DTRPG Says 'Don't criticize us or we'll ban you'

[Ovinomancer]

The hypothetical isn't harder, it's a substantively different example that only presents the appearance of being comparable so as to try and create a "gotcha" attempt, which isn't helpful.

Nope. No gotchas. The market is providing a service of convenience to the farmer, just like OBS. That it's actually largely true in my town is a bonus.

The farmer's market needs to be looked at in terms of whether or not they can meaningfully create a barrier to market access, and the issues you cited don't seem to meet that threshold. They're inconveniences, to be sure, but even for a one-person operation create only minor issues to reaching the same pool of potential customers. This is not the case with DriveThruRPG, as another publisher in this same thread has outlined, and which another publisher said in a link I posted earlier.

DTRPG creates no meaningful barriers to market entry. You can completely ignore them. You can ignore the farmer's market.

You are confusing "my business is not viable without using DTRPG" with a barrier to entry. There's a difference between enabling marginal businesses and being an actual barrier to entry.

If, instead, you mean a barrier to entry in the market of providing the same services to RPG companies? Again, DTRPG doesn't do this. They have no aggressive practices that burden competition in their field of service. It's just too small a market to really support competition. DTRPG didn't acquire OBS in a hostile takeover to secure dominance of the digital indie RPG and small company RPG market. They consolidated because there wasn't enough market to support both.

You said before that you didn't know what monopoly power was. I posted a link that describes the term, noting that it recognizes the difference between a literal monopoly and a business entity that has gained enough market influence that they have the effective abilities of a monopoly. It's not something that can be easily discounted, any more than being thrown off of Youtube (and its affiliated subsidiaries) can be said to be unimportant to someone who makes their living via video content, since they can still post videos on their personal website.

That's really just defining monopoly. Monopoly power is not something non-monopolies possess. The only distinction is between a pure monopoly and an effective monopoly. However, the market for RPGs is vaster than the segment that DTRPG has any control over. You have to artificially limit the market to get to where DTRPG has significant sway, and that sway is really in the realm of enabling small and marginal companies the ability to engage in the market at all.

Let me put it this way. DTRPG dropping a product does not provide a barrier to entry for that product into the wider RPG market. If DTRPG did not exist, those products would not become more viable in the marketplace. DTRPG isn't a monopoly here, because they're enabling businesses that otherwise would not exist. You can't claim that a choice by DTRPG to not enable a business that otherwise would not exist is providing a barrier to entry. If anything, they provide a footstool to entry, by bringing to market products that would not otherwise exist. This isn't a reversable analysis, where you can say that since they bootstrap companies into being viable that failure to bootstrap is creating a barrier to entry. Like, if there's a fence, and I offer you a ladder to get over it, not offering the ladder is not the same thing as pushing you back off the top of the fence or building the fence higher.

The farmer's market is a bad analogy, because it doesn't scale properly to what's happening here, nor does it gatekeep access nearly as much. That's why hypotheticals don't work: they distract from the issue at hand by trying to "win" the discussion rather than actually discuss it.

Let's not do that, okay? Let's put that example to bed and focus on what's happened with DriveThruRPG.

Scale is exactly the point, actually. Looking at a market and the players in it does not care if the market is large or small. The analysis is the same.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I believe they do. It is in their guidelines, but as I stated earlier int he thread, they have shown tremendous restraint on this front. I think they've largely reserved enforcing those guidelines to truly objectionable content. I think where people got worried with these new guidelines was it seemed to be taking a slightly different posture towards publishers and we were wondering if this signaled a change in how policies in general will be enforced.

But them showing tremendous restraint, doesn't mean it is an ideal situation. I think we would be better off if there were 3-5 truly viable OBS's than 1.

Keep in mind one of the concerns people are raising is about the process itself. When a product is flagged, it automatically gets taken down for two weeks. So all it takes is someone not liking you or your company and flagging you maliciously and a release date you have carefully timed, gets impacted. That is pretty important for RPGs. Those first two weeks are crucial. Now there are things OBS can do to balance that out on the other side. I don't know if they do or not as I have never had a product taken down for review. From the publisher side, I think them addressing this process would be very helpful because it seems like it is ripe for abuse.

