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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 1535438" data-attributes="member: 1465">Well, after having read all the comments in this thread, I believe that file-sharing must have had only a very limited impact on the RPG industry  <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=":)" /> . Perhaps it is because the typical RPG product is not fully subject to piracy - as mentioned by many, a scanned PDF is not nearly a match for the real book - or perhaps because us or the typical RPG consumers percieve our market differently compared to how music/movie consumers percieve their own... At least me and all of my players want our books to stay, we are proud of our small collections of RPG books on the shelf even if we don't use all of them, while maybe music and movies are considered more wastable (how many times you watch the same DVD?). Of all the RPG gamers I know personally, only one used to download lots and lots of stuff, going crazy to get them all but never using any at the end (he is the one who even plays least often); I don't think that nowadays he is still doing that, rumours are that he got a nervous breakdown when WotC released the D&D Miniatures line and he could not find them anywhere on peer-to-peer to download <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/paranoid.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":uhoh:" title="Paranoid    :uhoh:" data-shortname=":uhoh:" /> .However I have to say that I am not a voracious purchaser. I am lucky because some of my friends are, and I always get to borrow the latest RPG books from them, which I read but then buy only if I want to keep them. It's not illegal but somehow it might have decreased the sales  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> , if it wasn't for my friends I would have probably bought more books, only to later find that I didn't like them.But the same thing happens to me with music. I am again very lucky to live in a country where music is considered culture, and culture is considered to be freely available, therefore every library has thousands of CDs to borrow. The point being that no one needs to make copies of them, because when you want to listen to something you just go to the library and take it.Anyway, definitely internet file sharing has had a much larger impact on the music/movie/software industry. It is always a controversial subject, and sometimes I think that even governments don't really want to address it. For example, I believe that in Italy the most popular reason for a PC owner to get a fast internet access such as ADSL or with optic fibers is exactly the possibility to download music, movies and games for free. I have no idea how much effect it has on the music industry for example (still in the past 15 years the price of a CD here has risen from about 9$ to 21$), but I do have an idea how much benefit it had on the internet services industry, since many of my friends ended up working in that field. At the end I wonder if the overall result on the general economy is that bad or even good, it would be very interesting to know...</blockquote>

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