Exclusive interview WotC President Greg Leeds

[Jasperak]

I utterly agree. If you're not going to believe what someone says, then why ask them the question in the first place?

What is the point of journalism then?

 

[mxyzplk]

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.

I guess I'm a little disturbed that the president of WotC doesn't have a vision for D&D ready to go... Why do I suspect that if you asked the same question about Magic you'd have been treated to a pre-vetted paragraph about "cyber-synergy enabling us to dominate the market space" or something? "Huh, good question, let me think about that. We try not to have too much of a vision for D&D, it restricts our ability to make random kneejerk decisions."

 

[JohnRTroy]

What is the point of journalism then?

Journalism is asking tough questions.

Journalism is NOT just being cynical and derisive--save maybe for the opinion column.

Journalism is meant to get to the "objective truth" as much as possible. That includes stuff that might conflict with your own preconceived notions and ideas. It is conducting research and finding out the facts.

Granted, this was kind of a softball interview, and I think people are jaded thanks to PR firms, but I highly doubt they are lying about such things as the piracy ratio.

It doesn't matter - someone will (out of spite, desire to beat the technical challenge, whatever) figure out a way to download and save the files. Look at how quickly youtube grabbers morph when youtube changes their code to prevent downloading videos...

Yes, but my point was I believe WoTC will be changing the game to something different from our experiences. What if, for instance, the handbooks disappear, and become cards--your characters and monsters are a combination of cards, and the rules just tell you how to play--and add things like a specialized battlemat. "Fluff" content is regulated to on-line only, or maybe on-line dynamic databases for network play. Based on what I've seen from the 4e ruleset, it's about halfway there--monsters and characters are more "statblock" than ever.

This would be the most effective way to eliminate piracy. While somebody could scan and torrent the cards, people would have to really have the cards and the on-line database to maximize their effectiveness.

I see this as the possible future of D&D. It would be a lot more inconvenient to pirate such a game. While possible, it's probably not worth the effort for most.

The only flaw is their lack of getting the DDI up and running to maximum efficiency. But if they pull it off, I think the days of the hardcover rulebooks will end, at least perhaps when 5e comes around.

 

[mxyzplk]

What is the point of journalism then?

I'm confused, did he say something substantive enough to disbelieve? Is this about the 1:10, as it's the only thing approaching a fact in the interview? I can certainly believe that they did some kind of measurement which they interpret to be 1:10 on the PHB2. I also think they used that as an excuse to pull all the older game DLs as they consider it not in their best interest for anyone to be playing ANYTHING except their most-latest release.

 

[Mark]

If you're not going to believe what someone says, then why ask them the question in the first place?

Well, to be fair, I think you ask someone a question to see what they say and then decide if you believe them based on what they say and the evident facts. Certainly, you can hope that someone will give you an honest answer but sometimes an answer is honest and sometimes it is not and sometimes it is no answer at all. For my own part, the interview is irrelevant. As a PDF-providing ePublisher, I expect that the decision will have an impact on my sales. As a customer, the loss of PDF availability will reduce my purchasing. I did not need the interview to know either of those things.

 

[La Bete]

Thanks to Morrus, Piratecat and any other ENW staff for organising this.

Thanks to Greg Leeds and WotC for participating. Though I will admit I would have preferred a 'meatier' Q&A session, but as the Stones song goes...

And of course my thanks to ENWorlders for their high level of politeness and civility, which should ensure that this sort of interview is not just a one-off.

---

Couple of interesting points which I took from it:

1) Wasn't really expecting WotC to walk away from pdf completely! Someone was speculating (on the mega-pdf thread) that this function would move to a DDi online-only app, and it looks like they were right.

2) Nice to hear they are planning to release older products via the same method - which makes sense. If they've got you tied into a DDi sub, I suspect they don't really care which edition you play. I wonder if this means we would see the previously unavailable older ed. stuff.

3) Despite their comments about having novels on the e-reader, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for rulebooks moving to this platform.

 

[evilref]

Because of the degree of edition wars and the ever-increasing amount of rhetorical fallacies found on Enworld I've been reading these forums less and less.

This thread, and the levels of disingenous and fallacious arguments has pretty much put paid to me bothering with the site anymore.

