ICv2's interview WotC President Greg Leeds

[César Ayala]

This is factually what he said.



This isn't. This is just a rude attempt to assign some sort of negative motivation to someone because you don't like them or what they're doing. It's childish and a perfect example of why message boards get dismissed as cesspools of discourse.

Well, sorry if you didn't like what I said, but I see things in a context, and this interview comes after some store owners claimed that PDF were hurting their business, that companies that still sell PDFs were hurting them with their "special offers" and companies like Paizo are making special offers for their PDF products (as an answer to WotC decission).
And there comes the interview, and he says that removing the pdf will benefit the brick and mortar business, because pdf were hurting them. So it's easy to think that the CEO believes that the people that still use pdf it's hurting those business.

Don't get me wrong, I play 4th ed and will keep buying their products (I have all of them except Dungeon Delve), but I don't like what the CEO said there or what I think he was saying (if you prefer it this way).
I know it's CEO chit-chat and it's usual they use some kind of "We are so nice and good. We care" but I don't like it.

 

[Bagpuss]

Amazon.com (and similar) are having an infinitely more devastating effect on brick-and-mortar stores than any amount of downloading, legally or otherwise. When they can supply the customer with the books at a price lower than the b&m store can get them from their suppliers, what hope is there for the b&m stores?

If WotC are really serious about protecting brick-and-mortar stores, they have to do something about that threat. Otherwise, this action is like treating the paper cut while leaving the severed arteries untreated.

This is the real truth, if anything free access to PDFs drives sales, rather than reduces them. When our group got access to an illegal copy of the PDF, four out of the seven players wanted to buy it after reading it, before we had little interest in it (to be fair the others are causal gamers and never buy books). Of those four two ordered from Amazon online, because it was £16.99, and another two bought them in bricks and mortar stores at £25.99.

The sales in the Bricks and Mortar stores ONLY occurred because Amazon was sold out and the two people that had ordered online would not get a copy for at least a month, after release. How is a bricks and mortar store expected to compete with over a third off the cover price? Only by it having it in stock when the other shop doesn't.

But more importantly without having a chance to read the PHB2 before buying none of us would have been interested in buying it (certainly not interested enough to spend the asking price in a B&M store). The PDF made the sales. The online discounters are the only thing that hurt the B&M stores.

WotC decision and the complaints by B&M about sales on PDF show a real lack of understanding of their customers.