Jefe Bergenstein
Legend
Yeah this is a good point to make. No one doing the 1 month download thing was doing anything wrong... In fact if you only cared about that part, then doing that made the most economical sense.
That's part of the issue. They created a part of the service that gave people more incentive NOT to subscribe then to subscribe, and probably didn't realize how much of an effect it would have on physical book sales.
I think its 12.95 per month, if you go monthly, right? Assuming you download once each quarter, you're paying $51.80. 20 bucks less than the year long subscription. Was it really worth it to piss so many off to potentially gain a little bit of extra income from trying to force them into becoming year long subscribers?
The guys who also did monthly dips were also potentially missing out on getting the rules the month of release. It would have been smarter for them to stagger it out, where each month had a new splat.
And frankly, even if it hurts book sales, they are probably making more off each month of DDI than each copy of the lates book, as a result of selling direct.
At $72 a year, DDI is comparable in price to a MMO subscription. The difference is a MMO provides a complete play experience. And has a hell of a lot more costs involved, with servers, GM's, tech support, not to mention considerably harder to code. The character builder (honestly the only real reason to be a DDI subscriber) isnt a complete game... its just a supplement to something you already own. They're taking people to the cleaners for a feat planner, and yet the ones deemed "abusing" the system are PAYING CUSTOMERS.
PDF's are available of their books the week they come out. Piracy isnt going to be stopped by this. They spent a lot of time and effort for little benefit to anyone, to deliver something currently worse than what we had.