File-Sharing: Has it affected the RPG industry?

[Mac Callum]

Just as a data point, I don't go to game stores much. I've downloaded books, "thumbed through them", so to speak, and the ones I liked, I bought. The ones I didn't, I tossed. No different from looking through books at the FLGS, IMO.

So, how has file sharing affected RPG sales? From my seat, several books were sold that otherwise would not have been. I read reviews here at EN World, but I wasn't going to buy the books on that alone. I don't need more books on my shelf that I never use because they weren't what I thought they would be.

I also have a scanned copy of all the books I own. Legal? Probably not under the DMCA, but that law is about as contrary to established Fair Use as you can get. I carry my laptop around with me at school - I like being able to look up stuff in my PHB or DMG when I left the dead tree versions on the shelf. Besides, its certainly perfectly legal for me to scan the book in myself for my own use. How does downloading make a perfectly legal activity illegal?

Whatever, I could go on (my Copyright Law professor wrote the DMCA), but I won't.

Books are very different from music. The "experience" of music has more to do with your sound system than whether its being played off of a CD or Mp3. Most people's speakers aren't good enough to hear the difference.

Books aren't like that. The "experience" of a book can only really be recreated by paper, ink and a good binding. For music and movies file sharing may be a net loss, but for books it can only be good marketing. See here. Poster's wife's book was out of print, but selling used at Amazon for $99. She put posted online for free PDF. Price at Amazon went up to $105. If you follow the link there are more links to similar experiences.

Of course, PDF-only publishers who aren't offering anything better than what's available for free will be hurt more than people with both PDF & print versions. The "paid for" experience is no better than the "free" one. Only RPG'ers civic virtue (which I'm sure there's plenty of) will keep them in business.

Based on my observations, of course.

 

[diaglo]

i've known people to do it.

i think an issue comes up when the harddrive crashes or you get audited or when your favorite game goes kaploie. and you are left splain' to desi why you don't know.

i prefer not to use computers too much.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

See here. Poster's wife's book was out of print, but selling used at Amazon for $99. She put posted online for free PDF. Price at Amazon went up to $105. If you follow the link there are more links to similar experiences.

Instapundit is a pretty well known guy. He gets a @#$% of a lot of traffic. The book in question had a lot of free publicitity just because he links to her stuff. So I can see how it can help sales as long as you have a lot of advertisement to go with it (as a link from instapundit tends to generate).

I lurk on a certain nutty warez site. Some of the posters there are quite open about having no interest in purchasing anything. I'm not sure that giving away product for free will do much of anything in that market.

RPG products are sold at such very low volumes that I'm sometimes surprised the hobby makes money at all. Ten purchases make or break the viability of a PDF. Most d20 companies consider themselves fortunate to sell 5,000 copies of a given paper title.

I'm not really sure your example can carry over to the RPG industry. The Instawife has a large group of people that she can contact with free advertsing and the RPG industry has lots of small publishers scrape together money for one or two products before they colapse.

 

[Crothian]

http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=87750

That is one publisher look into this. Are there any filesharing messageboards? Maybe a poll on a place like that might help. I have no idea if it helps hurt, or does nothing.

 

[Pramas]

This is one of those things (like determining the effectiveness of advertising) that's just very hard to quantify. We can't really know how many sales we may or may not have lost. Publishers don't know how many pirated e-copies of their books are floating around. Now I did have one guy e-mail our customer service account specifically to taunt us ("Got your game for free, screw you!") but that's a thankfully rare occurrence.

 

[Zappo]

I'd like to throw this into the pot:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/03/30/kazaa_and_co_not_cause/

It seems that there is some evidence that file sharing isn't as harmful as record companies depict it.

Now, how does this relate to RPG products? I don't think that file sharing has a big impact on sales of paper products. The problem is different for PDF items, though. In this case, the product you get through Kazaa or whatever is exactly the same as what you would have purchased. It's not a low-quality scan of something that you could be holding in your hands instead; it's the exact same thing. It certainly doesn't push people towards purchasing the product after having seen it.

Another article I read (unfortunately, it was many months ago, and I can't find the link) noticed that sales in music did decrease from 2002 to 2003, but the number of new records had decreased by even more. This lends weight to the hypotesis that the companies are bringing the real damage on themselves by constantly recycling the same old stuff and the same known styles and singers.

However, this doesn't apply to RPG products at all. The d20 segment itself is too small and too recent to make good statistics, but new stuff is coming out at a very good pace.

Overall, I think that file sharing may be harming the PDF industry, but not the press industry really.

