Ken Hite Re: The RPG Industry

[Hussar]

Well, I dunno about rpg sales, but, piracy has had little to no effect on music sales despite what the RIAA would have people believe.

I'm not sure how much of an effect it has had, and I doubt anyone else has more than an educated guess either.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Well, I dunno about rpg sales, but, piracy has had little to no effect on music sales despite what the RIAA would have people believe.

I'll not go any further than this in this particular thread: I'm an entertainment lawyer who has personal experience to the contrary, including seeing bands lose 90% of their revenue from a release, indie lables folding and personal bankruptcies.

 

[goodlookinguratha]

Well, I dunno about rpg sales, but, piracy has had little to no effect on music sales despite what the RIAA would have people believe.

I'm not sure how much of an effect it has had, and I doubt anyone else has more than an educated guess either.

FWIW, Steve Conan Trustrum from RPG.net concluded that, ironically enough, pirate pdfs of RPG books had NO EFFECT on book sales from his own experience in the PDF industry and from talking to lots of publishers, both print and PDF (from the "Palladium is in trouble" threads). Just to put it in perspective, this is a COMPLETE 180 from his previous stance last year.

Despite availability of illegal pdfs of DnD books, they were still able to have their "best year" in DnD in 2004 and 2005 if I remember correctly.

Its also ironic people talking about how other games like boardgames, CCGS, minis are "supposedly" doing so well? I guess that the 20% decline in GW sales (who are by far the biggest minis company) doesn't mean anything I guess. Or recent Hasbro reports of both their boardgame and MtG revenues declining. Or the recent cancellation of Hecatomb. Or WizKids recent decline in revenue for Pirates, nevermind their Clix line.

 

[thalmin]

I dunno. Our minis sales are up, in spite of the decline in GWS. But with Confrontation, Hordes, Warmachine, and Flames of War all doing very well, and Reaper holding it's own (at least for our store) yes, minis are up.

 

[Hussar]

I should rephrase what I said. I stated things way too strongly. Serves me right for posting after too much coffee.

Stating that piracy is killing RPG's is like stating piracy is killing the music industry. The jury is still out on this one. There is a great deal of opinion on both sides and I'm not sure if you can baldly state one way or the other.

 

[prosfilaes]

OF COURSE piracy is having a substantial effect on sales.
[...]
Is it responsible for a good chunk in the overall decline in RPG sales while miniatures are doing extremely well? Damned right it is.

That's just flat assertion; it doesn't even reach the value of ancedote. As I said above, my experience was that even for groups that had pirated material, it never came near the table; there were hardcopies bought of books that were ever used in the game.

But for honest information, we need more than assertion, more then ancedote; we need unbiased statistical information. I suspect that Steve "Conan" Trustrum probably has the best selection of data of anyone speaking up on the web.

I'm an entertainment lawyer who has personal experience to the contrary, including seeing bands lose 90% of their revenue from a release, indie lables folding and personal bankruptcies.

The RPG industry is dealing with a different set of issues than the music industry is; there's a lot of difference between a PDF and a book and a social aspect that music doesn't have. Ancedotal evidence like indie labels folding (like businesses do) and people going bankrupt (like people do) strikes me as exceptionally useless for showing that piracy is hurting the music industry. Certainly Janis Ian (her article for people downloading her music) disagreed broadly.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The RPG industry is dealing with a different set of issues than the music industry is; there's a lot of difference between a PDF and a book and a social aspect that music doesn't have. Ancedotal evidence like indie labels folding (like businesses do) and people going bankrupt (like people do) strikes me as exceptionally useless for showing that piracy is hurting the music industry. Certainly Janis Ian (her article for people downloading her music) disagreed broadly.

Then let me be 100% clear.

I know of particular indie labels that folded because people pirated their issues rather than pay for the albums. Because the piracy rate on their biggest releases reached 90% or more, they couldn't recoup their costs, were forced to sell off hard assets to pay creditors, and folded. "Anecdotal?"- not to the people who lost their businesses.

