WotC puts a stop to online sales of PDFs

[xechnao]

Would you still think the 12 year old was correct if you knew that:

The damage being caused by allowing the pdfs to continue being sold was greater then the damage caused by not having the income from pdfs + angry customers?

I asked something like this before, I will ask again: how can you possibly know this? How can you quantify this damage? Especially since products are not equal (phbII is not equal in sales expectations with phbI since they are different products)

 

[Wayside]

Obviously this isn't the place for a challenge over who is better at finding illegally pirated material, and I can't give evidence for this, but I'll stand by what I said.
The protection used by Paizo is a significant hurdle for the most prolific pirating communities.

Are you knowledgeable about where most RPG pirating takes place? People with a passing familiarity tend to assume it's all torrents, but that's not the case. Torrents are mostly useful for large files or large groups of files (read: entire product lines), and they require more of a time investment to share. The "prolific" RPG pirating, however, takes place on networks that connect users directly and allow them to browse each others' collections in their entirety.

I'm sure that volume-wise most sharing is done via torrents, since torrents are an easy way for people to find, say, every 3.5 WotC book, or every Exalted 2e book; but those torrents themselves come from the people who populate the "prolific pirating communities," and if someone is interested in something, those communities have it. If I couldn't find Paizo's products there I'd be worried for them, because it would mean nobody cared about Paizo anymore.

I'd be very impressed if you could find pirated copies of the last two issues of Second Darkness, for example. You would have to delve very deep indeed to find them, and the files would likely still have identifiers of the purchaser attached.

To test your theory I connected to the lowest volume hub I know of. I'm not a Paizo customer, but from wikipedia it looks like Second Darkness ends at issue 18? I found issues going up to 18, at any rate, and it took one whole search at the least hidden place I'm aware of to do so. This isn't surprising. If Paizo had succeeded where companies with far more resources have failed, on the other hand, that would be surpising.

 

[Waylander the Slayer]

The more I think about this, the more I am driven to a simple conclusion. If you know that:

13. It must be the fault of the lawyers.

I have to disagree with this conjecture. I have worked intimately with lots of Corporate Counsel and have never, not once, seen Counsel make business decisions. In fact, many a time, good advice from the legal department is ignored in favor of making money. Legal departments are largely auxiliary and do not function in the way many people here seem to percieve. They do not make the business decisions. They might be consulted on the decisions to ascertain the legal implications, but they are not the final arbiter. The final arbiters are always the CEO/CFO or the subsidiary, or in instances, where needed, the CEO/CFO of the corporation. So one might want to look to whoever holds those positions within WOTC.

Maybe all this lawyer bashing has to do with popular culture where the big bad is the scheming lawyer.

 

[joethelawyer]

I apologize for adding to the pure speculation. But since I just failed the Will save...

Except for the degree of PR debacle and responsibility for it, this matches pretty close to one of my theories.

Add to it that it may not just be a matter of protecting copyrights, the trademarks involved (please, nobody confuse those two!!) for 4E, and their online business model; and I can well understand why WotC is taking this course of action.

I think, though, that there is significantly more to the story than the above speculative fiction.

And I agree its total speculation on my part. I just figure something so screwed up must have lawyers and lawyer logic involved in some way.

The way I view lawyers is as a mercenary. We don't get paid to deal with perception/PR issues. We don't get paid to affect the bottom line in any way other than in the case we are hired for. Therefore, if you hire a lawyer to go to war for you, expect some collateral damage, both on the PR and business fronts, unless you have someone in control of the overall situation who knows how to manage the lawyer within the scope of the business and public relations needs of the company.

 

[joethelawyer]

I have to disagree with this conjecture. I have worked intimately with lots of Corporate Counsel and have never, not once, seen Counsel make business decisions. In fact, many a time, good advice from the legal department is ignored in favor of making money. Legal departments are largely auxiliary and do not function in the way many people here seem to percieve. They do not make the business decisions. They might be consulted on the decisions to ascertain the legal implications, but they are not the final arbiter. The final arbiters are always the CEO/CFO or the subsidiary, or in instances, where needed, the CEO/CFO of the corporation. So one might want to look to whoever holds those positions within WOTC.

Maybe all this lawyer bashing has to do with popular culture where the big bad is the scheming lawyer.

I think it all depends on the power relationship within the corporation between the legal department and the business/sales people. That relationship varies from company to company, and even on a situational basis.

For example, when I was in sales, the large company I worked for had the legal department involved in reviewing all non-standard sales contracts. Most of the time we worked together just fine. In one particular situation, however, their obstinacy blew a $1.3 million deal I set up. It was such an irrational concern that we had to go to the CEO of the company to override the legal department. By the time we had legal out of the picture, the deal was shot to hell.

On the flip side, I have seen situations where legal advice was ignored to the business' detriment. I've also seen good advice ignored to the detriment to a local political board.

Bottom line though, is that this is all speculation. Who knows what happened. I, along with trillions of others it seems, are trying to figure out what's going on. Since we'll never know the whole truth from WOTC, and it's a commercial for the show I'm watching I figure I may as well speculate.

 

[Umbran]

The thing is, I have no idea how they can prove that by the numbers at hand at the time they killed the pdf market.

