[DRM] - Put your money where your mouth is!

[philreed]

Reposted from elsewhere:

Since I enjoyed a recent sales windfall on my one lonely product over at RPGNow I went out and spent that store credit along with some extra cash on the following:

Whispering Vault Collection 1
Whispering Vault Collection 2 ($5 each!, great bargain)

Thank you! And thank you to everyone else who has bought Ronin Arts PDFs during this last week . . . it's made my new start very encouraging.

So you know, I'll be taking those Vault PDFs off of sale tomorrow. Anyone who wanted to grab them cheap should probably do so quickly.

 

[romp]

Picked up a Traveller's Aide book and Whispering Vault collection #1 from RPGNow.com because of two reasons:

a) I am a Linux user and cannot view DRM'd .pdf's without cracking them first or going through a big hassle and setting up the unreliable WINE emulator, formatting a partition for Win applications, then d'l Acrobat 6 and install, cross my fingers and hope SUSE, WINE,& Acrobat work together, then register myself with Adobe, cross my fingers again and hope that any downloaded DRM'd .pdf works with this jury-rigged combo because my web access would be through mozilla/kde internet, then .... ahhhh; Forget it, I would just d'l a P2P client and d'l something cracked before I went to all that trouble or install a workaround ...

b) today is the last day of Vault downloads...


It hardly makes any sense for a company to eliminate any part of a potential market just because their computers use an OS that another company (Adobe) has chosen not to support. Montecook.com's latest release says that Linux people should look into an emulator in order to read the e-books. Especially when all they need to do is just simply use a non-DRM version of Acrobat to get that market back.

 

[Staffan]

Bought HARP and TOGC's Complete Spell Cards today. Looks fine, though I didn't get a full printout of HARP since the printer at school ran out of toner. I'll finish that tomorrow, I think. Didn't print out the spell cards either, but if I'm gonna do the DMing thing tomorrow I'll print out the relevant bits.

 

[nopantsyet]

I don't support panning the companies altogether. Several on RPGNet have claimed they will do so (but then they do that when a designer is curt on a message board ). Here is my response to that idea.

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I am boycotting - I'm boycotting DriveThruRPG.com. I won't be buying any of their products. Analogy time.

Lets say that McDonalds gets an exclusive distribution deal for Coke fountain soda - just for the sake of arguement. Now you don't have a problem with Coke, but you believe that Ronald McDonald eats babies. You want to send a clear message to McDonalds that they need to lose this cannibalistic clown.

So you don't go to McDonalds. Does that mean you should not buy cans and 2-liters of coke at the grocery store, because you don't like how one place that sells their product does business? Not only is that not communicating to McDonalds, its punishing Coke for no reason.

I agree with your reasoning. And more importantly, I really don't want the designers and publishers to suffer and rish going out of business because of this. I just want the PDF market to get back on track.

 

[Funksaw]

I don't support panning the companies altogether. Several on RPGNet have claimed they will do so (but then they do that when a designer is curt on a message board ). Here is my response to that idea.

-----------------------------------
I am boycotting - I'm boycotting DriveThruRPG.com. I won't be buying any of their products. Analogy time.

Lets say that McDonalds gets an exclusive distribution deal for Coke fountain soda - just for the sake of arguement. Now you don't have a problem with Coke, but you believe that Ronald McDonald eats babies. You want to send a clear message to McDonalds that they need to lose this cannibalistic clown.

So you don't go to McDonalds. Does that mean you should not buy cans and 2-liters of coke at the grocery store, because you don't like how one place that sells their product does business? Not only is that not communicating to McDonalds, its punishing Coke for no reason.

It's a little bit stupid, considering that:

A) McDonalds doesn't own Coke
B) Boycotting Coke actually *might* send a message to Coke that they aught not do business with McDonalds, which harms McDonalds anyway.

A more apt analogy is:

McDonalds comes out with the McCancer, a brand of cigarettes with a free toy inside. You think this is a horrible marketing move, and you want them to change their mind about this business decision. So do you stop buying McCancer? Well, yes, obviously. But you wouldn't have bought it anyway - the company doesn't lose money if you just stop buying the new product. Instead, you boycott McDonalds in it's entirety, and any other company doing business through the McCancer line, like Jack-In-The-Box-And-Williamson, Phillip-Wendys, and others. You hope - but are not guaranteed - that the boycott will affect sales enough so that they are losing more money from lost boycott sales than from gained McCancer sales.

Put another way, just boycotting DriveThruRPG isn't a boycott. It'll do nothing because pretty much all of the distributors have already made a profit from DriveThru - distribution and creation costs are near-zero. Even if ONE person buys DRM, that's still enough for them to make their profit. And some people are dumb enough to buy the DRM product. (Some people buy EZ-Ds and DivX, after all.)

What the companies are saying is that DriveThruRPG isn't for some people because of the DRM, and they're perfectly fine with throwing away *potential* sales and revenue. What the companies then, invariably say, is that if you don't like DriveThru, buy the print product.

We don't have a problem with just DriveThru's *products.* Because of the nature of DRM and the fact that we're trying to hold it off for as long as we can, we want to make businesses know that using DRM is unacceptable. We need to send a message that your products not only won't sell, but using DRM will hurt the sales of your OTHER products. We want to send a message that what you are doing is so low it has alienated your customers. The only way to do that is to buck up, and NOT buy the print stuff. Becuase boycotting JUST drive-thru will *never* show a loss of sales - and they'll keep making money. Boycotting the print products *might*

It's extremely frustrating for me. The main products I had planned to purchase in the near future were the new WoD line (which I'll now skip,) continued support for the Exalted line, continued support for the Angel/Buffy line, continued support for the Tri-Stat line (I was actually in the process of buying printed Tri-Stat books for my friends and converting GURPS games over to Tri-Stat - a process I'll now stop) and so on.

Tell the truth, I only picked up Mutants and Masterminds because I'm not likely to play Aberrant or Silver Age Sentinels (gaming is advertising). I *do* prefer the other two games because they're simpler and more robust than M&M - plus M&M's based on d20, an although it gets rid of most of the problems I have with d20, it doesn't get rid of all of them (especially the high failure rates... are these superheroes or office temps?)

I don't think it can be emphasized enough how much I wanted to buy the games Eden, GOO, and WW were putting out. But I think that what they did is more lowdown than a mean ol' egg sucking dog, and withholding my money from their print products is the only way that I can let them know that.