DSC-EricPrice said:
When my thinkpad returns off lease, or I buy a new computer, I lose access to these documents unless some kind of migration system is in place. As I understand it, no such system is in place. I might accept that my license to use the product expires after three years, but that seems to call for prices to drop dramatically. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the model adopted by the company in question.
And prices would have to drop to zero for a three-year limit on RPG use to be acceptable to me--some of my favorite games sat on my shelf for more than 3 years before i got a chance to play them, due to the combination of finite gaming time and the typically long-duration nature of RPG play (being just 2nd in the queue could easily mean a wait of 2 years to get to the game, if you only have time for one game/week).
Pricing being a topic of interest in several of these posts, consider this. If the price of a book from a DRM based site is the same as the print version (which is something that has been alleged by a few, I havent researched it to know) then the company is already ahead the cost of the printing. Couple that with the much LARGER chunk normally eaten up by the middleman (the distributors of old) and you see that it would be possible to knock off 30-40% of the retail price of the product, still cover the technology costs of the delivery method, and still make the same profit as before. Instead, we see people apparently aiming for larger profit margins OR coddling up in an effort to prevent a backlash in the print distributor / retailer network they are still very much a part of.
I think that the presumption that PDFs and hardcopy even compete significantly is questionable. My personal experience is that most people only buy PDFs when (1) the book only exists in digital form or (2) they don't really want it, but the price is too cheap to skip. Frex, assuming i get my computer upgraded to OS X while they're still on offer, i'll snag the Gamma World D20 and Exalted PDFs, because they're free. I'm not interested in them at cover price. Gamma World i might actually prefer in PDF, because i'm not likely to play it (i've got 2 previous editions with systems i prefer, as well as a couple other post-apocalyptic RPGs), but only to snag OGC for other projects. Exalted i'd prefer in hardcopy, because i want it for leisure reading and might actually play it. But if the PDF is enough cheaper, i'll go that route. I'd rather find it at ~half price, used [hardcopy], however--and i'm certainly not going to pay more than half hardcopy price for a PDF that i'm actually planning to read--it's too much of a pain to read on screen, and printing costs money, too. One i'm only (or primarily) going to reference might be a different matter, because then the searchability and cut-n-paste of a PDF comes into play. I think that ebooks and hardcopy have different strengths and weaknesses, and only under duress would someone buy one when they really wanted the other. Moderate price savings probably aren't enough incentive--unless they don't really want the book anyway.
Frex, i'm not currently playing D20 System, can't stand D&D3E, and in general prefer much less crunchy more-narrative systems. So, even the coolest D20 System book probably is only marginally appealing to me. Yes, you can get me to buy it if you drive the price down far enough--but you'll never make a living off of selling to people like me. I'm not your market. Similarly, anybody who's
really in the Exalted market has probably already bought a copy, or never will (due to financial constraints, or whatever). You're not likely to get a lot of new players by offering it for free at this point, nor are you likely to compete with sales of the hardcopy book. Moreover, i suspect you wouldn't compete with yourself all that much even if the game were relatively new: those who're really interested in the game probably want the pretty book, too--they're certainly gonna want to have the rulebook while they game, and even if they don't mind the lower production values of taking it to Kinko's, there's still that expense and hassle. It just becomes easier for most people to buy hardcopy if they really are gonna play the game. And that's at a pricepoint of free. If the PDF has a price anywhere near the hardcopy, it won't cut into hardcopy sales at all. Sure, it'll sell to people who otherwise wouldn't have bought the game, but i don't think it'll sell to people who otherwise would've bought the hardcopy. And, at that price, i don't even think it'll sell to those who own the hardcopy but would like a digital version for searching, preparing game notes, whatever.
Clark Peterson, of S&SS, has said that he got involved in this not to compete with hardcopy at all, or even to sell to those who want the product but can't afford it, but primarily (or even exclusively) to cater to those who want the product but can't get it. Overseas customers, frex, where the shipping costs could make the book prohibitively expensive. IOW, precisely those who, absent the PDF, were never gonna buy the book. I think he's right--but not just because of the near-cover-price prices of DTRPG. I think that, even at a significant savings (~35%--comparable to what you can often find for hardcopy if you shop around and have a little patience), DTRPG wouldn't be competing with brick-n-mortar stores. The markets for the products are just too different.
These aren't new issues. Every industry has considered and proposed possible solutions for the new "digital economy". Piracy in the digital age will continue to be an issue I suspect, and will continue to affect sales. That is, until such time that we as a society develop enough of a moral conscience to say "someone worked to produce this book, and I respect them for it. I will see that they are compensated, no matter how I obtained the book." Unfortunately the anonymity apparently provided by the Internet is a hard obstacle for us to overcome. I think the psychologists and socioligists among us can speak about the effects of perceived anonymity on human behavior...
What you said. We'll no more eliminate piracy with DRM than we can eliminate crime with prisons--you have to go to the source, the sociological situation that encourages/causes the behavior in the first place.
