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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TikkchikFenTikktikk" data-source="post: 5294018" data-attributes="member: 67494">Apocryphal, but I've heard of games in my town where everyone is expected to have a DDI subscription during play and are required to use Character Builder and its character sheets.Players are actually discouraged from buying books so they don't fall behind with Rules Updates and cause conflict at the table because of it.I've heard of them, because the DMs left playing Encounters and started DMing their own "friends-only" Wednesday night games and a few of the "friends" defected back to Encounters. I've also read some threads about these type of games right here on Enworld.I don't know that even DMs are buying books anymore. They have DDI accounts too, and get their fluff from Dragon and Dungeon and illicit PDFs. (Dark Sun Campaign Setting has been available all over the usual locations since at least the release date, OCRed and chaptered.)I'm the (volunteer) D&D Encounters coordinator at my FLGS. Players and DMs are not shy at all about talking about using PDFs instead of buying books. Inside the FLGS. I'm afraid I'll divert the conversation by bringing this up, but at least locally the use of illicit PDFs is widespread. Coincidentally, 4E book sales here have been pretty mediocre. Maybe the Barnes & Noble is moving some units since they only carry 4E anymore; quite a change from 2-3 years ago when they had a huge variety & selection of systems and associated splatbooks to choose from.I'd say the boxes are a response to a combination of three things:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Most of the content of the books is available in digital form for much less than the MSRP for the hardcover.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Retailers, who are a huge promotional/marketing venue in addition to their role as point of sale, are upset they're losing business because you can get the three $20-$40 books that came out that month, plus every book ever released, for $10 a month. And that $10 doesn't go through them, it goes straight to WotC.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">WotC and Retailers upset they're losing business because you can get everything for free in an extremely nice to look at (DDI Compendium and Character Builder don't have any art and are subjectively ugly) and convenient to use digital format.</li> </ul>The value of the box sets will be the physical bits that are hard to reproduce at home in decent quality: round tokens, big, shiny, poster maps, the box itself, hefty dungeon tiles, "non-collectible" cards on nice, shuffle-able cardstock, etc.</blockquote>

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