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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Funksaw" data-source="post: 1599610" data-attributes="member: 20181">It's a little bit stupid, considering that:A) McDonalds doesn't own CokeB) 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.</blockquote>

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