Exclusive interview WotC President Greg Leeds

[fanboy2000]

Thoughts

WotC is already distributing the content of thier 4e rulebooks without .pdfs via the Compendium. This is one reason I never bought a 4e pdf, I didn't need it. I have offline access via my hardcopies.

WotC is also selling novels in non-pdf form on the Kindel and Sony Reader.

Mr. Leeds made it sound like the 10:1 illegal to legal pdf was new for them.

People in this thread state that ratio is standard in the video game industry.

People in other threads have said that WotC is trying to make D&D like a video game to appeal to younger people.

There may be a connection there.

 

[scruffygrognard]

PDFs are not the only viable form of digital distribution, although they certainly dominate in the RPG field right now. It's been a while since I checked it out, but Marvel Comics has (or had?) an online subscription service where you could access hundreds of their titles (old and new) online for like $10/month. They weren't PDFs you could download, but rather you read them in a viewer on site. Nothing to download, nothing to pirate! I'd love to see WotC do something like this!

I'd hate this!!!!

You wind up having no access to the documents once the subscription ends and, most likely, couldn't print the materials you were "renting" while subscribing.

Then again I don't like MMO subscriptions or the DDI service either.

 

[RangerWickett]

I use Steam (from Valve, makers of Half-Life 2 and Portal), and you can't run their games unless you log in to their servers, but once you're logged in, you can do a heck of a lot.

Maybe WotC will just come out with a similar service/program. You log in to their site and can access a wonderfully-intuitive to navigate electronic database of all the books you own, with the ability to purchase access to additional books for a small microtransaction fee (say, $1 for a book you own, $3 for a book you don't). Then you can get access to any WotC book from any computer, and have added functionality of being able to, say, search for all paragon level fey lurkers.

Which I think is kinda like what they have now for the D&D Insider. All you'd need to do is add a component to let you view pre-4e content.

 

[El Mahdi]

Yup. I was hoping we'd have an explanation for why this happened, what they expected to gain from it, and how it got implemented. That didn't really happen.

Thanks for trying though!

 

[Piratecat]

One other thing. I asked Greg Leeds about his vision for D&D. He liked the question enough that he wanted to take some time on it. I'm hoping to hear back from him in the next week or so. With luck, it'll give us a roadmap of where he sees the game and the hobby industry going.

 

[RangerWickett]

I'd hate this!!!!

You wind up having no access to the documents once the subscription ends and, most likely, couldn't print the materials you were "renting" while subscribing.

Then again I don't like MMO subscriptions or the DDI service either.

Yeah, having the ability to possess items, rather than 'check them out from the library' as it were, will I suspect lead to an eventual solution where publishers just sell stuff digitally at a cheap rate, and higher for the hard copy. Basically the same way music is going now. Trying to implement DRM just won't satisfy customers.

Ultimately, I think you have to accept that pirating will happen, like jaywalking or speeding. You should design to mitigate the chances of people wanting to break the law.

 

[Fedifensor]

I don't see why people are saying he's evasive - the question on everyone's mind was answered directly.

We do not have any plans to resume the sale of PDFs, but are actively exploring other options for the digital distribution of our content – including older editions. We understand that digital content is important to our customers.

It doesn't get much more clear than that. He didn't say, "no watermarked PDFs", or "no PDFs unless they have DRM". He flat out stated that you will not be able to purchase a PDF of a WotC book.

Which means, if you want a legal electronic copy of a book, the only way to get one for now is to scan the hardcopy yourself...and most people don't have the time or patience to do that. Not to mention that the only way to get a good quality version involves destroying the hardcopy in the process.

In the future, maybe they'll have some propitiatory format. Will you have to be online to use it? Can it be displayed on something besides a full-fledged computer (iPhone, eBook reader, etc)? We don't know...but it's not far enough along for him to pass anything along to us. As he stated, they are still "exploring other options".


As to whether this new policy will make a difference, the test case is less than two weeks away from being released. If you don't see significant pirating of Arcane Power within a week or two of its release, and sales of the physical book meet or beat expectations, Mr. Leeds will be proven right. If the book sells less than expected, or legible copies hit the pirate sites within a few days of release, then the new policy will have had a negative effect for WotC.

 

[Obryn]

I'm willing to bet that that actual number of illegal downloads has stood for quite a while, and cessation of legal PDFs is not likely to change it - what it will change is the fact that people were getting it within hours as opposed to months. Common sense says, if it can be viewed or heard, it can be copied.

I think it's also critical to note that there's a difference between the two kinds of pirated PDFs.

WotC PDFs are gorgeous, high-quality, extensively bookmarked, errata'd, efficiently compressed, and allow both search and copy-paste.

Most quick pirate PDFs are scanned images, and many aren't even OCR'ed. They are of lower quality, usually not bookmarked, have larger file sizes, and are seldom updated unless there's a really determined pirate out there somewhere.

Seriously, there's just no comparison.

I think you could make an argument - not necessarily a great one - that a WotC PDF comes close to being a replacement for the hardcopy, whereas your usual pirated PDF falls far short.

You could also make an argument that the development time used to make the bookmarked PDF isn't worth the sales money coming in for it. Or, more extensively, that it is outweighed by the exposure to potential lost sales.

I still think this was a dumb move by WotC, and I'm no happier after the interview. But the more I think about it, the more I think they have at least a few points. I don't think they believe they'll stop piracy. I do think they believe they can make sure what's available to pirates is substantively worse than the official books.

-O

 

[Festivus]

[SIZE=+0]double post, see below.[/SIZE]

 

[GMSkarka]

It still makes no sense:

First: "We can track it" -- If piracy was that easy to track, there wouldn't be any piracy. You can estimate, but you're probably wrong.

But just going with sample "X" figures -- if your sales looked like this:

100X = printed sales
10X = pirated PDFs
1X = legitimate PDF sales.

Getting rid of the 1X in legit sales doesn't do a damn thing but lose you the money from those sales. A large segment of the 10X pirates were never going to be customers in the first place -- they just grabbed it because they could. In addition, even without the legit PDFs to use as source, you're still going to have 10X pirated -- they'll come from book scans, production files (y'know, like the CORE BOOKS were?), etc.

So all they're doing is irritating customers, and leaving the legit PDF money on the table.

The trends on this kind of thing and the failures of past responses are well-documented. There's an entire array of study and dissection of ePublishing, digital commerce and piracy, yet it seems like nobody is bothering to educate themselves on it before making decisions.