books, they might not extend their knowledge base to the secondary department of postcards.
PDF sales make be a "drop in the bucket" but they're still a source of revenue. D&D needs all the money it can get. And they're useful for the players, which keeps the fans happy.
I'm always using my Pathfinder PDFs. Continually. I'm reading APs at work during my break, or preparing for an adventure, or writing some homebrew content. Even if I don't have my iPad, I have them on Dropbox so any PC becomes my gaming library.
And I'd probably do that with 5e as well. I'm doing a 5e Ravenloft update, so it'd be handy to reference the books anywhere, so I can do a few minutes or race design or subclass balancing whenever I have some free time, not just at home with my books beside me. Being able to ctrl-F to search for a phrasing, or the frequency of a saving throw, or counting how many monsters have a fear effect, etc.
Really, the only thing Hasbro executives care about D&D is the IP it brings to the table. Again, like Disney, which doesn't care about comics but wants the characters. They don't even really need the TTRPG any more than they need the mini game or the character builder program. That could be licenced just as easily. If WotC thinks it can save money by doing the RPG out-of-house it will layoff all of the remaining half-dozen D&D brand team and keep the licensing people on staff to manage that.
Beleriphon
Totally Awesome Pirate Brain
Which is why Hasbro execs as a whole don't really care one way or another. That being said, revenue is revenue and I'm sure we'll see something eventually, just not yet. Whatever that product is (or isn't) we'll find out in good time. The biggest issue that I forseee is that will be too expensive for by virtue of the high production values of the actual books and the need to recoup that cost since much of the actual costs of books are in the writing and design, not the physical printing.
T
TDarien
Guest
I, for one, would much rather wait for a better digital format than settle for a PDF. They're certainly useful, but PDFs of full-size books are a pretty terrible model. OCR'd images of book pages are slow take up far too much space. You have all sorts of formatting you don't need, which makes them hard to read on even the largest mobile devices without zooming in and out, which I really don't want to do. WotC has said that that's the biggest reason they haven't released PDFs, they want to do something better. DungeonScape is likely part of that, but I'm thinking that there's more too it than that.
I would much rather have the rules in an ebook format with minimal or no art. DungeonScape will provide something like this; they've said that several times. I think there's a LOT of room to explore different ways to present material in a digital format that would far more useful than just a digital copy of the printed book.
I would much rather have the rules in an ebook format with minimal or no art. DungeonScape will provide something like this; they've said that several times. I think there's a LOT of room to explore different ways to present material in a digital format that would far more useful than just a digital copy of the printed book.
Last edited:
But you do understand that there are plenty of people who prefer pdf's right? I like reading the books in pdf format when on the go so that it does have the art. I like referencing a page or rule when talking during the session from a pdf and having someone with a book be able to flip to the same page or vice versa.
Every other major rpg publisher releases pdf's, it is great if WoTC wants to try and do some alternate formats but they shouldn't just refuse to do pdf's at the same time.
Similar Threads