 

[Torm]

I will admit to having downloaded RPG books, but this doesn't represent lost sales for those companies - I wouldn't have bought them, anyway, because I'm raising two kids on a single somewhat meager income. ("I can buy a new RPG book if I reduce the grocery budget by $20 for two weeks" isn't cool.) Usually these are books that some of the other (single or better paid) members of my group already have, so having the PDF is a matter of convenience in not having to go borrow it from them, which is what I'd be doing otherwise.

Unlike the music industry, when I am able I WILL go buy copies of anything I use and don't own - I don't feel like the RPG companies have "declared war" on me like the music industry has. I've found I prefer to deal with people for whom having people enjoy their work is the primary concern, or at least they're willing to lie and say that's the case.

 

[Janx]

Zappo's on the right track. There's contradictory info from the RIAA and other independent studies on whether piracy is hurting the music industry or actually helping it.

Certainly, piracy isn't nice, in that it's basic concept is I took your stuff with out paying for it. But that whole system has so many complexities to it that a blanket statement that piracy is hurting the music industry may not be accurate.

Out of all the pirates of product A:
Z% eventually buy the real product (honest samplers)
Y% only wanted a small piece of the product (wouldn't have paid for it)
X% refuses to pay for product (jerks)

Z is obviously not a problem. Y is a market you'll never be able to reach, because they could live without it. These are the folks who only wanted one song, or just wanted to see the product before they bought it, then decided they didn't like it. X are the guys who usually build all the pirating infrastructure in the first place. They're the guys you should not like, and be working to stop. Z & Y aren't a threat, and when you kill X, they'll come through normal channels. The question is, if you could prevent piracy perfectly (the non-copyable book), would the pirates buy your product? What percentage of them? Is the sales from those pirates higher than the cost of the "uncopyable" product.

The fact is, piracy happens. It costs money to stop it. Pirates put a lot of energy into breaking protection schemes and they always break them. If the cost of fighting piracy is higher than accepting the "lost" sales. That's the hard part, is since the sale doesn't happen (ie the customers don't tell you they are NOT buying your book), you can't estimate it easily.

Most real stores accept shrinkage (that's the industry term for shoplifting/loss of product). They obviously take practical steps to prevent/reduce it, but the accounting department knows it happens, and it is budgetted. And this is loss of actual product. Meaning they paid for it, and it vanished. The fact that there are businesses that take a real loss have learned to accept it and move on suggests that piracy targets also need to expect it and move on.

It may be tricky for some people to see the difference between theft and piracy. Theft means you paid money for something, and somebody else took it and you have nothing. Piracy still has somebody "taking" it, but you are left with exactly what you had before the pirate did his work. The instant before and the instant after are identical. Now the victim of piracy doesn't feel that way, obviously, they are owed payment for the product that the pirate wouldn't have gotten, if not for their work. But because the pirate has no relationship to you, if he pirates or just never buys, you'll never know. And that's the difference that matters.

Janx

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

I've seen a lot of downloads and I can honestly say that it serves as a way to preview stuff. The stuff that's good, I've bought. The stuff thats bad I haven't. And there's A LOT of bad product out there; stuff that should never have been published and would have died a quick death on the store shelves. Personally, I'm grateful for filesharing b/c it's allowed me to avoid purchasing a lot of crap that I'd regret.

The key to not losing out to filesharing is QUALITY!!! Make it good and people will want the book. Make it bad and they won't (or they'll settle for scans). I bought the Draconomicon b/c it's excellent and I wanted the art. I'd already seen in on filesharing sites but I HAD to have the book b/c it was so good.

The same holds true for music. Artists who invest some creativity and effort into making their physical CD more attractive likely have higher sales.

 

[Djeta Thernadier]

I tend to think that most gamers who can afford it, are more likely to want to own hard copies of books when possible. And most of us want to support the companies who put out the books / pdfs we like. I know I'm the same way with music. If I like an artist, I'll buy their cd. File sharing has not stopped that, at least not for me. I think what music file sharing has done is cut down on the number of people buying cds for one single, or buying single tracks. CDs they wouldn't buy anyway. I think RPG books are the same way. If you want it, and like it, you'll buy it. I also wonder if people who download a PDF , maybe preview it and then buy the real copy. I know a lot of people do that with music, though it isn't widely reported. Statistics can be spun anyway the person putting them out wants to put them so while I'm not saying the numbers are necessarily false, you have to look at who is putting them out there.

I think it's still early to tell if file sharing has hurt the RPG world. PDFs are so cheap anyway, I really can't see anyone who really wants the PDF not putting forth the $4 or whatever it is. Maybe I'm just clueless.