NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DammitVictor" data-source="post: 8007915" data-attributes="member: 6750908">It is really, really not. And... as much as it sucks to compare the number of people downloading your work illegally to the number of people paying good money for it, the latter number is the only number that matters in an economic sense-- those huge number of downloads are not lost sales, because there isn't a pirate in existence who could afford to legally purchase a small fraction of what they illegally download and the people who uploaded them in the first place did purchase them legally. If you imagine that a tenth of a percent of the people who illegally download your work go on to purchase it, or to purchase something else of yours-- and I reckon that a conservative estimate-- and you compare the number of legal sales to the number of illegal downloads again, you'll see that a substantial portion of your sales, the only number that matters, come from pirates.The economic reasons that it sucks to be in this industry-- leaving cultural attitudes aside-- is that the nature of our industry has always been that almost all of your customers want to be your competitors, and the technical limitations that prevented them from doing so are vanishing. The reason that this industry sucks is that for every professional trying to earn a living... they're competing with dozens or hundreds of people who don't have to.Retail sales for intellectual property, especially low margin IP like roleplaying books, are a dying business model. Blaming piracy only makes us feel better about it at the expense of putting off finding a model that will allow us to survive.</blockquote>

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