The harm you're claiming here is one that DTRPG has a duty to you to protect your sales on the DTRPG platform from possible harms that have not materialized. They have no such duty, especially if it's called out explicitly in the terms of the contract. What you're proposing means that DTRPG would have to increase staff to constantly monitor and immediately assess claims against a product in real time, which is pretty costly. I don't imagine DTRPG's staff is particularly large, but the number of products they have is. So, staffing wise, are you willing to foot the bill in increased percentages to pay for this service you think DTRPG should provide? The usual answer to this is no, no people are not.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Actually, that's a conflation of the legal definition with the broader principle that someone should not be retaliated against or otherwise attacked for expressing their opinion. That includes (threats of) economic harm or other attempts to financially punish them for saying something that other people don't approve of, and so is relevant to this discussion.

I would call this misrepresentation egregious, were it not immediately followed up by one of the worst misrepresentations I’ve ever seen on this site.
Attempting to reframe the phrase “freedom of speech” as if there is any broadly agreed upon right to not be told to shut up and get out when you say something inappropriate in the eyes of the private establishment you’re speaking in, is dangerous nonsense.

"Freedom from speech does not mean freedom from consequences" is simply "blame the victim" dressed up in a more acceptable presentation.

No, it is not. What the phrase in question actually means, and pretty everyone understands this, is that your freedom of speech does not obligate me to put up with you, even in public, but especially not in a private space that I own and/or operate.

“Take that Nazi trash elsewhere and don’t come back.” In response to someone posting something like a fresh new take on that one old school product that makes tribes of orcs into different indigenous people in the most racist way possible, is not a violation of free speech.

It holds that if you attack someone, they deserved it because they provoked you.

No, it doesn’t. You’ve simply made that up whole cloth.

It's historically been used as justification for oppression, ranging from "if they they didn't want us to raid their homes, they shouldn't have given aid to rebels" to "of course she wanted it, look at what she was wearing," and it's no less odious even when the stakes involved are far less serious.

This is outright disgusting.

 

[Alzrius]

Nope. No gotchas. The market is providing a service of convenience to the farmer, just like OBS. That it's actually largely true in my town is a bonus.

I disagree. I believe that the farmer's market has only a minor convenience to offer, and has little ability to gatekeep an individual seller from the market. That is not the case with DriveThruRPG.

DTRPG creates no meaningful barriers to market entry. You can completely ignore them. You can ignore the farmer's market.

The difference being that if you ignore the farmer's market, you can set up a stall a few feet away for marginal time and trouble and reap near-identical rewards. If you want to set up your own sales website for pay-for-download RPG products, you not only need much greater technical skills, but you'll also be unable to effectively reach most of your customers.

DriveThruRPG has created a barrier to entry simply by virtue of its overall success, in other words. By becoming the single largest venue, it has effectively made it more difficult for alternative venues to viably compete, and so discourages publishers to use those other venues, let alone creating new ones. That's far and away more than the farmer's market can do, hence why it's a bad example.

You are confusing "my business is not viable without using DTRPG" with a barrier to entry. There's a difference between enabling marginal businesses and being an actual barrier to entry.

That's a distinction without a practical difference. Either way, you need to engage with DriveThruRPG in order to engage with your potential customer pool. By demanding that publishers adhere to certain conduct guidelines, they're effectively leveraging the barriers they've created (whether intentionally or not) to exclude meaningful market access from people whose behaviors they disapprove of.

If, instead, you mean a barrier to entry in the market of providing the same services to RPG companies? Again, DTRPG doesn't do this. They have no aggressive practices that burden competition in their field of service. It's just too small a market to really support competition. DTRPG didn't acquire OBS in a hostile takeover to secure dominance of the digital indie RPG and small company RPG market. They consolidated because there wasn't enough market to support both.

Anti-competitive practices alone are not the hallmark of a monopoly, nor are they the sole indicator of a barrier to entry. DriveThruRPG might not mean to drive other venues out of business, nor discourage new stores from opening up, but the fact of the matter is that they do simply by virtue of being so successful that they've become, for all intents and purposes, the only game in town.

When a publisher only gets 5% of their storefront sales from Paizo, and 10% from the OpenGamingStore, and the other 85% is DriveThruRPG, that's an indicator that the latter has monopoly power, and so they've achieved a de facto barrier to entry for publishers who don't meet their conduct guidelines.

That's really just defining monopoly. Monopoly power is not something non-monopolies possess. The only distinction is between a pure monopoly and an effective monopoly.

This is not correct. By this definition, monopolies don't exist, since anyone who could effectively open up a sales venue, no matter how localized or how limits its scope or reach, is always "in competition" with even the largest and most omnipresent corporations. That does not truck with what we can see in the world around us.

