Exclusive interview WotC President Greg Leeds

[El Mahdi]

Back to the threads subject...

I'd consider the gaming hobby to be a very entrenched and well supported hobby. A hobby with enough ideas, concepts, and material floating around to at least be self sustaining, without an industry, for the next century, and perhaps in perpetuity.

With that in mind, since the industry itself is not completely necessary, although very beneficial, it's role is technically only one of supporting the hobby.

So, when did WotC's mindset change from one of developing a strategic vision to support the hobby, to one where the hobby needs to conform to WotC's strategic vision?

The latter may be what Mr. Leeds wants, but the reality of the hobby is the former.

He can wish all he wants that the hobby will bend and conform to the wishes of WotC. I think that's a foolish expectation.

 

[Jack Campbell]

Even after the opening salvo that was the demise of ETools, to be followed by outside licenses (Dragonlance, Ravenloft, etc.), then the killing of two of my favorite print periodicals, digital initiatives and broken promises, the mechanical abandonment of a game that I still recognized after thirty years, and then pulling the rug out from under my miniatures skirmish game, I still want to be respectful of Mr. Leeds and sympathize with the efforts at WoTC.

But this whole .pdf thing has just wore the track in the carpet clean through for me. It is finally all too much for me to reconcile. It is like patronizing the same gas station for years on end and, one day you go in and the nozzles no longer fit your tank. When you ask the attendant he says, "Sorry buddy. Sucks to be you."

So for the first time in 28 years, I am taking a serious and hard look at other game systems that I can integrate with what I already have whether that be Pathfinder, Castles & Crusades, or OSRIC.

I want to be excited again. I want to feel like someone is in my corner and cares about my interests as a customer.

Reading Mr. Leeds answers to our genuine concerns reminds me of listening to a refrigerator hum. I do wish it were otherwise.

 

[ki11erDM]

Instead of all this worthless bickering and complaining how about you guys put your brain power together and come up with away to satisfy WoTCs (and every other content provider in the world) one issue with .pdf distribution. Create a form of DRM that is easy and logical for the end user and reasonably secure for the content provider. And do all that without pissing off retail stores who distribute the tree based products.

WotC wants to provide digital versions of their books. (some of) You want to buy them. Work to find a solution and make 100’s of millions of dollars along the way. Or you can just sit on message boards and complain about how reality works. *shrug*

 

[Krensky]

Instead of all this worthless bickering and complaining how about you guys put your brain power together and come up with away to satisfy WoTCs (and every other content provider in the world) one issue with .pdf distribution. Create a form of DRM that is easy and logical for the end user and reasonably secure for the content provider. And do all that without pissing off retail stores who distribute the tree based products.

They had it. DRM does not work. It never has. It has always been trivial to overcome for those who wanted to, and always been annoying, aggravating, and damaging to the consumer. There is nothing to suggest that this trend will change in the future. I would further suggest that no DRM system will ever be secure enough to stop or even meaningfully slow piracy. The watermarking system allows consumers to do what they want and expect with a file, and allows producers to find out who to sue or cut off if it is illegally shared. Ebooks are a non-issue for retail. retail stores piss and moan over it, but what's killing them are their typical lack of professionalism, poor buisness practices, and online retailers, not pdfs. If Wizards wanted to drive more dead tree sales to game stores, they should stop selling to Amazon or insist that Amazon sell at MSRP. Either that or get into the idiotic model of consignment used by most publishing houses and book stores.

The most successful (afaik) ebook publisher doesn't use DRM at all and has repeatedly said that doing so is a waste of time, money, and hurts your business by showing that you view your customers as potential criminals and spending money on DRM that could be spent getting new content or reprinting back catalog. You can find this company's ebooks on torrent sites and the like, but the torrents tend to be rather sickly because the market for their books considers the prices and freedom the publisher provides good value, so rather then hunting for a torrent or ftp site or whatever they go to the company's store, fork over $6 and download the novel in their choice of formats for whatever reading device they may have.

Piracy primarily happens for two reasons: Economics and idealism. You solve the economics issue by giving the public what they want. Cheap ebooks with little or no DRM that can be accessed in multiple ways. PDF more or less fulfills these requirements (other then price), if only via ubiquity. You can't solve the idealism issue. Some superannuated adolescent will always find some way to pirate material because of his beliefs that "information wants to be free" (which is not what Brand said) and because it makes him feel like he's sticking t to the man or gets him props in his dysfunctional community.

Most pirates fall into the first group. They're downloading pirated material because the cost is too high, the DRM is to restrictive, or some other form of artificial scarcity pushes the legal product out of the market. Most content providers or creators respond by villifying the consumer and demanding legal remedies.

There is actually a second type of person who is an "idealistic" pirate. This is the issue that the RIAA and MPAA and the people they represent have run afoul of at this point. Due to abuse of the market and consumer, people have reclassified them from "creative people who deserve our money" into "crooks". Once an industry or entity moves from the former to the later, you find all sorts of people who no longer consider it wrong to pirate their work.

Wizards is on the edge of this cliff. Hopefully they won't fall in.

