D&D 4E Piracy and 4e

[Digital M@]

The more useful a book, the less it will get pirated without being purchased. It is more expensive for people to print out a large .pdf than to buy it and they get cheap paper and cover. Reading a 200+ page .pdf is a major pain.

I have known several people who down loaded books. Right or wrong, they either down loaded it to check it out to see if it was worth buying, wanted a specific feat or some tid bit from the book or wanted it as a back up to their purchased hard cover.

If someone is only looking for a piece of data from a book then pirating may seem like a good solution, but outside of that, it has little value to most gamers. The money lost to pirating of WotC books was probably very minimal despite the number of downloads the books received.

 

[SteveC]

I think the answer is a big "it depends." It really depends on what WotC decides to do about PDFs of their products. After using the SRD for so many years, I find an electronic reference as invaluable for D&D. I sincerely hope that I'll be able to purchase PDFs of the new edition for a reasonable price. I am very ethically opposed to piracy, but I'm certain that if there aren't any legal ways to get the books as PDFs you'll see a lot more piracy.

Why is that? Most of the people I know like the convenience of a PDF for reference, and are willing to purchase one if it's available. If its' flat out not available, I'm sure some of them will take the easy way out.

For me, it's going to be a pain, but if there aren't professional PDFs available, it's back to the MK1 Keyboard and entering things into a database by hand, which I think you'll see a fair amount of by different people.

--Steve

 

[MaelStorm]

WotC does not want to alienate their resellers, so they give a window of time before releasing a PDF version. But in the mean time customers who would have preferred to buy a PDF copy can't get one at the release date. They prioritize distributors and book resellers over pleasing customers who prefer PDF. Plus they alienate further customers because they don't give them a good deal on PDF. The results is angry customers will be able to get pirated PDF before they could order one.

WotC should go fully digital and sell their PDF at a good price. They could make as much money as physical book sales by bypassing the whole chain of distributors, and resellers, plus printing fees. People could buy direct and save on transportation fee. We're in the age of information, the digital age, physical book sales is a thing of the past, the more we advance in the 21st century, the less physical book will be printed. Personally I think WotC is affraid of shifting fully digital, they are stuck in the past.

The Digital Initiative is a first step, but a very timid one, their online rules is a support for quick reference only. This is not what customers who would be inclined to jump digital want, they want the whole thing, not just references.

I do not want to put WotC off business, so I will buy the books instead. But I would much prefer to order PDFs in advance and download them on day one instead of books. In the end I will get my PDFs, but I won't pay twice for the same products, I will download them for free.

 

[malraux]

I doubt things will be much worse than with 3e. There's not going to be much changing wrt the price points, and its not like you can stop people from scanning the books. So the three ways to deal with it are to ignore it and hope it doesn't hurt your business, zealously attack those who do fileshare, or give people another option. I'm not sure that ignoring the problem is the right answer, but I'm not sure that WotC's bottom line would increase much if filesharing went away. They could attack the sharers, use fancy inks that resist scanning, etc, but my experience with that is that it treats your loyal customers poorly, and doesn't affect the filesharers all that much, as only one person has to figure out how to get around the protection.

Lastly, they can offer an alternative. DDI seems to be a step in the right direction. Yeah, there's a bunch of people who won't ever pay money to WotC. But because they won't ever pay money, its silly to go after them as a market. Instead, go for the person who might pay out a little if you make it easy and convenient. The rules database could be this solution. Its at least a reasonable try.

 

[Will]

Personally, I'm not buying a hardcopy until/unless it comes with PDF access, or if they sell PDF-only copies.

DDI, for me, isn't an option; I want to own, not pay some sort of rule access utility.

I'm very frustrated with the move away from 3e's style of SRD, and am a bit unhappy with a lot of the tightening down I'm hearing about; I thought it was very liberating and smart for WotC to take the directions they did with 3e, but now it sounds like new suits are in who balk at anything but STANDARD PRACTICES.

Sigh.

