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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cody C. Lewis" data-source="post: 7685437" data-attributes="member: 6802841">Please pay attention Wizards, as the solution is right under your nose.Problem: How does a publisher provide digital content to it's end users without the risk of piracy eating away at the profitability?Solution: A DRM'd application. Simple. Powerful. Do NOT print out a pdf with bookmarks and leave yourself vulnerable to a quick watermark removal and upload to a file sharing website. Instead you have complete control over the product. People make the assumption that all piracy is born from someone being too cheap to pay for material; or worse they assume that all piracy directly leads to a lost customer, and lost revenue. This is not true. It may be some of one or both of those, but in my experience piracy is borne from necessity. The desire to have a product in the format you want it in, is what has lead to piracy more than people would have you believe. Let's look at what was mentioned above by [MENTION=63245]Evenglare[/MENTION]. He is absolutely correct that DRM will always be defeated. He is also correct that all of the 5e products are available right now on certain websites. Seriously, right now you can have everything WotC has produced for 5e including maps, D&D Next adventures, a compiled Unearthed Arcana, and even the D&D Expeditions stuff in one simple torrent. Think about that. Now let's approach this logically.1.) WotC wants to protect their IP and has not released any capabilities to obtain their 5e books digitally (with the exclusion of Fantasy Grounds), in order to protect themselves from piracy.2.) Online Piracy has EVERYTHING WotC has produced for 5e, D&D Next, subcontract cartographers, online articles, and free releases made exclusively for brick and mortar stores, available, right now, thus rendering WotC's reason to not supply digital product moot.3.) So we can safely assume that if people want to buy the books, they have done so. We can also assume that people who want to pirate the material, have done so. Finally we can see that the only group left are in fact, the people who want to pay money to WotC for digital product, but have no way to do so.I have a print copy of every single release WotC has made for 5e (and I am checking everyday for the Out of the Abyss DM Screen to hit Amazon). It looks beautiful on my shelves. If I could have bought the products on my tablet/android app, I would have bought both. Wizards could learn from WoW. They are not f2p. They still get subs. But instead of JUST giving people the ability to sub, they have created a way for those who would spend more money than just the $15/month they are going to, to do so. They can spend the $15/month AND buy a character transfer or a level boost or a whatever whatever (IDK as I actually never played WoW past the trial periods). Do you want to know the one thing I have NOT been able to see online anywhere for 5e material though?The damn Dragon+ magazines. And it is the ONLY thing I haven't seen. So make an app Wizards. Not a PDF. Move to a sub service like Windows is planning to do to beat piracy. Or set it up like the DC Comics / Marvel / Amazon Kindle / Nook / Comixology apps. All you have to say is: "if for any reason we have to close the servers for the app, we will make previously purchased material available to our users in a downloadable pdf format". And please, hire a different company than the one who vastly over-complicated the Dragon+ app. I still cannot get the app to not crash on my Note 4 and can only read it on my tablet.</blockquote>

Verification