I do think it's a poor business decision to pull the pdfs. I also know that the company would have done so for reasons it considered to be in its best interest. I don't agree with them, but it's their company, they've got every right to make bad business decisions.

The bile, venom, insults and arguments that would fail a prep school debate class that this forum has devolved to are such a long, long way from the principles and standard of discussion found here back when the site first began to grow and develop.

 

[Kask]

Pretty obvious from his reply.

1: They don't want to sell older product (as evidenced that they don't sell it) they are willing to lose that rev stream as they feel it is eroding the 4.0 sales.

That's it in a nutshell as they aren't going to replace the rev stream, it isn't about lost sales of older material due to piracy.

 

[Wormwood]

oh never mind

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Um, should we bother having PR firms and White House press secretaries then? Or never question politicians again, please.

You parse through the lies and read between the lines, and hold their feet to the fire when they are finally caught.

I respect Mr. Leeds for addressing these issues with his responses to the two interviews, but that doesn't change that fact that he is the CEO and his primary duty is not to tell the truth, but to parse his language in a way that does not hurt the shareholders he works for or bring undue damage to the brand. His addressing this issue directly tells me that this is one of the most important issues that they face right now. In the best of worlds the head of WOTC has to be a CEO first and gamer second. Others like Paizo, Green Ronin, Necromancer Games, or Goodman Games may be gamers first, CEOs second, but you never see that from a Hasbro Subsidiary.

Do you have an independent source of information that contradicts your position? Or is it all just guesstimating or what you feel should be right? Do you merely have an anecdote to tell us?

Do we have actual sales number? Do we have a peer reviewed study on piracy or sales? Do we have technical details on the processes used to track sales, download numbers or piracy? Do we have contradicting data to anything of what WotC says?

It's okay to disbelieve something if you have evidence to the contrary, or at least demand further elaboration. But we don't have this kind of information, or if we have, no one ever presented it.

Either we accept the information source we have and discuss it based on that data, or we ignore it and make it clear that we are speculating. A lot of speculation sounds good on paper or electronic bulletin boards if you don't have any data to check it against. You can formulate a lot of hypothesises, but unless you can check them against data or make predictions based on them, they are just an entertaining past-time and hold no further weight.

And what's the alternative?
"We retracted all PDF sales, because we don't want anyone to download any AD&D or D&D 3.x material and instead buy our 4E products. And we also decided to no longer offer any 4E material to cover it up. We rather lose money by not offering PDFs then have anyone in the world not playing 4E.
Piracy is of no concern to us, that's why we just filed a court case against a few uploaders. We don't really know how the download figures are, that's why we give you a made-up number*.
4E is doing terribly bad, that's why we are still investing in new supplements and already showing off material for the next years releases."


Did anyone of you participate in the latest marketing surveys (one was DDI, the latest - a few days ago - was regarding DMG). Either survey definitely focused on looking on expanding what they already got (especially DMG) an what they should target next (especially DDI). There was nothing of the kind "What we did before sucked, you say, so please tell us what we should do instead?" No, they ask what to do next or where to expand upon.

Their surveys are definitely targeting on strengthening what they have, not figuring out what they did wrong in the past or why we no longer buy their products.

Of course we could theorize and claim that just shows that they have no clue about how to fix the supposed mess they are in, but Occams Razor suggests that the simplest solution of several possible ones is the preferable one - and the simplest solution is:
D&D 4 is doing well. WotC wants to know how to build on what 4E does and continue attracting gamers by giving them what they want out of it.

And the same applied to this interview:
Piracy was one of the two major issues (but not the only!) why they stopped the PDFs, even if they are aware that this won't stop it all together, they feel it will help them in the future. They don't have yet a clear plan what to do next, except that they are apparently no longer seeing PDFs as the way to distribute digital rulebooks and look at a "safer" route (which will probably means it is not as convenient as PDF, too, unless they surprise me.)
They are also still considering how to release older, pre 4E content (so they don't fear themselves as competition and are quite willing to make money out of people that don't play the 4th Edition of D&D).

Oh, and regarding the "leader" position: It seems they see themselves still as very important for the purposes of "The Hobby". Depending on your view, that might be hybris, a sad truth of market power, wishful thinking, a nice ideal or the truth, but that's how Leeds presented it.