Liz Schuh on Dragon/Dungeon moving to the web

[Glyfair]

Maybe, but I accept Milton's statement as factual.

I tend to agree, Hanlon's Razor and all (with a major demphasis on the stupidity part).

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

How's that 5 1/4" floppy disk backup from 1980 doing? Was it formatted for Tandy or DOS or Commodore? Was it a WordPerfect document?

The 50+ I have were formatted for Commodore. As of the last time I checked, they were all in working order, thanks. I don't have any WordPerfect docs from that time, but I do have some from '87 or '88, give or take. MS Word reads and writes to them just fine.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

I don't think anyone is saying that print or digital is better. They each have thier own uses and pros and cons. What people are complaining about is that rather than serving both customer bases they have chosen to serve only one. Before it was the print people, now it is the digital people. The print people are (IMO) justified in complaining that WotC has chosen not to serve thier needs anymore. What we (for I am one of these people) are asking for is why our needs are no longer worth serving. The print people arn't saying there can't be a DI, just that it needn't be an either or option. Paizo has stated that they would have liked to continue on and they were paying WotC licence fees to do so. So I don't think it is too unreasonable of a request to ask why the print people are no longer considered worth getting money from. I realize that WotC doesn't want to give away its all its finances, but they can surely come up with something to respond with that doesn't give everything away. I am not talking about individuals posting here (who obviously don't have the authority to do so), but the PR department whose job it is to make the company look good. Right now that part of the company from an outside perspective doesn't seem to be doing thier job.

The prevailing theory (aside from "WotC R t3h h4t3rz!!!") seems to be that, to keep the print magazines, they would have either had to a) not used the Dungeon and Dragon brands, at least for - ironically - print collection purposes, or b) produced a marginally profitable product with a significant risk of outright failure in-house.

As to why the print people's needs aren't worth serving - keeping in mind that we're talking about the Dungeon and/or Dragon reading people, not people who buy print products in general or even print D&D products -, one could start with the fact that the 'print people' constitute approximately 1% of the D&D customer base. That's assuming, of course, that not one person currently listed in Dungeon and Dragon's circulation figures is as or more interested in digital content.

On the flip side, the 'unique visitors' Wizards' site gets on a monthly basis are about 260% of the D&D customer base. Now, as people have pointed out, not every one of those uniques really is, and not every one, perhaps not even MOST, are D&Ders. FWIW, and I have *no* idea how much that might be, by my calculations about 42% of all posts on Wizards' forums are D&D or d20 related.

Let's say half of the 13 million 'uniques' are not really unique; we'll round down and say only about 6 million are. Out of those 6 million, only 42%, or 2,520,000, are on the site for D&D. Out of those, only 10%, or 252,000, are willing to pay for online content. Let's further say (and here we veer into purely hypothetical territory) that no Dragon or Dungeon readers are among those 252,000, and that no one who buys or subscribes to Dragon does to Dungeon, and vice versa. That still leaves the Digital Initiative with twice as many subscribers as Dragon and Dungeon have copies in circulation.

 

[Jim Hague]

Media changes. Hardware and software standards change. Paper doesn't.

Paper is easily damaged, hard to transport, prone to rips, tears, print fading...and once damaged, cannot be recovered, except by purchasing another copy, in most cases.

So no. You're entirely wrong.

 

[Mark Plemmons]

I have no insider info, but there is one additional consideration that occurred to me. Maybe Paizo was becoming TOO associated with the magazines (or to be more accurate, the brand names). When readers think Dragon/Dungeon, they may think "Paizo" as often as "WotC". With Paizo starting to produce their own products, and having what I'd assume amounts to tons of free ad space in the magazines to promote them, I wouldn't be suprised if someone at WotC was worried about the competition and association of brands. Not the only reason to end the license, but a good additional one.

Just a random thought.

