Arcane Power: How long before the pirated copy appears

[Nymrohd]

Yup the torrent seems to be out on mainstream torrent sites, I'd say it will be everywhere by the end of the weekend. I have seen some demand for it but nothing great (and really on sites that use downloading ratios books are not the best thing to share since they are tiny compared to movies and TV series). Did read a few posters actually buying the book because they were tired of waiting for it to hit the net though. Obviously anecdotal but that is 3-4 more books sold

 

[Bleoberis De Ganis]

(4) WotC is, by the same token, not spending any money on the PDFs.

-O

Pdfs cost WOTC nothing. They already have documents for hard printing. All they have to do is combine and convert them into a pdf. All that takes is a copy of Adobe Acrobat and 30mins (probably not even that long) and that's it.

If they find it that difficult they can send me the pages and I'll do it for a tenner.

 

[CardinalXimenes]

Found the first four chapters, the rest is coming to..

So it took a few days.. did wizards really had increased sales from pulling out the PDF sales?

I don't think so..

They bought themselves four days at a minimum and probably two more until the whole book hits the major sites. That's significantly more time than I was expecting, and I can't imagine WotC isn't pleased at the results. Given the former condition of zero-hour PDF piracy, this is a great outcome for them.

WotC is betting that at least 11 out of every 110 potential pirates would rather buy the book on release day rather than wait an indefinite amount of time for a non-OCR'd bootleg scan. If they can hit that number, then they've beaten their returns on selling PDFs.

 

[akodoreign]

Just a heads up, someone posted pages 1-96 of it on a Certain popular sign up server.

Don't know if that counts though since its only 1-96 (as far as people tracking these things) Was in my RSS feed a short while ago.

 

[catsclaw227]

The big questions are:

(a) How many in group X are also in group A? How many buy the book, and pay for it a second time to also own it in pdf format?

(b) How many in group X are also in group D? How many pay monthly to get the information in the compendium and character builder, but also pay to own it in pdf format?

(c) How many in group Y are also in group D? Does having a well documented (bookmarks and the like) pirated copy available around a week before the compendium update discourage anyone from subscribing to ddi?

I am in groups A and B.

I have bought the PDFs even though I own the books and have a DDI sub.

Maybe it's unnecessary to own the PDFs for splats with DDI and Hard copy. But with campaign settings and books like MM and DMG, I like the PDF for copy and paste, as the DMG and MM have a lot of stuff not in DDI (like MM Lore, tactics, etc.)

BTW -- a old player of mine in Cali, who is a PDF completionist, PDF "downloader" (and impatient as heck), said he would have bought the PDF if it were available because of the delay in the pirated copy hitting the streets.

I think the delay in the pirated copy going live is good for WOTC, but there's gotta be a way to get the FULL book copy in a digital format when the print books are released.

 

[Derren]

There is a 4E arcane power file with high availability on emule. No idea of course if that is the real thing and complete. The size seems plausible, maybe a little on the low side (62 MB)

Edit: No, according to the comments of that file it is a scam.

 

[Voadam]

WotC is betting that at least 11 out of every 110 potential pirates would rather buy the book on release day rather than wait an indefinite amount of time for a non-OCR'd bootleg scan. If they can hit that number, then they've beaten their returns on selling PDFs.

If none of those 110 potential pirates would have also bought the hardcopy in addition to their pirated pdf, then yes (though the numbers are still rough since there are different profits for pdfs vs books). But this still only applies for selling new pdfs. For the 950 non-new pdfs that they were selling but are now not doing so, it is hard to see WotC profiting from that part of the decision.

 

[Brown Jenkin]

Edit: No, according to the comments of that file it is a scam.

Is it Pakistani midget porn?

 

[ender_wiggin]

WotC is betting that at least 11 out of every 110 potential pirates would rather buy the book on release day rather than wait an indefinite amount of time for a non-OCR'd bootleg scan. If they can hit that number, then they've beaten their returns on selling PDFs.

Logical, but misleading. Once the full pdf arrives, all "new" pirates will download that pdf. So in order for WOTC to make money by your model, they have to pull in enough extra book sales in these few days before the pdf is available to cover 10% of all pirates ever, because presumably once the pdf is out they won't pull any more legit sales from potential pirates.

That, in my mind, is extraordinarily unlikely. So what can WOTC do once the pirated pdf comes out? Well, if they stay their course they can do nothing.

However, if they release their own legit pdf at low cost, they can hopefully at least maintain 10% of the total aquisitions as they've been doing before this whole thing. Using this technique (closely monitering the torrent sites, and releasing legit pdfs at the correct moment) I think may optimize their sales, as it maximizes the time they have before the book is pirated, maximizes the sales during that period, and then maximizes the sales afterward.

 

[Mistwell]

I checked all the major torrent sites - and the entire book is still not up. I did see what purported to be chapters 1-4.

So we are at what now, day 4? Most of the day is gone now too, so looks likely to go to day 5?

I think we can hands down conclude that the change in policy absolutely delayed widespread torrent distribution. How much of an impact on sales that delay makes is up for debate, but I think the folks who said it would cause no delay at all were not correct on this one.