Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rasyr" data-source="post: 2640226" data-attributes="member: 2855">Interesting choice of words. Saying that it is a "problem" that companies won't give away the core elements of their products for free.Hmm... I don't recall WotC ever saying that. Then again, in regards to this issue, you cannot really compare WotC to any other company. They are in a class all by themselves.There are laws about "Fair Use". Personally, I see nothing wrong with copying a section of a product and giving that to another person to use if they don't have the product. For electronic products, I can easily see, and accept a person copying portions of the PDF they purchased to hand out to their players. The operative word here is "portion" as in not the whole thing, and not the majority of the thing. No, I was replying to you. However, your statement wasn't all that clear, so I replied to the overall impression I received from that last portion.Except that while print versions may have a limited lifespan (and this is an artificial lifespan imposed mostly by distributors who want and promote the frontlist syndrome), PDF versions have no lifespan, and continue to sell well past those time marks you gave. Thus, putting out a free no-frills version only undercuts and kills those sales.Perhaps you missed the thread where Phil Reed talked about doing this. He put out a product, and a few months later put out a SRD for it. The result? All sales for that product died, and it had been a steady selling product up until then.Does that "complete" SRD contain stuff from every book? I doubt it. Nor does WotC put information from any but a few core products under the SRD on the fantasy side of things. They have not placed anything from any product under the SRD in a long time, not even the material from Unearthed Arcana which is almost fully OGC (very few, if any of their other products use the OGL in any form, not even their core books - subsets of the core books have been placed under the OGL, and included in the SRD, but the books themselves are NOT OGL).Money is not always that tight, but at the moment it likely is, as there is a major downturn over the past several months of rpg sales (for ALL companies) according to distributors.Up above, you mentioned products having a limited shelf life. And here you are complaining because companies also believe that and won't upgrade a product because they feel that upgrading it won't reset that shelf life timer (which it won't, for the most part).Remember, a company's idea of support is going to be based primarily on economics first, and then on the company's desiresOh, and it isn't always about budget. It is also about time and the manpower involved. Most RPG companies, (WotC being the MAJOR exception here) are small, having only a few people on staff. The time and effort spent on "upgrading" products has to be taken into account. "Let's see, we can either get this new book finished and watch it sell very well, or upgrade this old book that hasn't sold at all in the past 2 years and hope that it sells a few copies." Guess which one he will pick? The one he is sure will sell well, or the one that might sell a few copies?You do realize that companies do NOT want those priated copies out there? Saying that they should "give it away for free" because some sleazebag is doing it illegally is not a good response. All that is going to do it to tick said companies off.Who is going to pay for the person who does the work? Who is going to cover his other duties while he is doing this? Those are the ways in which a company is hurt by doing this. It takes time and manpower to accomplish, which pulls somebody away from something else (which quite likely will make a profit).Right, and if the product handed over was not 100% OGC, then the company has to have somebody go through and make sure that they did not include PI in what they put online. Time and manpower quite likely better spent elsewhere.Sorry, but wrong. The PrC would still have to be reprinted even if there was an SRD with the material in it. It is an extrememly bad practice to require customers to look elsewhere (other books, online, etc..) for material that is used in a product. Given the fact that the vast majority of gamers are not actually online, this means that the product will end up nearly worthless.Sorry, but again wrong. As mentioned above, the vast majority of gamers are not online in any meaningful way. This means that they couldn't care less if there is some master SRD out there or not. It is quite likely that 4e will not be released under the OGL at all. There is a possibility that it may be released under a more restrictive license. In fact, by beefing up the SRD, it could have the effect of pushing WotC into releasing 4e sooner than planned.Remember the OGC Repository that Mearls suggested several weeks ago? Remember the reaction that publishers had towards it? A beefed up SRD will not increase the lifespan of 3.5, if anything, it will kill it as more publishers move away from it and/or use much more restrictive declarations.Sorry, but I think that this one is wrong as well. As Phil learned the hard way, releasing an SRD (for smaller publishers at least) kills sales, not generates them. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Sorry, I don't see it this way either. Part of the idea behind the OGL was to make other publishers buy your books in order to re-use your OGC, at least that seems to be the mind set of many publishers, and of the purpose of the design of the OGL (which does not require publishers to create a SRD of OGC - unlike the GPL which requires developers to freely distribute the source code of products using GPL code).Again, I want to point out that Phil Reed tried to make an SRD out of one of his products and it killed all sales for that product. You do that on a larger scale, and it will kill sales on a larger scale. This in turn would reduce the chances of 4e being OGL as killing sales is not something a company really wants.</blockquote>

Verification