Mark CMG said:
I'll be blunt. I'd have no current reservations being a part of this if it were not for the rate increase.
Indeed. You're in a prisoner's dilemma.
If enough publishers decided not to accept the new arrangements and cancelled their agreements with OBS, then OBS would be strongly pressured to negotiate terms more favorable to the publishers -- otherwise they would wind up with less profit together than they had separately.
However, each publisher makes their decision in isolation; they can't be sure what other publishers will do. If OBS holds fast and only a few publishers peel off, then those publishers who leave are left with nothing where they used to have the majority of their sales. Moreover, we know that many publishers have already signed exclusives, which further hurts the viability of any future competitor who won't be able to stock those exclusive lines; and many major publishers in the print arena just don't think PDFs are big enough a deal to pay very close attention to the petty details -- they just look at the dollar figure on the checks they cash.
If a publisher decides to swallow their pride and say "thank you sir, please may I have another" when given a deep cut to their wages (in effect), they'll take a hit to their income, but that's better in the short term than no sales at all. In the long run, you can darn sure expect that they will get another cut, sooner or later -- if not from today's bosses, then tomorrow's. Publishers who have trouble saying "no thank you" today will have an even harder time tomorrow. If you can't say no and walk away from a deal, you're not negotiating, you're begging for charity.
I decline to sell products through the new OBS for the same reason I had declined DTRPG -- I think the terms are lousy, and they signal the market that publishers are open to having more taken from them. No one should be surprised that RPGNow heard that signal loud and clear.
