Hasbro makes money, everyone wins

[Ryujin]

I wouldn't characterize it as positive, or at least not unequivocally positive. That would be a stretch that I'm not willing to make.

 

[Scribble]

Heh, yeah. It is really irrelevant to an economic calculation if people who will NEVER be customers download a copy of your stuff. In fact it can't really be seen as anything but positive from a business perspective, at least you got eyeballs on your product, which is a pretty significant goal in marketing. Ideally you probably would rather those with no interest at all don't copy your stuff, but you never know, they might show it to someone or their kid might look at it, etc. At that point it is pretty much just a marketing material floating around on the net.

And frankly anyone that tries to go around saying they have ANY idea what the cost of piracy really is has zero credibility with anyone that knows a bit about the subject. The "we lost $82 billion because so many people copied our stuff" nonsense is what makes the RIAA a laughing stock. Obviously they don't believe those numbers either, but pushing that kind of mush headed logic on the rest of the world is a PR stunt at best and loses you all credibility at worst.

The problem I have with this line of thinking is that it's basically the same as the opposite in "provability."

You can't prove someone wouldn't have bought the thing just as much as you can prove they would have...

The only facts you actually have are that there are copies out there, that you received no money for.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Heh, yeah. It is really irrelevant to an economic calculation if people who will NEVER be customers download a copy of your stuff. In fact it can't really be seen as anything but positive from a business perspective, at least you got eyeballs on your product, which is a pretty significant goal in marketing. Ideally you probably would rather those with no interest at all don't copy your stuff, but you never know, they might show it to someone or their kid might look at it, etc. At that point it is pretty much just a marketing material floating around on the net.

So basically what you're trying to do here, Abdul, is try and justify why piracy is a good thing, rather than a deplorable one. "It's more people getting their eyeballs on the product!" "They wouldn't have bought it anyway!" And other ridiculous platitudes.

You can try and think of all the positives that come with piracy you want... but the simple fact of the matter is... every single company would rather sell their product to just 10 of those 1000 pirates if they could eliminate piracy altogether... than get the "free marketing" from all 1000 but piracy still exists. You know why? Because those 1000 people who pirated the material aren't going to buy the additional material either!

Yes, we will never completely eliminate piracy, that much is true. But we sure as hell can hold up our middle fingers to all of them and tell them that we're going to make damn sure it's as difficult, or time-consuming, or inconvenient as possible.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So basically what you're trying to do here, Abdul, is try and justify why piracy is a good thing, rather than a deplorable one. "It's more people getting their eyeballs on the product!" "They wouldn't have bought it anyway!" And other ridiculous platitudes.

You can try and think of all the positives that come with piracy you want... but the simple fact of the matter is... every single company would rather sell their product to just 10 of those 1000 pirates if they could eliminate piracy altogether... than get the "free marketing" from all 1000 but piracy still exists. You know why? Because those 1000 people who pirated the material aren't going to buy the additional material either!

Yes, we will never completely eliminate piracy, that much is true. But we sure as hell can hold up our middle fingers to all of them and tell them that we're going to make damn sure it's as difficult, or time-consuming, or inconvenient as possible.

I'll just refer back to my original post with the Bill Gates comment on that, obviously there is a subset of businesses that actually WOULD rather have the 1000 pirates out there. MS may be a class of one in that regard, we don't really know, but chances are they're not. As I said before too there are reasons why marketing people would often RATHER have more control of the process in their own hands. I don't think very many companies are actively aiming to be extensively pirated, but that doesn't mean at least some of them don't recognize the potential benefits.

And I am in no way justifying piracy. To be clear I haven't ever condoned it, practiced it, or encouraged it. From the perspective of the consumer freeloaders are generally not much of a direct benefit. Certainly someone that is an actual player of the game and should be paying their fair share and isn't? I'll bust their chops just like the next guy. Someone that D/Led a copy of a book just to look at and has no intention of playing the game or buying anything? Honestly they just aren't my concern.

[MENTION=23977]Scribble[/MENTION] - obviously this is some guys on a forum talking. Nothing is provable one way or the other. I never claimed I was proving anything. More like pointing out the lack of any sufficient logic in someone else's claimed 'proof'. I did that partly by counter argument which really didn't require anything more than incrementally better logic than the argument being refuted.

I mean really, nobody here can say what the cost/benefit ratio to Hasbro really is. I'd be quite surprised if THEY could do that, it would require knowledge that seems unlikely to be obtainable, like a pretty decent statistical sample of all the downloaders to be polled at the very least. I'm thinking that isn't a terribly feasible project. They might be able to get an idea over time if they can get some good data on customer acquisition, but that would most likely be no more than establishing a correlation, not a causal relationship.

 

[darkwing]

I'm not sure how much income D&D as a whole brings in. I'm reading the most recent quarterly report. Here's what Hasbro corporate thinks of gaming:

"Revenues in the games and puzzles category for the quarter increased as a result of higher sales of MAGIC: THE GATHERING and SCRABBLE products." They also mention Monopoly a few times. Dungeons & Dragons isn't even mentioned once in the entire report.

