DriveThruRPG.com to release 3.5 edition Dungeons & Dragons titles in eBook format

[JustaPlayer]

Well... except if it costs WotC any substantial amount of money just to have their PDFs hosted there. I think that might be so. Therefore, there's still a possibility - as far as I'm aware - that they could lose money this way.

Does it cost to host them there, or does DT just take a cut of each PDF sold?

 

[sckeener]

Somehow I figure that WotC wouldn't do this if the trial run they did wasn't sucessful enough to support this strategy.

Unless someone else has any numbers to back it up, I'm taking this move as an indication that the initial trial release of WotC D&D books through Drivethru was successful. Even with DRM and the price level.

Otherwise I fail to see why WotC would do it again without changing the parameters.

Who is to say they won't have a sale in a month or two (probably 6 months)? Right now it is new and no reason to change the price unless people are not buying. I bet we'll see the price drop in 10% increments until they hit the sweet spot of good return on pdfs without affecting their hard copy sales.

 

[JustaPlayer]

Who is to say they won't have a sale in a month or two (probably 6 months)? Right now it is new and no reason to change the price unless people are not buying. I bet we'll see the price drop in 10% increments until they hit the sweet spot of good return on pdfs without affecting their hard copy sales.

I don't know. The original 7 are still at full price.

 

[Voadam]

With DRM I won't even consider picking them up.

 

[Voadam]

It's too bad, I buy pdfs every month and I would like to buy these if they were not DRM and were at a more competitive price point.

Oh well, plenty for my pdf buying dollar to keep me going on stuff I do want for years at my monthly rpg budget.

 

[jaerdaph]

I encourage all traditional print publishers moving into the PDF market to take a look at Green Ronin's PDF pricing vs. that of Green Ronin's print product pricing as a guideline.

 

[jaerdaph]

DRM is also a guaranteed NO SALE for me.

 

[DonTadow]

Eh, DRM isn't bad if you have a full copy of adobe acrobat. I'm glad they are moving in the right direction. I do hate that they havn't realized that people aren't going to buy something in soft cover when they could buy it in hard cover for the same price. My idea would be the green ronin system with a twist. Perhaps provide some kind of proof of purchase of the hardcover book and you get a discount off the electronic book. That would be a way of detering file sharing, far more effective than DRM and sill ysecurity measures. Even gaming companies are moving away from trying to "lock up" material opting to instead listen to what their customers want.

 

[JustaPlayer]

There's no question in my eyes that they will make sales. At least one of their previoously released DRM products at full price was in the top 20 on DT for a while. If they were user friendly with a good price point even at less margin they would blow the PDF market away. Until then, Monte will pretty much reign as king when his releases come out.

 

[Nellisir]

The price is less offputting to me than DRM. I'd consider buying a pdf version of the Spell Compendium at full (print) price just for the cut-n-paste ability, but not with DRM. So, no sale.