Arcane Power: How long before the pirated copy appears

[Nymrohd]

I think people expected Arcane Power to be pirated fast as a reaction to WotC pdf policy. I don't think the pirating community (is that even the right way to call them?) cared a tenth as much about this as this community did.

 

[Dice4Hire]

Well, WOTC has certainly slowed down the pirating, I think that much is clear. But will it be slowed to 3.5 levels, or even slower? I think to 3.5 levels, where people do the crude image pdfs, so WOTC's plan has had at least some success.

But did it equate to success in the pocketbook? That I do not know.

 

[CardinalXimenes]

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.

I think WotC's perfectly willing to write the long tail of their PDFs off entirely. Why? Because the only long tail PDF customers are those who A) declines to pirate and B) demand electronic format and C) are not satisfied to buy the book... and these customers can then be led to the handy DDI subscription. This will satisfy all those customers who are not explicitly after DM or fluff books like the Draconomicon or Open Grave, and I'm willing to bet the number of digital-only DM book aficionados could fit inside a VW Beetle with elbow room to spare.

One can argue that offering PDFs online for sale is a trivial cost for some slightly-more-than-trivial gain, but we're not WotC, and we're not in a position to really know how much it costs to get those PDFs not merely prepared for sale, but administered and overseen. Nothing involving selling people a product is something you can totally fire and forget, and you can be dead certain that somebody was logging billable hours on WotC's PDF line.

 

[Voadam]

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.

He did say explicitly if that many pirates would not wait and instead bought hardcopies on release day.

 

[Kask]

but we're not WotC, and we're not in a position to really know how much it costs to get those PDFs not merely prepared for sale, but administered and overseen. Nothing involving selling people a product is something you can totally fire and forget, and you can be dead certain that somebody was logging billable hours on WotC's PDF line.

For the old editions that WotC doesn't itself sell, yes I have been there. There is basically no cost other than logging quarterly payments from the reseller. That's why WotC didn't give that as an excuse...

 

[Imban]

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.

They certainly were not. Most people don't understand how piracy (of anything, really) actually works and for all they're concerned, the magic piracy fairies that go by such strange names as Reloaded and Deviance just make it available on torrent sites a few hours after release. Or earlier.

 

[Remathilis]

I also came across the link for chapters 1-4, which in and of itself is a unique phenomenon (most people wait for the full thing for releasing; either the anticipation for a pdf copy "just to show WotC" was bigger than predicted or 4e PDF fans are spoiled by zero-hour releases)

Still, my initial prediction (1 week) seems to be holding. Its slower than 4e's PDFs by far, but not nearly as slow as the 1-2 months some 3.5 books could take to run.

BTW, as a side topic, the PHB3 playtest article was up there too, I wonder if WotC gonna do something about Dungeon/Dragon Piracy (assuming of course they don't already blind watermark with you DDi Login, but its not likely).

 

[resistor]

I will be most interested to see how quickly the PHB3 shows up next year, since it will probably have the most comparable demand level to the PHB2, to get an apples-to-apples comparison.

 

[tmatk]

I think people expected Arcane Power to be pirated fast as a reaction to WotC pdf policy. I don't think the pirating community (is that even the right way to call them?) cared a tenth as much about this as this community did.

I agree. Any delay is more indicative of a smaller interest in pnp rpgs. Arcane Power is hardly the latest movie or video game.

 

[drache]

Well, WOTC has certainly slowed down the pirating, I think that much is clear. But will it be slowed to 3.5 levels, or even slower? I think to 3.5 levels, where people do the crude image pdfs, so WOTC's plan has had at least some success.

But did it equate to success in the pocketbook? That I do not know.

I think it's too early to judge that.

Arcane Power frankly is a supplement and probably not high on the list of most people.

What will be really interesting is to see what happens with DMG 2