 

[freebfrost]

Paper is easily damaged, hard to transport, prone to rips, tears, print fading...and once damaged, cannot be recovered, except by purchasing another copy, in most cases.

So no. You're entirely wrong.

Entirely wrong? Interesting.

I've never lost a single issue of Dragon, although I've taken them on trips, or to gaming sessions, the print has never faded, nor have I damaged any. On the other hand, I've lost countless power points/spreadsheets/word docs to hard drive failures, power outages, backup malfunctions, electrical spikes, someone overwriting my file, etc.

Paper seems to work fine for me. YMMV.

 

[Maldin]

A number I question. Say I look at the website at work, at home and on the game club computer. That means I'm 3 "unique visitors."

And for normal server stat-collection, "unique" is reset per day. Its purpose is to eliminate the perhaps 200 file hits that a single visitor may generate on just a few graphics-heavy webpages viewed over a short period of time (minutes). Sooo.... if you view from 3 different machines 4 days a week, you, my friend, have just become 624 "unique eyeballs" over the year, and our "13 million" has just become under 21,000 people. Now, most visitors don't visit the site 3 times a day 4 days a week, so that number is low, but then I know from experience (looking at my own website stats) that some web visitors generate loads of "unique" IP addresses because of their own server settings and one visit may spawn 50 "unique eyeball" clicks each time they drop by. It seriously skews any accurate count. As well, "unique" usually is reset more then once per day.

In effect... "13 million eyeballs" is a meaningless publicity statement, and in no way can be used to calculate a possible subscribership of 252,000. And its already been said here that a large percentage of wizards.com visitors are there for Magic (and other stuff) and not for D&D.

Denis, aka "Maldin"
Maldin's Greyhawk http://melkot.com
Loads of edition-independent Greyhawk goodness... maps, magic, mysteries, mechanics, and more!! And soon, its websites like this that will be the only source of Greyhawk at all.

 

[freebfrost]

The 50+ I have were formatted for Commodore. As of the last time I checked, they were all in working order, thanks. I don't have any WordPerfect docs from that time, but I do have some from '87 or '88, give or take. MS Word reads and writes to them just fine.

Hey, can I import them into my laptop here? I'll just put them into my... um.... my... dvd drive?

Do you really expect the average person to have the access, technological saavy, and means to be able to do that Moogle? I don't think WotC is targeting the slashdot crowd for their DI.

 

[Jim Hague]

Entirely wrong? Interesting.

I've never lost a single issue of Dragon, although I've taken them on trips, or to gaming sessions, the print has never faded, nor have I damaged any. On the other hand, I've lost countless power points/spreadsheets/word docs to hard drive failures, power outages, backup malfunctions, electrical spikes, someone overwriting my file, etc.

Paper seems to work fine for me. YMMV.

And paper's a fine format - but arguing that it's somehow sacrosanct and therefore superior is just bunk. Or are you arguing that because you take archival care of your magazines, somehow that applies to everyone? Paper decays, and the more acid that's used in it, the faster it goes. It's susceptible to spills, tears...but surely you know this.

 

[billd91]

Paper is easily damaged, hard to transport, prone to rips, tears, print fading...and once damaged, cannot be recovered, except by purchasing another copy, in most cases.

So no. You're entirely wrong.

No, he's not. Paper does go through chemical changes in time, but so does computer media. Computer media also has a tendency to go through format changes, something paper forms do not, that can make data archives incompatible with current hardware.
There are old US government archives on old computer formats that are now, without tremendous expense, unaccessible. Contrast that with over 100 years of government documents still preserved on paper and still usable.

Sure, each media has its own preservation requirements. I keep my paper magazines in a reasonably dry environment for long term storage and I don't have to do anything else to them. My electronic files, I will have to make sure I retain a piece of software capable of reading the file and keep moving the files to media as the media used by my computers change. In some ways, that's not that difficult to do. But, as I said before, it is and will be a higher bar to keep jumping over to access the information.