Well, it is not as if any business decision, in the history of mankind, was made on the base of "knowing". There is never certainty. There are only estimates.

 

[WotC_Trevor]

Hey guys. I haven't been back to post here since things got started, but it looked like everyone was doing a good job of dragging the information into this conversation, and I really didn't want to come in here and spam you with the same information twice.

I did want to let you know that while I'm gathering all the feedback on the pdf conversation, I'm not just looking through Wizards' forums. I'm looking here, other D&D communities, blog and article sites, etc.

I know this hasn't been a beautiful walk in the park, so thanks for taking the time to contribute to the conversation.

 

[Nikosandros]

I'm not sure I agree with that reasoning -- Paizo and DTRPG/RPGNow both took down the WotC PDFs at about the same time, so they both must have misinterpreted WotC's request. Given that they are the only vendors around, IIRC, then it seems like 100% of whom WotC communicated with misunderstood their communication.

Personally, if I say something to people, and everybody misunderstands me, I tend to suspect that I didn't phrase it very well.

It is also possible that there wasn't any misunderstanding. WotC is slightly changing its course due to the negative reaction and they have asked Drivethru to cooperate.

 

[JohnRTroy]

I think what's bothering me the most right now is the group of posters going around saying "Well, I don't use any .pdfs, so clearly there's no problem at all here. Furthermore, if you have a problem, you're obviously just a WotC hater and your opinion doesn't matter in the first place."

But in that thread about Lorraine Williams, you stated yourself that "gamers deserve to be dismissed sometimes". It's a little ironic that you're getting upset now because somebody is dismissing your POV.

I think the big thing in those threads are just people getting "meh" about WoTC decisions, since in the past few years they've been doing a lot to alienate people, from releasing 4e and losing some fans, to the GSL fiasco (I no problems with the GSL instead of the OGL, but they did really botch vendor/partner relations with that). And maybe some people wondering how big the PDF market is compared to the print market.

How can you prove lost sales/revenue? WotC certainly can't prove that people who downloaded the book from a filesharing site would have purchased either the PDF or print copy of the book (or at least, if that is their argument then I'd expect any half decent defence lawyer would rip them to shreds).

This comes up everytime piracy is discussed. However, we have sales forecasting--algebra, calculus, logic, statistics, etc., that can help predict trends and can predict things with a high level of accuracy. While we can't always predict the weather or financial markets with 100% accuracy, we can make good judgement calls. If we couldn't, nobody with an education would be able to get anywhere in those professions.

In some cases, educated guesses are all that are needed. Hell, Scientific theories can't always be proven 100%. Believes in Intelligent Design like to say that Evolution is "just a theory", but scientific theories are more than a hypothesis and can usually be tested.

So, I think businesses predicting costs of piracy are not just pie in the sky figures or FUD.

Maybe all this lawyer bashing has to do with popular culture where the big bad is the scheming lawyer.

Isn't "Joethelawyer" a Lawyer?

Regarding the law, I tried to look up the cases on PACER and they aren't showing up. I couldn't enter the numbers MerricB copied her from Wizards, as they weren't the exact format, but I don't see any cases in the Western Washington PACER system. The only reason they should be omitted would I guess be if the court records were ordered sealed, but I'm not sure this case qualifies as one to be sealed. Could a real lawyer explain why these records wouldn't show up in PACER?

 

[Scribble]

How are they going to find the people they are going to sue regarding those "more to come" you are talking about? It has been said so far that it were the watermarks that lead them to the suits this time around.

Also the fact that you sell pdfs yourself or not I think is irrelevant regarding damages or any lack of necessary security measures.

The thing is, I have no idea how they can prove that by the numbers at hand at the time they killed the pdf market. How can a person possibly calculate such a thing? The only certainty at the time of the decision was that you would piss people off. Since pissing your customers off usually leads to lower sales, I would have decided it wasn't worth the risk to find out if the calculation you outlined above was accurate. Then again, who am I?

Well, obviously they can't know anything with 100% certainty, but I'm sure they're not inexperienced with their company.

With my company, though we don't know for certain how much our clients EE's will spend on medical bills in a certain quarter we can usually give a pretty darn good estimate.

We look at things like, population size, income level of the population, what the job actually is, how educated the population is, age range, etc... Lots of things that someone experienced in the field can use to give a good estimate.

I don't know what a game company uses to evaluate its numbers, but one thing is certain- I'm sure Wizards knows a lot more about how their sales "should" be then the common person on the street.

I'm also sure rather then just some random guy making a "gut reaction" to the piracy it was also looked at, and evaluated by people with that knowledge using lots of info we don't have.

Sometimes companies do stuff that's just plain dumb sure... But also sometimes companies do things that if you don't have all the numbers looks dumb, but in reality "we're going to look dumb" was one of the considerations made before the plan was enacted, but in the end the ends justified the means.

My company again... we switched around accounts from various people, a move which caused some people to be doing some aspects of the "new" accounts with no experience. To some parts of our clients this move looked really dumb... But to the people that matetred, the consultants, the HR people in charge of buying our services, the "integrated" model was the smart move despite how dumb some poeple thought it was.