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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steve Conan Trustrum" data-source="post: 3147066" data-attributes="member: 1620">You may want to note that "what ENWorld did" wasn't especially noteworthy so far as the overall market was concerned. If you talk to most publishers they didn't make nearly as much from ENWorld as they did on either RPGNow or Drivethru. ENWorld may have become third on the market but they were WAY behind the leading two when it came to product sales and throughput. Most publishers who spoke up on the matter noted that ENWorld's storefront had no impact on their sales on the primary two sites. The biggest reason as to why this is is the same reason why e23 and Paizo will find it difficult to compete on OBS' level: the top companies are so entrenched in their market shares that penetrating them is an expensive uphill battle that has everything working against the new guy.I believe many publishers will agree with me when I say that ENWorld's most useful and influential interaction with the PDF market following the opening of its own storefront remained what it had been prior to that storefront's opening: offering a consolidated location for publishers to access their customer base and not as a place to buy or sell PDFs. Which is why Misfit Studios never forked out the sign-up fee to join them--the stories I'd heard about insignificant sales and logistical problems were too frequent and from too many respected companies for us to risk coming on board and not doing so didn't see a drop in our sales at all.I think the thing you continue to not understand is that people aren't using the word "competition" to say "yeah, there's someone else out there selling PDFs as well, no matter how ineffective or small their market share." The term is being used to illustrate that there's noone left out there operating at the level of OBS to make them worry or push themselves in many regards. Yes, monopolies very much DO have a lot to do with the level of competition remaining in the market because the remaining alternatives are not viable substitutes.What you're saying is that because some guy operating out of his basement has written his own OS and is selling it off his web site that he's offering Microsoft competition in the OS market. What everyone else is saying is that because this guy's ability to affect the market is so minimal that he isn't actually competing with Microsoft at all.e23, Paizo, etc. are indeed competitors in the sense that yes, they exist in the same market. Are they competitors in the sense that the amount of PDF business they do results in sales even remotely comparable to those that went through the systems of OBS' parent companies? Absolutely not. Not even close. They're essentially second thoughts that were so insignificant in the larger scale of things that most of the market didn't even take the time to utilize them. This may change now (MAY, mind, as it's not a given), but such a state of actual competition does not currently exist. So far as the PDF rpg market is effectively and practically concerned, OBS' parent companies were the people to be doing business with, full stop period, if you wanted to be in the PDF market. Everything else was just a bit of extra icing on RPGNow's and Drivethru's cake.</blockquote>

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