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Message: <blockquote data-quote="philreed" data-source="post: 1823084" data-attributes="member: 5968">I don't think it's a question of ethics. I think the question is:Is it good for the game industry to release collections of OGC for free?Let's take a hypothetical (or two).WotC releases Unearthed Arcana. One year later, well-meaning fans post the material as OGC for free. At that time, WotC still has 50,000 copies of the UA hardcover for sale. Let us assume that monthly sales of UA have dropped to 4,000 and are stable. So in 1 year WotC will sell out of UA.But what happens if the free OGC drops their monthly sales to 3,000? We're now looking at over 16 months before sellout. That's 4 more months that the products take up space in the warehouse. A less drastic effect, say 3,500/month, requires just over 14 months to clear out the inventory.Hmmm. D&D sales are slowing. Time to drop some staff and cut back a little on the schedule. Maybe just fire two employees and drop 1 D&D book/year from the schedule.A little deeper digging uncovers the free UA online. Well, hell. That's the last time we do an OGC product.Let's now look at a smaller company. Bastion or Green Ronin make excellent examples since both have lots of 100% OGC products and are respected by fans.Let's say a hypothetical product released at the same time as UA included 100% open game content. After one year of sales, someone releases the material free online. At this point, we can safely assume that monthly sales of that product are around 75-100/month (and this may be a little high). We'll go with 100 for simplicity. We'll also assume that the publisher saw the market trends and only printed 2,500 copies and now have 1,200 copies to sell.So what happens to monthly sales? If we assume that only 10% of the people that would download the UA SRD will download this one monthly sales of this hypothetical product drop to somewhere between 0 and 50 copies. At this rate, it will take somewhere between 2 years and infinity to clear the product out of the warehouse. 2 years? Damn, that's a problem. Better print fewer copies of the next title.Oh no. We're printing less than 2,000 of a new release? Might be time to get rid of some staff . . . might even be time for a new job. It's certainly time to stop doing products that are 100% OGC.Granted, these are extreme examples. But they're not all that far-fetched. To be honest, the free posting of OGC from a book could close down a company for good. Here's an example from my own PDF sales. Many months ago an e-mail came in praising my PDFs and saying how useful they were in games. And when would more of them be free on Kazaa?Those aren't free PDFs, I pointed out. I know. But they're free on Kazaa and it only hurts the corporations and not people to download stuff. I don't want to give corporations money so I'll wait for more of your PDFs to be free on Kazaa.This is the only time it's ever happened to me. But . . . what the hell? Corporation? Hello, it's me here.And I need to pay my rent.</blockquote>

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