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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WalterKovacs" data-source="post: 4766479" data-attributes="member: 63763">Let's do a little exercise here. We have people who fit into group A, they buy the D&D books in hardcover. We have people in group B, they don't buy the books. We have people in group X, they buy the pdfs when they are available. We have people in group Y, they download pirated pdfs when they are available. We have people in group Z, they don't get pdfs of the D&D books at all. Finally, we have group D, they subscribe to ddi. (Group E does not). So, B+Z+E is a massive group, but they are trivial. They have little or no involvement with D&D and are unaffected by the pdf issue. In fact group Z in general is unaffected. The big questions are: (a) How many in group X are also in group A? How many buy the book, and pay for it a second time to also own it in pdf format? (b) How many in group X are also in group D? How many pay monthly to get the information in the compendium and character builder, but also pay to own it in pdf format? (c) How many in group Y are also in group D? Does having a well documented (bookmarks and the like) pirated copy available around a week before the compendium update discourage anyone from subscribing to ddi? Again, this is as much my opinion as the 'they were hoping to increase sales by delaying the pirating and they failed' guess is. I believe that in the case of A the group of X+A is much smaller than Y+A (people that buy a hardcopy and just pirate a pdf), so that they weren't getting much money from people willing to pay twice for the same book, so most of their sales were from those that weren't buying the hardcopy. In other words ... I don't think that the hardcopy sales will be impacted by the pdf change. However, I do think that ddi subscriptions may be changed. DDi is geared towards the same people that would want pdfs. If you want the information on your computer, you can get it either via DDi, or via a pdf. Now, that means you have some options. You can buy the pdf, you can illegally download the pdf, or you can subscribe to DDi ... an you can also do some combination of the pdf and DDi. Now, again, paying for the same information twice based on basically an honor system, isn't necessarily going to translate to big money. Long story short (too late), the pdf sales of new content for 4e basically equatted to releasing their pdfs for free and asking for donations. The speed that the pirates removed the security stuff and put the same pdf people paid for online was such that someone would only buy it under the honor system. By stopping the sale of pdfs, they at least aren't doing the pirates work for them. There is potential that, the pdfs made by the pirates might not be as high quality, not to mention delayed, which could be the difference for some people between using those pdfs exclusive, or putting down the money for a ddi subscription. There is also the wild card, as according to the phone call anyway, there is some hope of a new electronic method of selling products that is harder to pirate. If that is the case, the longer they continued selling the pdfs, the longer pirates would be able to strip the security from the files and put them out there for free, and the lower the value of these hypothetical 'new' products would be. At the very least, by discontinuing new products in pdf format, they increase the chance they can sell them if and when this hypothetical new format comes out. It may not be book sales they are trying to increase. It may be ddi subscriptions, it may be future electronic content, or it may just be that whatever work went into creating the pdf files, however little, wasn't worth having it instantly pirated as soon as it was put up for sale.</blockquote>

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