You're all missing something important here. WOTC realized that with its actions in the past few years it managed to completely fracture and splinter the RPG community.
This is just part of WOTC's master plan to unify once again the entire RPG community. Every board I have been to tonight is unified in their outrage at WOTC, no matter what edition they play.
Well done WOTC!! What's phase 2 of the master plan I wonder?
Someone do me a favor and rep him for this. I already repped him for someone else this thread.
I'm guessing the idiot behind this PR fiasco is up at Hasbro, and doesn't really know much about what happens with the D&D brand besides how much money it pulls in or doesn't.
They can legally ask other online websites to pull their products without warning, and it sucks for those people who were allowed to get multiple downloads and now can't. Unfortunately, that happens with the market. They can even legally pull the stuff from their own website.
It's a bad move though, because it annoys the hell out of the customer base. Maybe Hasbro's marketing is big enough to weather whatever losses they take from this, but that's old thinking. The Internet these days plays havok with that sort of thinking, because opinions and rumors can travel faster across it than anything in history. So while WotC and Hasbro's execs are sleeping and maybe not thinking much over this, you've got firestorms brewing and percolating here, RPG.net, on WotC's servers and who knows how many other message boards, blogs, and what not. That means more damage control that's going to need to be done in the long run.
I feel sorry for Scott. He or someone else in the company is going to end up having to face the anger of the online gaming community and fall on his sword for the moron who thought this would be a good idea. I'm sure some of the people working on the D&D brand at WotC know how TSR angered gamers over stuff like this 15 years ago, and maybe they even warned a bone-headed executive who wasn't interested in listening.
The biggest concern I have is the future of the old edition products. It sucks if the stuff going away for good because WotC doesn't want it competing with 4e, though maybe that's a sign that customers don't want it. If those customers aren't buying any 4e products though, WotC could still potentially make money selling them the older stuff that they do like. Not just disgruntled fans who only want old stuff, newer fans who are curious about the game's past and evolution, and so on. I liked that the older edition PDFs were offered for sale before, because if I want to pick up an older product I could never find, or I'm just simply curious, I didn't have to rely on eBay, where some of that stuff sells for insane prices.
These days companies who provide entertainment need to think outside the box. The models of cracking down on piracy in the hopes you'll actually make more money while irritating the hell out of customers don't work. I find this approach to be interesting though, even though it applies to old movies:
Warner Brothers Fights DVD Decline With Old Movies And A New Model - Media Money with Julia Boorstin - CNBC.com Don't know if that approach would even work with D&D stuff, or if it will even work for it's intended purpose, but I'm glad to see at least one megacorp is at least
trying to think creatively.
This will probably cause a short-term piracy spike from people pissed about it. They'll do it out of spite or because they think they're hurting "The Man" or some such. And some of that piracy will be towards 4e stuff, the sales of which WotC is trying to bolster in the first place.
