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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5376857" data-attributes="member: 82106">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.</blockquote>

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