 

[Scribble]

obviously this is some guys on a forum talking. Nothing is provable one way or the other. I never claimed I was proving anything. More like pointing out the lack of any sufficient logic in someone else's claimed 'proof'. I did that partly by counter argument which really didn't require anything more than incrementally better logic than the argument being refuted.

I mean really, nobody here can say what the cost/benefit ratio to Hasbro really is. I'd be quite surprised if THEY could do that, it would require knowledge that seems unlikely to be obtainable, like a pretty decent statistical sample of all the downloaders to be polled at the very least. I'm thinking that isn't a terribly feasible project. They might be able to get an idea over time if they can get some good data on customer acquisition, but that would most likely be no more than establishing a correlation, not a causal relationship.

But this is missing the point. It's not about proving whether they would have purchased it or not, or using any kind of statistics. The fact is that they made a transaction when they downloaded a copy of the digital file.

The only group legally able to authorize that transaction should have gotten money for it but they did not, so it counts as a lost sale.

What the downloader would have done under different circumstances is irrelevant. It's what they DID that matters, and they DID download that copy without paying for it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But this is missing the point. It's not about proving whether they would have purchased it or not, or using any kind of statistics. The fact is that they made a transaction when they downloaded a copy of the digital file.

The only group legally able to authorize that transaction should have gotten money for it but they did not, so it counts as a lost sale.

What the downloader would have done under different circumstances is irrelevant. It's what they DID that matters, and they DID download that copy without paying for it.

And again, you simply cannot call something that has no impact one way or another on a sale a "lost sale", that's just the same voodoo mumbo-jumbo by which the RIAA and the BSA claim kajillions of $ in lost revenue to piracy from, and in every case the numbers are utterly meaningless and known to be utterly meaningless by all involved. This discussion has been recapitulated 1000's of times on the Internet and in the halls of government the world over. Nobody buys it. At best it is meaningless posturing on the part of industries that are looking for the government to bail out their broken business models and justify suing poor people. REALISTIC and USEFUL numbers need to answer the question "how much did this activity affect our revenues and business prospects?" which is a question nobody has really figured out a very good way to answer.

We can go in circles on this all day long, but it isn't going to add anything new to the discussion. I'd suggest doing some research on the topic, it can be quite interesting.

 

[Ryujin]

Remember, groups like RIAA tend to go after people who distribute, rather than people who simply possess. IF there are lost sales, then this group is responsible for them.

 

[Scribble]

And again, you simply cannot call something that has no impact one way or another on a sale a "lost sale", that's just the same voodoo mumbo-jumbo by which the RIAA and the BSA claim kajillions of $ in lost revenue to piracy from, and in every case the numbers are utterly meaningless and known to be utterly meaningless by all involved.

It's not "voodoo mumbo jumbo" in any way shape or form.

The observable fact is, for each copy of a digital product produced the owning company should have legally received payment. They did not receive that payment for said copy, yet the copy was still taken.

You can say it doesn't hurt because they might not have done it in the first place had they been "forced" in some way to pay for the transaction, and therefore the laws should change or something... But they DID make the transaction- they simply chose not pay for it, so as it stands- it's a lost sale.

 

[Solvarn]

Bad analysis

I understand the sensitivities on both sides of the software piracy issue. It is really a non-sequitur from a business standpoint. Many of the "statistics" showing an alarming rise in the incidence of software piracy are released by companies or organizations financially vested in there being an increasing incidence of software piracy. It's something that as an innovator and a creator that concerns you; you want to be rewarded for your hardwork and talent, and that is understandable. Like so many other things in life, you do what you can reasonably do about it, and not sweat the rest.

From a business standpoint it is business problem, how do you get this customer to purchase your product? Part of that solution is almost certainly making it more difficult to obtain it for free, but fixating on this issue because of its dubious nature and difficulty in attaining accurate measurables is silly and prevents you from seeing the larger opportunities that are there.

Part of the process of delighting your customers would be to offer something that people taking the data for free don't get; value in the box, as it were. Tokens, cards, colorful bits, etc, that make the product fun to open. Reduce the cost of the product so that stealing it becomes less attractive as an option. At what point does it makes sense to download a torrent of the PDF? For $13.00 you can pre-order it. A lot of this they're already doing. I know with Gleemax that they had a pretty ambitious plan, I don't know what they are going to do moving forward. I know personally that I will probably be just using character sheets and books for now. I don't know if that plan is off the table or not. I think it sounded pretty cool, but lots of ideas sound pretty cool until you analyze them to see if they are viable.

I can tell you how I feel about their recent changes. I like Essentials. I'll buy the books I want because they are a good value. I'm on the fence about DDI. I'll try their product for free to see if I like it, if they offer trials, but unless I get the opportunity to try it for free I might not ever get exposure to it. With the new pricepoint of the Essential line, the value of the Insider to me drops off significantly. I would definitely have paid for the cavalier and hexblade classes to be added to my character builder account though, with the caveat that I can access it anytime in the future at no cost to me.