Will WOTC's Ending PDF Sales Because of Pirating Increase Pirating of their Stuff?

[Agamon]

Not a fan of pdfs, personally (I'm still 3 issues behind on Dragon because I haven't gotten around to it yet), but it just seems like common sense that, yes, this will makes things worse, not better, for many different reasons.

 

[Cadfan]

I selected no.

I don't think it will have a meaningful effect. If it has any effect, it will increase rather than decrease, but I think the overall effect will be negligible.

 

[Remathilis]

Sorry Hasbro*, Cat's out of the bag.

First off, much of there collection is already out there. There are torrents all over the net full of their old stuff; suspending the PDFs of Aurora's Whole Realms Catalog is isn't going to fix anything**.

Secondly, if you have a problem with selling PDFs of your books on the internet QUIT PUBLISHING YOUR HOUSE MAGAZINES IN PDF! Honestly, I have a DDi subscription and occasionally I've grabbed articles off torrents because I don't feel like logging in to WotC's site. You want to make it difficult to pirate, PRINT THE DANG MAGAZINES ON PAPER AGAIN!

Third, don't think this is going to stop pirating. As long as there are people willing to take a book, rip it apart, and scan/OCR the thing, their will be PDFs. Heck, the 4e books were released BEFORE the print mags thanks to an employee releasing the print-proofs. Will it slow them down? Sure. Stop it? Not by a longshot.

WotC SHOULD have tried to go with an iTune's method; charge a price so low that piracy becomes less attractive. Charging full price for a PDF was ludicrous. Actually, I miss WotC's "buy the book, get the PDF" model (as impractical as it was). Most PDF buyers do so to keep a searchable copy on a laptop for game. WotC convinced some to buy the books at full price, they would've convinced more to buy them at 1/2 price, but now they are forcing them all into piracy.

Someone should reconsider this choice.

* I say Hasbro because I bet pistols to pesos it was a Hasbro, not a WotC beancounter, who noticed the loss in revenue and ordered the stop.
** Really, all pre 4e items are out of print. Whose sales are they hurting? Ebay's?

 

[El Mahdi]

I can't imagine how it won't! (voted Yes)

However, it won't be me contributing to this. I'm done with WotC. It's not even worth the trouble to illegaly download them for me (and since all it really takes is a simple Google search, that's saying a lot).

Since I can't on a .pdf, or wipe my with a .pdf, or take a .pdf out back and burn it with the garbage, I really can't foresee any reason or motivation I'll have for ever downloading WotC .pdf products again - whether legal or illegal.

There is simply no amount of legal action, copy protection, or watermarks/identification that will ever eliminate pirating. May as well stand on a beach and yell at the ocean to try and stop the tide from coming in.

 

[I'm A Banana]

WotC SHOULD have tried to go with an iTune's method; charge a price so low that piracy becomes less attractive. Charging full price for a PDF was ludicrous. Actually, I miss WotC's "buy the book, get the PDF" model (as impractical as it was). Most PDF buyers do so to keep a searchable copy on a laptop for game. WotC convinced some to buy the books at full price, they would've convinced more to buy them at 1/2 price, but now they are forcing them all into piracy.

The issue with that was the idea of "cannibalizing book sales" (kind of how iTunes actually reduces the sale of albums). WotC and D&D are still really book-based. They don't want to do anything that'll hurt book sales.

I mean, admittedly, it probably wasn't ever that great of a risk, but it's one of the reasons they haven't taken that course.

The idea of "buy the book, get the PDF" eventually transformed into the compendium.

The Compendium is dynamite for deterring piracy. $10 for one month's access to all the D&D crunch published to date? Convenient, quick, and fairly simple. The Compendium is the best anti-piracy idea out there. The better they make that thing, the less piracy will be an attractive option. Link it to the galleries. Include the setting/fluff stuff. Organize it for browsing. Maybe even make it more timely (a one month delay is still long enough to make the early-adopters pirate things).

The DDI in general is the best thing WotC has done to deterr piracy.

This move will increase it. Not by much, but by some. What it WON'T do is make anyone new buy a physical book. As a strategy for increasing sales, this is a dunderheaded move.

 

[Grazzt]

I selected no.

I don't think it will have a meaningful effect. If it has any effect, it will increase rather than decrease, but I think the overall effect will be negligible.

Agreed. I don't think it will have too much of an effect at all. But- I don't seriously believe it will slow it down either.

 

[Derro]

It's disappointing that the leading company in the industry feels the need to punish its customers based on the actions of a few bad apples. There also seems to be no thought as to how this affects the intermediary providers, RPGNow and DrivethruRPG. Removing your product is one thing, failing to provide the downloads that the customer has already payed for is another entirely. I'm sure this is going to have some repercussions for the download sites that WotC is happily insulated from by the contracts in place.

I can understand WotC's concern for newer product being pirated. D&D 4e and SW Saga, presumably, are primary revenue generators at this point and losing any of those sales to piracy is not just a dip in the stream but also an indicator of the viability of the line.

Removing older products, specifically very early edition modules and supplements, is just reactionary. Those products are supplemental revenue at best. WotC did not pay for their production costs and was only required to pay the relatively small amounts of money to turn them into clean PDF files. Before the PDF market existed no one but re-sellers were making any money on these products and there was a finite amount of stock.

I'll say it again, I'm very disappointed. WotC has been sinking lower and lower on my list of preferred publishers and I think this just pushed them over the edge. I know that corporate culture has to be arbitrary sometimes, it is an unfortunate product of the free market, but making moves like this without any real explanation or consideration for your market or partners goes too far.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

If ending sales is followed by free downloads, like was the case around 2000-2001 under Jim Butler for the first initial few old product scans, then there would be no pirating issue.

I have five Dark Sun scans Jim made available for free before the PtB at WotC decided to contract out the scanning operation and monetize the downloading. Maybe they'll return to that? (I'm not holding my breath though!)

 

[FireLance]

I posted this in the other thread, but given the Humor tag, I guess it's more appropriate here.

This is is what WotC should do:

1. Retrain their secret gaming police into an elite ninja force. As everyone knows, ninjas and pirates are natural enemies.

2. Unleash them onto the world with instructions to seek out and destroy all pirates instead of stopping people from house-ruling their 4e games or playing previous editions.

As a side note, Piratecat may want to change his screen name to Ninjacat just to be safe.

 

[Voadam]

Maybe the decrease in easily available pdf quality (at least, I assume scanned documents don't hold a candle to fully published and indexed pdfs) will cause some people to buy some books, instead of pirating them. That'd be one possible reason it could help.

It doesn't always work that way.

The 3e Spell Compendium I bought from WotC was almost unuseable. It was huge in page size and takes forever to search or change pages. I assume this is because it is almost print proof level of pdf detail on full color image resolution etc. where you can put in tons of detail that won't be noticeable on screen and it doesn't matter if it takes forever for screen pages to refresh on the screen because they are designed for professional print resolution only.

Scanning with a low resolution for art can mean an easier to use pdf. The Malhavoc press ones are generally designed to be pdfs from the start so they handle and print much better. late 3e and 4e WotC books are not designed for pdf from the ground up. I can't speak to how the 4e ones are though, I never got them.