DracoSuave
First Post
The irony is that D&D -is- going the microtransaction route.
It's called 'Essentials.'
I heard that should be coming out soon.
It's called 'Essentials.'
I heard that should be coming out soon.
Hasbro makes money, everyone wins
- Thread starter Solvarn
- Start date
SteveC
Doing the best imitation of myself
Well that's a different discussion for a different day. Let's just say that I'm not too impressed by the limited content there, but books are a different medium entirely, and I'd much prefer the old standards there. I'm going to leave that discussion for another day and another thread. You make a good point, though.
--Steve
renau1g
First Post
It can't be proven to be lost revenue. If Pirate Jerk A goes to Torrent site X and grabs the CB someone at WotC may say "oh man we lost revenue" and add that to help their business case. Now, you have to dig deeper (and it's likely impossible) into whether Pirate Jerk A would actually have purchased the tool if it wasn't available for free. If he would, then yes it's lost revenue, if he wouldn't, then no it's not lost revenue. Same for the PDF's of their books. I'm sure a bunch of people who grab them from pirate sites are those who want digital offerings of the books they've purchased for utility reasons. I know of a few who want PDF and would pay for them, even owning the books, but have to resort to torrents...
I'm not saying that the there isn't lost revenue going on, but it's far more difficult to quantify and could be extremely small. Who knows? We'll see when the CB goes online only and if in 6 months (once all those who quit over the online only + all the new subs who previously grabbed it for free come onboard) the subscribers have gone up then they have a win, if not, well then they just may have wasted 6 months development resources.
DracoSuave
First Post
Wrong.
It takes one person who says 'I'd rather download than buy the book' to prove the case of lost revenue. This is the elephant in the room, is the existance of this one guy. For all the talk of 'benefits of piracy', this one guy is the guy you have to acknowledge, cause he's the guy who is the center of the argument, and that pro-piracy advocates choose to completely gloss over.
This person does exist. He probably exists in your gaming group. He's probably the guy extremely vocal that Character Builder is going online because he can no longer download updates for it from thepiratebay.org. He's probably the guy on this forum who advocates buying one month of insider, then downloading everything, and then cancelling the subscription for a few months. He's probably the guy who advocates downloading PDFs for 'evaluation purposes' and is sitting on one of the leak copies of the PHB, running games of fourth edition, but strangely has decided the book is not worth his purchase.
This guy probably even posts in this thread. You probably even have a few ideas who this guy is.
One does not need to quantify it to prove it exists.
Actually: If the revenue from it goes up (not number of subscribers), while the costs go down (including costs to update, bandwidth and the cost of maintaining the copyrights from downloaded copies), then it is a win. If the subscriptions go down, but you have to pay less money to keep it going, you still may make more profit from it, and therefore win.
Number of subscribers mean nothing when 'subscribe one month, then quit' is one of the problems the new model is meant to curtail.
Ryujin
Legend
Then the simple solution would have been to discontinue anything but annual subscriptions, going forward. A month's notice, then done. There would have been an outcry, but it might not have been as big. I'd have continued my annual subscription without hesitation, for example. It's the cost of one and a half hardcover 4e books, so a no brainer for me.
As to the proof of piracy thing, I'm going to get a little pointy-headed about it by stating that "evidence" and "proof" are not the same thing.
As to the proof of piracy thing, I'm going to get a little pointy-headed about it by stating that "evidence" and "proof" are not the same thing.
DracoSuave
First Post
Proving there is piracy is easy. Go to torrent site. Find it. Get torrent. Run bittorrent client. Count seeds. Count leeches. Prove established.
And again, as for proof of lost revenue, it only needs to be proven there's a guy out there who doesn't pay for the books. I know that guy. But that isn't proof to you, just to me. However grabbing that proof is simple: Find that guy.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
It proves nothing until you demonstrate that said person would have bought the books in question if there was no other option, otherwise it is meaningless.
There are all sorts of factors involved when you are dealing with content theft. You have to consider whether or not the 'lost sale' was actually lost first of all. This involves 2 factors. First would they have bought the product if they couldn't steal it? Second how many other products that they might never have bought did or will they now buy because they are now exposed to your product?
Beyond that the money equation has a number of other considerations. First of all you don't lose the purchase price of the product, only a small amount of that would go to the content producer anyway, so the 'loss' is always (generally grossly) smaller.