However, the market for RPGs is vaster than the segment that DTRPG has any control over. You have to artificially limit the market to get to where DTRPG has significant sway, and that sway is really in the realm of enabling small and marginal companies the ability to engage in the market at all.

I believe this is an inaccurate assessment of the market for pay-for-download digital RPG products, which is the market under discussion here. The small publishers for whom most/all of their products fall under that market are adversely affected by DriveThruRPG's decision to leverage the barrier to entry that they have (and they do have it, even if they didn't seek it out) against publishers who don't meet their conduct guidelines.

Let me put it this way. DTRPG dropping a product does not provide a barrier to entry for that product into the wider RPG market. If DTRPG did not exist, those products would not become more viable in the marketplace. DTRPG isn't a monopoly here, because they're enabling businesses that otherwise would not exist. You can't claim that a choice by DTRPG to not enable a business that otherwise would not exist is providing a barrier to entry. If anything, they provide a footstool to entry, by bringing to market products that would not otherwise exist. This isn't a reversable analysis, where you can say that since they bootstrap companies into being viable that failure to bootstrap is creating a barrier to entry. Like, if there's a fence, and I offer you a ladder to get over it, not offering the ladder is not the same thing as pushing you back off the top of the fence or building the fence higher.

When you're the only ladder in town, and you say that only the people who approve of can climb the ladder, then you are effectively acting as the barrier to entry, even if you say that the fence was already there. All the more so when getting over the fence is the only way to reach the market that's beyond it. The fact of the matter is that just because your own success has made you assume greater responsibilities, doesn't mean that you not wanting to have ever assumed them to begin with is a viable reason for ignoring or otherwise shirking them.

DriveThruRPG is not what enables a business to exist, they're what enables a business to reach the customer pool that they've managed to corner. In so having cornered it, they've gained the ability to regulate who accesses it. That's a responsibility that they need to manage appropriately, with regard to not gatekeeping those publishers.

Scale is exactly the point, actually. Looking at a market and the players in it does not care if the market is large or small. The analysis is the same.

I disagree. When you get so big that you've managed to be the source of 85% of the market revenue, the analysis is no longer the same.

 

[Jd Smith1]

My point was just it is important if you've followed the free speech conversation over the years (i.e. it comes up a lot)

I have, and it isn't. My point is, avoid blanket statements, because you don't speak for everyone.

 

[Jd Smith1]

That kind of thing has to be a two way street as well - part of the reason that the available options are not viewed as as good is the lack of network effect. Publishers who are worried about this sort of thing should consider putting their content up on other sites such as itch and gumroad to try to help those retailers become better known and more widely used by customers looking for ttrpgs. There's a chicken and egg problem going on and it takes both publishers and retailers to break that cycle and create competition in the space.

Except that what you are suggesting is bad business.

Diversification of outlets is not automatically good. If consumer focus is primarily aimed at a single provider, and that provider carries your product, you are well-positioned to sell.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

They provoked us" is not an excuse for causing harm, at least when the provocation is "said stuff we don't like" (outside of very specific exceptions such as explicit threats of physical violence,

White supremecist propaganda is a an explicit threat of physical violence against all marginalized people in a community into white that trash is interjected.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

That's a responsibility that they need to manage appropriately, with regard to not gatekeeping those publishers.

Kicking Nazis off the platform is managing your platform appropriately.

 

[Alzrius]

Attempting to reframe the phrase “freedom of speech” as if there is any broadly agreed upon right to not be told to shut up and get out when you say something inappropriate in the eyes of the private establishment you’re speaking in, is dangerous nonsense.

I strongly disagree. When a private enterprise has effectively assumed the mantle of being a gatekeeper over a particular market, they have a responsibility to not exclude others based on their personal feelings about them.

No, it is not. What the phrase in question actually means, and pretty everyone understands this, is that your freedom of speech does not obligate me to put up with you, even in public, but especially not in a private space that I own and/or operate.

That's not an accurate definition of what the phrase means. The phrase means that attacking someone else is legitimized if you say their opinions were upsetting to you, which is untrue; someone else's beliefs are, unto themselves, not justification for your attacking them.

 

[Alzrius]

Kicking Nazis off the platform is managing your platform appropriately.

That's a very snappy catchphrase that doesn't help with examining the idea that a single venue, when they're the gateway to 85% of a market, is being irresponsible when they gatekeep who can access that market based purely on their own ideology.