 

[Dumnbunny]

Instead of all this worthless bickering and complaining how about you guys put your brain power together and come up with away to satisfy WoTCs (and every other content provider in the world) one issue with .pdf distribution. Create a form of DRM that is easy and logical for the end user and reasonably secure for the content provider. And do all that without pissing off retail stores who distribute the tree based products.

WotC wants to provide digital versions of their books. (some of) You want to buy them. Work to find a solution and make 100’s of millions of dollars along the way. Or you can just sit on message boards and complain about how reality works. *shrug*

Well, large companies and industry groups have been trying for the last decade or so to come up with the DRM you describe, and have failed. The odds of a bunch of people on a message board actually figuring this out seems remote, to say the least.

Worse than that, large companies and industry groups have been trying to come up with some sort of copy protection scheme for nearly 30 years if not longer, and they have for the most part failed. More and more IP-based companies and individuals are accepting what seems to be the awful truth, that there is no DRM or other copy-protection scheme that will protect their IP without pissing off their legitimate customers. Hell, many if not most DRM schemes fail to protect their IP and piss off legitimate customers.

 

[Mirloc]

Here's the thing. He says out of every 10 copies downloaded, 9 were pirated. I'd like to know where he got his number or are these simply fun numbers pulled straight from his nether regions?

The video games industry, which is made up of some of the most technologically savvy people out there can't figure out what the damages to their industry is from piracy, and he wants us to believe they managed to do the impossible? Track every single instance of one of their product being downloaded from every server in the world? I somehow just can't get drink enough of the Kool-aide to believe in the accuracy of those numbers.

To that end there's even those in virtually all industries that are saying piracy is responsible for increases in sales, not only of new product but sales of older product that simply does not get any press time any more. When was the last time you saw an advert for the 2E books? Yet they were (up until the ban) still sold in PDF form.

As for the "cost" of producing an electronic rather than paper book, that anyone could even use that as a real cost is laughable. As you finish the layout of your book, you finalize what it looks like in the editor of your choice and press "print to PDF" and there's the PDF of the book. Available for sale and distribution now, as opposed to the print book which needs to be sent to the publishers, who create the run, package the books and ship them to retail stores. And if you think there's no costs involved in this process you need to really reconsider the real world.

Electonic distribution of media is the way to go, but the IP holder needs to enable the purchaser the right to print a copy on their own for those who prefer a real paper book rather than electronic media.

I realize that WoTC, like any other company producing product like this needs to wrap their heads around a new way of doing busniess is all.

 

[Dausuul]

Here's the thing. He says out of every 10 copies downloaded, 9 were pirated. I'd like to know where he got his number or are these simply fun numbers pulled straight from his nether regions?

The video games industry, which is made up of some of the most technologically savvy people out there can't figure out what the damages to their industry is from piracy, and he wants us to believe they managed to do the impossible? Track every single instance of one of their product being downloaded from every server in the world? I somehow just can't get drink enough of the Kool-aide to believe in the accuracy of those numbers.

No, the number is quite legit. The problem is, it's not a very meaningful number.

Showing that there are (at least) 10 times as many pirated downloads as legit sales is very easy, since there are pirate sites and networks that let you find out how many downloads there have been of a given file. WotC employees have stated that this is how they got their figures. The ratio might be higher than 10 to 1, in fact it is probably vastly higher, but we can be confident it is not lower.

Problem is, that ratio, while it sounds scary, doesn't actually mean anything. Wizards seems to think it implies something about profits and losses, when in fact it does nothing of the kind. To know the actual impact to WotC's bottom line, you have to determine the percentage of those downloads that represent lost sales, versus the percentage that would never have bought the thing in the first place.

And then you have to figure out how much effect cutting off legit .PDF sales will have on piracy, since pirates are perfectly capable of making their own scans and a single scan can supply the entire Internet.

And then you have to figure out, of the downloads that do represent lost sales, how many are lost sales of physical books as opposed to the .PDFs that Wizards is no longer selling anyway?

And then you have to factor in the sales gained as a result of the "free advertising" provided by pirated .PDFs... and so on.

I strongly suspect that whoever is calling the shots at Wizards is waving off these issues as statistical noise. Of course most of the people who downloaded the .PDFs would have bought the book if the download hadn't been available - of course piracy will drop off significantly if we stop providing the .PDFs ready-made - of course it has a substantial impact on sales of physical books - of course the "free advertising" effect is negligible.

The last company that made D&D made strategic decisions on an "of course" basis* rather than market research... Tactical Studies something. Whatever happened to them, anyway?

*I'm not suggesting that this one single decision will deliver Wizards to the fate of its predecessor, but it's not a good sign.

 

[El Mahdi]

No, the number is quite legit. The problem is, it's not a very meaningful number. ...

Not to mention that they also can't tell how many of those were failed downloads and re-downloads, multiple downloads due to losing the file on one's computer (hey, losing a file on ones computer does occasionally happen ), or inadvertent multiple downloads of the same title under different file names.

A company running under the assumption that 1 illegal download = 1 lost sale is self deluded at best (besides, y'all know the saying about assumptions).

 

[ki11erDM]

They had it. DRM does not work. It never has.

It is nice to see you have such a limited view on what is possable.

 

[Krensky]

It is nice to see you have such a limited view on what is possable.

I'm confused... is that supposed to be an argument, an insult, or a thought terminating cliche?