Then you have to factor in the positive benefits of the theft for any meaningful economic analysis to be done. We already touched on the fact that the thief may later buy other products (IE may be converted into a loyal customer). Secondly you have to consider that said individual may well expose many others to the game or certain game materials, so there is an advertising value to the piracy activity itself. Heck, plenty of people may well simply download a pirated PDF from simple curiosity as a free way to learn about the game.
Personally I know that all of these processes DO take place in reality. I've seen it. Beyond that EVERY study that has been done on the costs and effects of piracy in every medium where it is currently prevalent has shown the net effect is revenue positive. There are still a number of reasons to desire to cut down on it from the producer's standpoint but the main effect of anti-piracy measures in general is just to encourage people to go ahead and buy the thing they might otherwise steal since it reminds them of their obligations and in some cases may intimidate them somewhat. It also puts the most egregious pirates out of business sometimes.
No marketing department succeeds for any length of time based on calculations of cost/benefit so simplistic that they just consider every pirated copy of their work a dead loss. Industries may well PRETEND that is what they do for public consumption but in reality most of them are far more sophisticated than that. It makes good PR, but the execs aren't stupid, they know the score.
I think the calculation that is going on nowadays in people's heads in the corporate marketing world of content producers is more like asking themselves how they can get the same BENEFITS as piracy but without the downsides (certainly some lost sales realistically, but also just a general lack of control over this 'marketing' effort). Free entry with premium content sales to follow seems to be a strategy with an excellent probability of working for them in general. It lets people have a free or very low cost "taste" of the product and provides a VERY easy and instantly gratifying conversion route to full paying customer. There's not much point in pirating something you can have basically for free or nearly so.
The challenge then becomes getting people onto the content platform to start with. Network effects are a good way with existing print customers, but possibly coupons combined with old fashioned advertising is probably one of the best ways they have. Ironically again the pirates could easily be helpful in this regard. If every pirated PDF has a big fat full color add for DDI in it who knows? Those ads sure wouldn't INCREASE piracy, but they might be effective and obviously don't cost a thing beyond getting them out there to start with.
Scribble
First Post
You really think there wouldn't have been as big an outcry if WoTC forced you to buy a year at a time?
There are plenty of people that still will only buy short term subscriptions, who couldn't care less about it being online.
This announcement at least comes with some good (Mac users can now use it among other things.) Killing all but the year subscription is just a sucky announcement.
In fact I'm betting that once the new CB comes out, people start using it, and they iron out a few bugs (exports and possibly increase the number of savable characters) the outcry will mostly die off.
Especially if they make another announcement soon. The arguments and complaints will shift focus, and horrors of an online CB will be largely forgotten.
Dungeoneer
First Post
Econ 101
My point is two-fold.
The first point, and I think this is the one that this thread misses, is that WotC simply has more than one kind of customer. This micro-transaction idea is a one-size-fits-all approach, and WotC's current approach is, IMHO, also one-size-fits-all. But one size does NOT fit all, and therefore they are leaving money on the table.
When you go to Starbucks, the cheapest cup of coffee you can buy isn't even on the menu. They have a size 'small', but they don't advertise it. However they keep it around because they know that there are lots of those cheap customers out there who will just order a small black coffee and then load it up with sugar, b/c that's all they're willing to spend.
But there are also customers who will come in and order the Giant Double Chocolate Triple Whipped Grande Mochaccino, or whatever. Price doesn't matter as much for these customers, and Starbucks definitely wants their money too!
That's why you sell both high-end and low-end products. Make sure that you get both kinds of customers. So do I think EVERYONE would want a full-color limited edition D&D art book? No. Do some people want it? Yes. And Wizards should sell it to them.
But in the meantime, they need to not overlook the customers who are buying an extra small black coffee and that's IT.
Point #2 is simply that microtransactions won't work, because it doesn't solve the basic problem: piracy is cheap and easy. You can dress this up all you want, but the fact is that rules are really easy to duplicate and really hard to protect.
OK, I may have emphasized the gee-gaws more than I intended to in my post. I don't disagree that flooding the market with 'collectible items' is a sure-fire way to have a warehouse full of crap that nobody wants. But that wasn't really my point.
My point is two-fold.
