How Has the WotC PDF Situation Affected You REALLY?

[ppaladin123]

It affects me in that there are now a half dozen hyperbolic threads on enworld.org predicting (and occasionally hoping for) the imminent demise of WotC. The nerd rage is strong. It is crowding out everything else.

I'm really looking forward to a time when we can just get back to discussing D&D again.

 

[FireLance]

Not very much. They may take our pdfs, but they'll never take our imagination!

 

[Felon]

Uggh. A poll with way too many choices, most so specific that many people won't choose any of them. Instead of trying to nail down every conceivable point of view, the choices should be simple and broad.

Anyway, I didn't know about the PDF issue until this very thread. Seems like a lousy move that accomplishes nothing positive. There will still be illegal PDF's, they'll just go from outnumbering legal PDF's to being the only PDF's. Lameness.

 

[Asmor]

It hasn't affected me at all.

I buy the dead tree books and pirate the PDFs, and nothing they've done is changes that.

My outrage is from a purely philosophical standpoint.

 

[Pramas]

I had a lot of good laughs this week. WotC's PR department fumbles more than a virgin trying to unhook his first bra.

 

[sjmiller]

I will be honest, right now the WotC decision has little effect on me. That is because I am currently unemployed and I cannot buy any game material. However, I did have plans to buy a number of 3.x pdfs once I had a job. Some of them are for books that are difficult to find. Now, when I get a job, I will have to search high and low and probably pay an obscene amount of money if I want those books. It's a shame we will probably never see the older editions in a digital format ever again.

I was also asked recently if I wanted to try playing D&D 4e. I have been quite reluctant to play, but thought I should give it a try with a very good DM. I thought that I would try buying the 4e pdfs, as they would take up less room on my gaming shelf. I normally do not like sitting at my computer to read a book, but a friend has a tablet computer he would lend me for awhile. Putting the pdfs on a disk (or thumb drive) would make this pretty convenient. Now, without the possibility of pdfs, I will probably just borrow the books and not buy them at all.

So, this whole debacle means that I will spend no money on WOtC items that I otherwise would have purchased. In my rather limited case it seems that instead of WotC doing something to increase their sales they have actually eliminated their sales .

I guess I am more baffled then upset. I am not really protesting or boycotting WotC. I am, however, not buying anything from them, but that is because they no longer carry what I want.

 

[Agamon]

How has it affected me? It's made one of my favorite web forums pretty unreadable (again; see 3e v 4e a year ago). Sigh.

 

[Elephant]

No, that's like saying X is now illegal, continue to download them and be arrested. Is it fair that it's now illegal for everyone? That's the debate. However, they answered the problem the easiest way possible. Now, rather than heavily investigating every .pdf out there, they can simply say, "all .pdf's out there for products going forward are illegally made."

I don't completely agree with the decision, but I can see the logic behind it.

Okay, forget trying to use snappy analogies.

The point is: There is a demand for PDFs of D&D books. There was some copyright infringement going on, and WOTC's response was to make it so the demand could ONLY be fulfilled via copyright infringement.

Am I the only one who sees this as a poor business decision? Isn't it better to accept any copyright infringement as collateral damage, keep the sales channel open, and pursue strategies to discourage the copyright infringement channel? Maybe a PR campaign saying "Look, when you download our PDFs for free instead of buying them, that's less money going towards new books. Support D&D. Buy our PDFs."

 

[Dumnbunny]

It's left me without a non-piracy means of completing my collection of older TSR (OD&D, BD&D and 1e) material at a reasonable cost. While I have no doubt that it will be a very long time before WotC re-releases their material in some non-PDF format, and it will probably be unreadable on my computer, at least I can be certain of the ability to quickly and easily convert whatever they're selling to PDFs.

 

[mach1.9pants]

well I just spent some money on Foxits PDF eReader, now they have stopped PDFs. I am p1$$ed big style. Although I have never pirated b4, unless I can easily scan my books in things might well change (I'll still buy the books and get DDi but stuff 'em I might torrent the scans anyway)