Actually, I think the numbers that were thrown out were specific to .pdf sales of PHB2. In other words, for every .pdf of PHB2 that was purchased, at least 10 copies were pirated.
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Can Wizards turn around their D&D support?
- Thread starter MerricB
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Peraion Graufalke
First Post
I seem to remember something like only 1 sale having been reported to WotC by some pdf store(s) for every 10 actual sales. Not sure though, I could be misremembering.
Economists, accountants and attorneys would have a very different view.
Derulbaskul
Adventurer
I think an economist would look at the actual sales being the targeted sales and say that piracy had not discernible effect on sales. An economist might also take into consideration the lost sales from not having an evergreen PDF line and/or because of the electronic distribution.
I think an accountant would say something similar but with less flair.
The job of an attorney, however, is to scare you. I don't say that as a criticism, because it is such an important role, but a lawyer will automatically tell you that piracy is a problem, even when the product was completely sold out, because then they can earn money for anti-piracy initiatives and advice.
There is no incentive for them to say otherwise. If they do not claim that piracy is a problem then, especially in the Land of Litigiousness, they might be sued for malpractice for failing to identify a key business risk.
These three professions all provide advice. Advice is worthless without sound judgement and, IMO, we're seeing faulty, un-commercial judgement at work in WotC's business decisions.
As a lawyer with an Econ degree, I can tell you there are formulae & models that are used to calculate the effects of various kinds of theft on a company's bottom line, including piracy. Not only are those models used in legal cases, they are used by many companies to determine whether certain strategies will give a good RoI (Return on Investment).
At the very least, pirated copies shrink the market for future sales. Even if you sell all of your initial print run, the existence of pirated copies affects your ability to make a profit from subsequent print runs. For instance, a company would use such a model to decide whether their investment in a second print run would be profitable within a certain window of time...and if a product is being pirated at a 10-1 ratio, it may well not see future re-releases.
IOW, piracy DOES affect a company's bottom line according to economists.
And accountants? They're looking at the costs of anti-piracy measures, the costs of NOTA taking such measures, the costs of paying those who do the analysis...again, it has an impact.
Tony Vargas
Legend
I can't imagine piracy having /no/ effect, but, by the same token, not every copy pirated is a sale lost. I supose the effect of piracy would be to increase the elasticity of demand for the pirated product - because there is a cheap alternative (the pirated product, same thing, much cheaper, much less dependable, with a side of risk assumption). Not good for the suplier, but not fatal in itself, and something that could be adapted to, if it couldn't be stopped. In some cases, adapting to piracy might be the less costly strategy. Piracy could concievably even be leveraged, rather like viral advertising.
Derulbaskul
Adventurer
Yes, I am aware of all of this and yet I stand behind my comments.
Why? Because models don't always work. Why did we have a Global Financial Crisis? The short answer is due to faulty models. The only point here is that a model is simply a model; it may or may not be a solid representation of reality.
Degrees are nice; I am sure I have one or two somewhere, but there is a profound difference between providing advice and actually running a business and making commercial decisions just as there is often a profound difference between models and reality (witness the GFC).
Does it?
More particularly, does it in the case of WotC's D&D products?
I don't think we have a model for that. D&D books are not just for reading. You prepare your games by referring to them. Pirated PDFs are not exactly the ideal medium for this.
Also, look at WotC's experience with D&D. Clearly print products don't work for them else we wouldn't have had so many products cancelled this year.
Now, if the products are not working as first releases then clearly the issue of second, third or fourth print runs is largely irrelevant. IOW, piracy is not affecting the subsequent print runs because the first print runs are not happening.
To be clear, my point is this: there is a commercial decision that needs to be made by WotC as with any business. External advisers are nice but they are not always right. And external advisers advise toward sclerosis; it's those with commercial experience who make the game-changing calls, like Ryan Dancey did with the OGL and SRD.
Personally, I think WotC made the wrong call with pulling PDFs, cancelling the offline builders while the online versions were still in development and reducing their DDi content without a single message to the fanbase from Bill Slavicsek et al. We're seeing sclerosis.
I would really love to see what Ryan Dancey or another game-changer (like Lisa and Erik at Paizo) would do if they were able to take over the D&D brand at WotC before we're left with troll's leavings (sorry, WHRPG reference).
Only that it really didn't. It may have allowed them to track down the original person to realse a particular copy into the web, but once it's in the web it will be pirated forever even if the original pirate is stopped. And that's assuming that you can successfully win a lawsuit against someone in Togo and even if you do most likely all you'll be left with is a a theoretical right to monetarily compensation that the pirate won't ever be able to pay anyway.
And every month some acclaimed source will release their own model to disapprove the claims derived from the models that come before.
The models used (particularly the claims made in court by the RIAA) don't hold up well to peer-reviewed research into the effect of piracy though.
www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-d...coast-president-greg-leeds-4.html#post4750120
There can be an impact. That impact for music looks like less than 10% of sales.
Of the hardcore pirates I've known over the years, they use very little of the pirated stuff they get (ie. software, movies, music, etc ...).
Their MO is more along the lines of compulsively acquiring and collecting the most cutting/bleeding edge pirated stuff, and bragging about it to their other pirate friends (both online and offline). It's very much like a competition where they're "one upping" one another, to see who's the "king of the castle" with the most recent bleeding edge pirated stuff.
The vast majority of their acquired pirate stuff ends up on a backup drive/tape, without ever being used by anyone (other than running the program once to see if it runs).
