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Arcane Power: How long before the pirated copy appears

How long before the pirated copy hits the torrents

  • 1 day

    Votes: 31 23.7%
  • 2-3 days

    Votes: 34 26.0%
  • 4-5 days

    Votes: 17 13.0%
  • a week

    Votes: 28 21.4%
  • two weeks

    Votes: 8 6.1%
  • three weeks

    Votes: 1 0.8%
  • a month

    Votes: 5 3.8%
  • longer than a month

    Votes: 1 0.8%
  • never

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • lemon curry/no idea

    Votes: 6 4.6%

  • Poll closed .

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Legendary Pictures (and the company that owns it -- WB, I think) put up a massive effort to prevent The Dark Knight from being pirated pre-release. They were able to delay the pirated copy for 24 hours, and they considered it a monumental success

No disrespect to you or to WotC, but I highly doubt there was NEARLY as much hype surrounding Arcane Power as there was The Dark Knight. And bigger hype means that people are going to be trying harder to pirate it.

Aaron
 

I'm honestly a little surprised it's not up already. I know it's not a hot item, but it's honestly trivial to scan an entire book. We have document scanners in our public computer labs here at Syracuse. Okay, they're a little pricey (low end $250-300 on Newegg), but that's no real detriment. I would suspect the reason it is taking so long is putting in bookmarks and such, as someone suggested earlier.
 



Perhaps they shouldn't have pulled the pdfs completely. Perhaps they should delay their sale for a number of days because:

1. The pirates will have flooded the torrents with sub-standard scanned pdfs anyway by then.
2. To give hard copy sellers a chance to sell to those who want a copy a soon as possible.

That is a good idea, even if they delayed the PDFs a month I would be happy (i.e. long enough for peeps to get the books and totally digest the char builder/compendium info). Win Win IMO
 


Regardless of the delay the real question is whether or not it translates into sales of the product that wouldn't have been there without this strategy, assuming there is actually a reliable way to determine that.

I mean, hypothetically, if you could spend resources to stop piracy of your product dead in the water but then found that you didn't recoup the investment in the form of increased sales from people who otherwise would have pirated the product - again, assuming you can reliably determine these numbers - would you still invest in stopping piracy? I guess that's what it comes down to.
 

No disrespect to you or to WotC, but I highly doubt there was NEARLY as much hype surrounding Arcane Power as there was The Dark Knight. And bigger hype means that people are going to be trying harder to pirate it.

Aaron

This is very true, but I believe the concept translates. WOTC is going making far less money overall, but their ability to to gain money with a small delay is still fairly substantial (not as high as a major motion picture with exponentially decaying income), but sales are still highest when the book first comes out. Barring oddities.
 

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