The first point, and I think this is the one that this thread misses, is that WotC simply has more than one kind of customer. This micro-transaction idea is a one-size-fits-all approach, and WotC's current approach is, IMHO, also one-size-fits-all. But one size does NOT fit all, and therefore they are leaving money on the table.
When you go to Starbucks, the cheapest cup of coffee you can buy isn't even on the menu. They have a size 'small', but they don't advertise it. However they keep it around because they know that there are lots of those cheap customers out there who will just order a small black coffee and then load it up with sugar, b/c that's all they're willing to spend.
But there are also customers who will come in and order the Giant Double Chocolate Triple Whipped Grande Mochaccino, or whatever. Price doesn't matter as much for these customers, and Starbucks definitely wants their money too!
That's why you sell both high-end and low-end products. Make sure that you get both kinds of customers. So do I think EVERYONE would want a full-color limited edition D&D art book? No. Do some people want it? Yes. And Wizards should sell it to them.
But in the meantime, they need to not overlook the customers who are buying an extra small black coffee and that's IT.
Point #2 is simply that microtransactions won't work, because it doesn't solve the basic problem: piracy is cheap and easy. You can dress this up all you want, but the fact is that rules are really easy to duplicate and really hard to protect.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Eh, I think the free-to-play, premium-content-is-extra AKA 'microtransaction' model would work fine. Most piracy seems to be a result of presentation. People pirate a book or an album because acquiring the physical thing requires a certain amount of effort. The prime example of how this works is iTunes. It is hugely successful even though EVERY product it sells with practically no exceptions is available free online somewhere if you want to find a torrent. It is simply easier and more convenient to pay a trivial fee to Apple to get it from the most convenient source.
Beyond that though DDI has other advantages that it shares somewhat with MMOs like DDO that have gone this route, which is the content is really only usable in the context of their larger 'product ecosystem'. Sure, you COULD print off pages of Compendium and make your own PDF. That is going to be vastly less convenient than just paying for DDI or buying a book. With 'premium' DDI content it largely isn't all that useful outside of the DDI platform. Sure, again, someone could easily capture a copy of the new special wonder spell that costs $.99 but nobody that gets that copy in their hands can go into CB and put it on their character sheet because they'd then have to pay for it, or at best hack it in as a custom element if that is allowed.
So, really it isn't the 'microtransaction' aspect that is all that significant except as an enabler that lowers the instant perceived cost low enough to make it worth it to people to just click on the button and get the thing instantly and cheap vs free but harder to find. The real key is the way all the different parts of the content IN THE PLATFORM work together to make the user's experience of the game better. There will be some percentage of the community that is outside of the DDI system and no doubt will have different incentives that might include pirated content. As we debated a bit above though even if those people don't pay for a THING they can still be an asset because they expand the overall network effect of D&D as a whole, etc. This becomes even more true in a world where the significant revenue stream is DDI. No other alternative will really compete with it on the same merits, so it stops being a matter of your product competing against a pirated version of itself. It is almost like with MMOs where piracy is a non-issue.
Beyond that though DDI has other advantages that it shares somewhat with MMOs like DDO that have gone this route, which is the content is really only usable in the context of their larger 'product ecosystem'. Sure, you COULD print off pages of Compendium and make your own PDF. That is going to be vastly less convenient than just paying for DDI or buying a book. With 'premium' DDI content it largely isn't all that useful outside of the DDI platform. Sure, again, someone could easily capture a copy of the new special wonder spell that costs $.99 but nobody that gets that copy in their hands can go into CB and put it on their character sheet because they'd then have to pay for it, or at best hack it in as a custom element if that is allowed.
So, really it isn't the 'microtransaction' aspect that is all that significant except as an enabler that lowers the instant perceived cost low enough to make it worth it to people to just click on the button and get the thing instantly and cheap vs free but harder to find. The real key is the way all the different parts of the content IN THE PLATFORM work together to make the user's experience of the game better. There will be some percentage of the community that is outside of the DDI system and no doubt will have different incentives that might include pirated content. As we debated a bit above though even if those people don't pay for a THING they can still be an asset because they expand the overall network effect of D&D as a whole, etc. This becomes even more true in a world where the significant revenue stream is DDI. No other alternative will really compete with it on the same merits, so it stops being a matter of your product competing against a pirated version of itself. It is almost like with MMOs where piracy is a non-issue.
