Perhaps a small boycott?

[Asmor]

So I find myself in a peculiar situation which I suspect many else are also in. I strongly disapprove of WotC's sudden removal of PDFs from the market, but I enjoy 4th edition and am not willing to give that up.

Since Arcane Power is this month's "high profile" release and thus the first of the 4e books not to be available in PDF, I suggest a boycott of it.

Like I said, I don't want to give up 4th edition, but if we gave a concerted effort against this one book that might send a message to them.

Am I just crazy or does anyone else think this might be a reasonable idea?

 

[Xyxox]

So I find myself in a peculiar situation which I suspect many else are also in. I strongly disapprove of WotC's sudden removal of PDFs from the market, but I enjoy 4th edition and am not willing to give that up.

Since Arcane Power is this month's "high profile" release and thus the first of the 4e books not to be available in PDF, I suggest a boycott of it.

Like I said, I don't want to give up 4th edition, but if we gave a concerted effort against this one book that might send a message to them.

Am I just crazy or does anyone else think this might be a reasonable idea?

I'll put it this way, if Arcane Powers does not utterly fail to meet sales expectations, WotC management will consider their PDF move to have been successful.

I fully expect this to be considered successful and to never ever see any 3.5E or older material available through legal electronic means ever again.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

Couldn't you just boycott WotC releases, but still buy 3rd party supplements? I know it's nice to get more feats, classes, powers, etc... but do you really NEED them? And even if you do...put it off for a few months so WotC gets the message, at the least...

 

[Thasmodious]

I've asked this elsewhere, but how is this a big deal or some huge problem. Who was really buying these .pdfs anyway? If they weren't selling well, either because the .pdf market isn't that big or everyone just pirates it anyway, why keep an unprofitable revenue stream going? I need someone to explain to me why I should care about this, and as I have mad respect for Asmor, this seemed like a good place.

To me, it seems like the people freaking out about this are the usual noisy crowd of WotC haters who fly into a rage every time WotC makes any kind of announcement about anything and people who are worried that those good quality .pdfs will be hard to get a hold of now and they'll have to go back to the dark days of 3e and the hand scanned .pdfs.

 

[fba827]

Disclaimer: I was never a pdf consumer so this obviously affects me much less than some of you.

Having said that do what you feel you need to do. Just remember that if you do such a thing, make sure it is clear to WotC that it is in protest. Otherwise, the "suits" who are disconnected from the action and just looking at numbers will think that the product failed on its own, leading to less support to the brand in general, or higher cost on future products (even if a nickle more) to make up for some lost expected returns on this product.

Having spent most of my career talking to the suits who look at numbers, I know that, frankly, they're just looking at the numbers even if there is a footnote regarding the reason for the dip in a product's return. And it ends up being seen as loss of interest in the brand or product rather than a statement by the consumer.

I would imagine it'd be even worse at a big name like Hasbro, where you have suit after suit in a giant hierarchy where each level of the suit hierarchy gets a more compressed financial statement. D&D as a brand is eventually just compressed to a single line number in a list of brand ROIs (where the brand gets reviewed as a whole rather than looking at individual product returns from said brands).

Of course, I have no personal knowledge of Hasbro or WotC. I am just speaking from my own experience in the business world.

 

[Ktulu]

I've already got mine pre-ordered; at least this means I'm likely to get the earliest possible shipping time

What? Ok, so I'm looking for the silver lining...


I agree with FBA, though. If you're going to boycott, make sure it's made very, very clear.

 

[charlesatan]

So I find myself in a peculiar situation which I suspect many else are also in. I strongly disapprove of WotC's sudden removal of PDFs from the market, but I enjoy 4th edition and am not willing to give that up.

Since Arcane Power is this month's "high profile" release and thus the first of the 4e books not to be available in PDF, I suggest a boycott of it.

Like I said, I don't want to give up 4th edition, but if we gave a concerted effort against this one book that might send a message to them.

Am I just crazy or does anyone else think this might be a reasonable idea?

I suggest a petition first.

And then if that fails, a petition w/ a stated boycott (remember, a boycott only works if the company knows why people are boycotting their products, instead of, say, regular market forces dwindling their sales). Either way, for me boycotts should be a last resort, not the initial weapon to use, at least in this case.

 

[malraux]

To me, it seems like the people freaking out about this are the usual noisy crowd of WotC haters who fly into a rage every time WotC makes any kind of announcement about anything and people who are worried that those good quality .pdfs will be hard to get a hold of now and they'll have to go back to the dark days of 3e and the hand scanned .pdfs.

I'm probably one of the usual voices who defends WotC's actions. But this does annoy me. A lot. I love grabbing old edition stuff. I wasn't a big fan of the torrenting method specifically because WotC had made an alternative available. It's not as though I'm currently not a good customer of WotC either. I really prefer a legal approach to the problem. Now, if I want to read say "Against the Giants" to see the oldschool approach to giant fights, I don't have a relatively simple legal way to do it.

Is it a huge problem? I don't know. I don't even know if the revenue WotC got off of RPGNow's scanned books was ever even enough to pay for the cost of putting it up. But still, this does have some significant impacts.

 

[darjr]

Wizards Community - View Single Post - WotC halts sales/downloads from rpgnow.com

If you boycott, make sure you tell, at least, customer service.

 

[nightwyrm]

I've been seeing at lot of nerd rage in various forums over that pass few days regarding WotC's decision to end pdf sales and I'm just not getting what's the big deal. So they ended a "product line" that's probably a relatively minor component of their sales, so what? It's like boycotting the local supermarket coz they stopped carrying your favourite cereal.

Personally, I'm completely unaffected by WotC's decision. I've never bought a pdf and I don't ever plan to. I've always bought game books at 35% discount from amazon and I plan to continue doing just that.

I think their goal of trying to stop internet piracy of their stuff via not releasing pdfs is completely useless and idiotic, but that's their business decision. I'm rather firmly in the camp that believes most online downloads are stuff that people were never gonna shell out money to buy anyways. If sold pdfs aren't available for file sharing, someone out there is just gonna make a pdf using page scans. I think WotC's effort to stamp out piracy this way is lame but I'm not up in arms about it. If I like their stuff, I'll buy it; if I don't like their stuff, I won't. Capitalism works just fine for me. If their business decisions causes them to go under, that's just the way the market works.

I don't buy D&D stuff coz I'm a WotC fan, I buy D&D stuff coz they're well made stuff and if that happens to support their company, it's completely incidental.