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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 4758220" data-attributes="member: 58197">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.</blockquote>

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