Paul Farquhar
Legend
Hardly a recent development...You can't have a personal library if you don't have a room to put it in~
Hardly a recent development...You can't have a personal library if you don't have a room to put it in~
Unless that library is digital... *G*You can't have a personal library if you don't have a room to put it in~
The PDF thing is one tiny aspect of the article and not really a very interesting one, but oh well - let's fixate on that and ignore the rest.
There are millions of Spanish-speakers, but we aren't enough rich to buy all. You can see in many free-to-play online videogames there are translations to different languages but not for Spanish.
China is a great market, but there the future of the industry of the speculative fiction isn't good. Its censorship doesn't like undeads, supernatural elements nor even their own pre-Mao historical past.
Radio killed books, TV killed radio, Videoclubs killed TV, Internet killed cinema and videoclub and video-consoles killed miniatures and boardgames.
The books are for collectors, and the PDFs are by little third party companies.
* I imagine the future of the storytelling "pencil & dices" RPGs like videogames with a creator of quests/missions/stories.
* For new generations of players WotC needs a boardame with simple rules to be easily learnt by preteens, something like the "Hero-Quest" 90's boardgame. ("Endless Quest" as title was copyright by TSR).
Wait ... are you saying I should believe what they say, instead of my own fevered hopes and speculation?
DRAT! That takes, like, 95% of the fun out of the internet.
It just seems to me that stating "international" or that they are taking the game "worldwide" is like saying "I put gas in my car" (or charge the batteries).
Of course they are. The only other option is to limit their own profits and profitability. Not that they have maximized their market penetration within the USA, but there is nothing inherent about D&D that is localized to one place. Hence the market has always been worldwide. It's just a matter of funding & managing international expansion.
As for localization, I'm all for D&D in as many languages as possible. But their is a real cost to doing that, whether teh people that are doing it are WotC employees or a third party. Maybe a business might be willing to subsidize such a cost, but apparently WotC is not. That leaves 3 choices; 1) pay the higher price and show that translations are a good business investment and provide justification for more products to be translated which will drive down the price as the risk becomes less and competition arises. 2) Don't pay the higher prices and justify the high cost due to low success and high risk. 3) Try social pressure to get WotC to subsidize the costs and then hopefully justify their investment by helping them to sell lots of translated books.
Lots of people certainly like books. No doubt about that.
Lots of people also like PDFs