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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Henry" data-source="post: 1533803" data-attributes="member: 158">First of all, I want to remind EVERYONE who responds to this thread to please be civil, and be mindful of no discussion of politics or religion.---------------That said, there are two beliefs on this issue. One belief is that it does not affect much or at all the RPG industry, and only helps when rare or out-of-print games are made available to the public who wants them. Another is that it is very harmful to an industry that already works on a shoestring budget, and has no beneficial effects at all.My personal opinion is that the people whom it hurts most are the small-press publisher, and followed closely by the RPG industry as a whole. Here's why:The small-press people see sales (maximum) of 5000 copies over the lifetime of one product, in rare circumstances going higher than that. PDF publishers will see an average of 100 to 500 sales TOTAL of a product, only slightly more if it's absurdly popular. Whether or not illegal file downloaders would or would not have purchased a copy is irrelevant; if the legal channel is the ONLY venue for it, then they won't have the copy anyway, and the owners will have a sharply accurate picture of the true sales figures and popularity of their products. If it wouldn't matter that downloaders wouldn't pay for it anyway, then it won't matter either if they are denied the product they are after. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The other problem is WotC's (the industry leaders) skewed sales projections concerning the copied products reflects poorly on their sales figures in Hasbro's eyes; conceptually speaking, if EVERY person who HAD an illegal copy of a given WotC book had at least one LEGAL copy of that book, sales figures would likely be drastically higher, and the producers of the #1 leading RPG would see the RPG line as much more popular than it is currently. In other words, if people actually PAID in a scale reflective of the work's popularity, sales figures would be higher than they really are.This is not to say I believe electronic copies are inherently a bad thing; personally, I believe if I own at least one copy of a book, I should have access to an electronic version of same. Some vendors offer that at a premium, some do not, but I think it would be more helpful to gamers as a whole if it were offered as such. This is my take on it, and goodness knows many other posters here have had different takes on the subject. But realistically looking at the issue, PDF sharing can't help a small publisher who decides whether he eats Ramen Noodles or chicken based on the sales of his 5 most recent books - while the file sharer who's eating his chicken is cozied up to the latest pirated online copies.</blockquote>

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