Some of the bands whose records were thus pirated had sunk thousands of their own dollars into the productions (sometimes via credit cards), in order to minimize recoupables and accellerate royalties. When the recovered royalties amounted to 10% or less of their expenditures, some of those bandmembers had to sell instruments to pay off their credit card bills.

The best we could do for these bands and companies was to get certain websites shut down by cutting off their ability to process credit cards (for those sites that were actually selling the pirated music and not just freely distributing it)- because the pirates were in Russia, there was no way to recover the cash.

(In concrete terms, what this means to you is that the labels most likely to find new, fresh music are in the greatest danger, while the ones who have the established acts that people decry as "sucky corporate rock" will probably survive in some form or another.)

Even Ani DiFranco has complained (at an industry symposium- I have no link) about how difficult it is to keep her label going for all of the piracy of her work .

And really, the issue for RPGs is the same core issue for the music industry: how to make enough money to keep the doors open while fighting off predation of your profits by your own fans.

The music industry IS hurting (mostly the little guys and new bands)...but the majors at least have a lot of money with which to buy time to possibly find a different business model or a medium less vulnerable to piracy.

While their product isn't as vulnerable, RPG companies are operating on comparatively thin profit margins and small print runs. Even a horrible album will generally sell more copies than a good 3rd party D20 product, and a CD or mp3 has a greater markup than any book.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

Uh...there's all sorts of cool PDF content from Dungeon and to a lesser extent from Dragon available from the paizo website. No, it's not the whole issue, but as a DM, I'm really jazzed that the Dungeon handouts, maps, etc. are available as PDFs.

Yeah, I know about that content, and I download it when it becomes available. That doesn't mean I want the magazines to be only pdf. If that extra material was available as an actual hardcopy, so I wouldn't have to fold or spindle my magazine when I wanted to show it to the the players, I'd love to have it, too. I want print magazines. I'm not exactly sure what your reply has to do with my post.

 

[prosfilaes]

I know of particular indie labels that folded because people pirated their issues rather than pay for the albums. Because the piracy rate on their biggest releases reached 90% or more, they couldn't recoup their costs, were forced to sell off hard assets to pay creditors, and folded. "Anecdotal?"- not to the people who lost their businesses.

Yes, anecdotal, you know a "short account of an incident (especially a biographical one)". That "because" in there is begging the question; in an alternate universe where their audience didn't pirate the album, how many people would have bought the album?

And really, the issue for RPGs is the same core issue for the music industry: how to make enough money to keep the doors open while fighting off predation of your profits by your own fans.

"predation of your profits"? That's counting non-existent chickens. "people stealing the books instead of buying them" would be more accurate.

Again, from Janis Ian's article, "in 37 years as a recording artist, I've created 25+ albums for major labels, and I've never once received a royalty check that didn't show I owed them money." There's an article from someone in the thick of things who finds piracy a boon to the small music artist.

 

[goodlookinguratha]

FWIW, Steve Conan Trustrum from RPG.net concluded that, ironically enough, pirate pdfs of RPG books had NO EFFECT on book sales from his own experience in the PDF industry and from talking to lots of publishers, both print and PDF (from the "Palladium is in trouble" threads). Just to put it in perspective, this is a COMPLETE 180 from his previous stance last year.

Despite availability of illegal pdfs of DnD books, they were still able to have their "best year" in DnD in 2004 and 2005 if I remember correctly.

Its also ironic people talking about how other games like boardgames, CCGS, minis are "supposedly" doing so well? I guess that the 20% decline in GW sales (who are by far the biggest minis company) doesn't mean anything I guess. Or recent Hasbro reports of both their boardgame and MtG revenues declining. Or the recent cancellation of Hecatomb. Or WizKids recent decline in revenue for Pirates, nevermind their Clix line.

Here is the thread of what Steve is talking about. The first post of it is on #1279.

Palladium in Trouble

His later posts on the "Osseum implosion" where he said that PDFs largely saved a number of companies from going under are what really shocked me! Again, this is much different than from what previously said even from late last year! Don't know if his views on other markets like music/movies/video games have changed however....