 

[Amakar]

Interesting

Actually...

My habit has been to get some pdfs for stuff I want to check out (Or I go to the library- aka Borders). It is simply that I could not afford the books. But I still budgeted the $30 bucks I coudl afford to spend on wizard products a month and bought that (Including some minis I never really ogt use out of, just to buy something). The rest either I'd download, or for just classes and feats, I'd go to the store with a pen and paper. But I gave the company what I could afford to give.

Strange ethics perhaps.. please hold the massive flames.

I think I may have mentioned this habit once on the surveys. Now, the new '3 books per setting' and seemingly fewer random splatbooks to pick up, it looks like I'll be able to afford everything I want within my budget.

Perhaps I'm not the only... 'buy what I can afford, download the rest' person out there, it sound slike the new edition marketing might be better for those types.

 

[Pale Jackal]

He made the point that scifi/geek/gamer viewers think that they are smart, and take pride in downloading shows, skipping commercials, and sneering at commercial advertising. But we are left with cancelled show after cancelled show, while the NASCAR viewers watch the advertisements, drink their Pepsi, and enjoy their race.

That probably has an impact, but that's not the cause. NASCAR is established and ultimately has a large fan base, whereas each sci-fi show will only appeal to a portion of the 'sci-fi television geek' and probably has crappy exposure. So I really don't think that's the reason.

I'm sure piracy will be a problem, but a PDF is a poor replacement for an actual book. I suspect PDFs are mainly used to look up a particular class, feat or power, not something that you actually want to read the entirety of.

 

[Spatula]

Smarter in the short run, maybe.

I once read an editorial in Scifi.ign.com (can't find it anymore, sadly) that really struck me. The editor was bemoaning the fact that scifi shows never seemed to last, and always got cancelled, while stuff like NASCAR just kept playing over and over.

He made the point that scifi/geek/gamer viewers think that they are smart, and take pride in downloading shows, skipping commercials, and sneering at commercial advertising. But we are left with cancelled show after cancelled show, while the NASCAR viewers watch the advertisements, drink their Pepsi, and enjoy their race.

NASCAR, or whatever other form of mass entertainment that survives despite not being to your tastes, keeps going because it's very very popular, which in turn drives advertising rates up.

Sci-fi shows fail because there aren't enough sci-fi viewers to bring in enough advertising to support the production costs of the shows - which are a hell of a lot higher than airing mosts sports events. Piracy doesn't even enter into it. If piracy were that big a problem for sci-fi shows, DVDs of those shows would barely exist because it would not be profitable to release them - since everyone would just download the episodes for free, right? and some people undoubtedly do. But not the majority, and TV show DVDs are big sellers.

Piracy is a fact of life for intellectual properties. It happens, it's always happened, it's always going to happen. Companies are better off focusing on packaging their content in the best form possible so that people are getting something of value when they pay for it, vs what they'd get by downloading it off the net.

And yes the 4e books will be on the net within the week they're released, I'm not sure why one would think anything has changed. Unless WotC has developed some sort of un-scannable printing process. Whether the piracy continues comes to down how popular the 4e books are - the more popular, the more likely they're going to be bootlegged. No one bothers scanning in obscure works that people aren't interested in.

 

[I'm A Banana]

This thread might not go anywhere good...

...the point about "Nascaar is popular, sci fi shows are not! It must be piracy!" misses a much broader social context and is pretty dismissive of Nascaar.

Piracy was not a huge problem in 3e as far as I know, and I payed pretty close attention, so I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that Emirikol is blowing a bit of smoke at us on that one unless he can back it up a bit.

 

[Shemeska]

I think it may be worse for 4e than it was for 3e. For various reasons, there seems to be more ill-will towards WotC at the moment than at 3e's launch, and with easy availability of pirated pdfs, a lot of potential buyers on the fence about 4e may play it using pirated pdfs of the books.

What I suspect will really get nailed hard by piracy is the DDI, specifically the online Dragon/Dungeon content. At the price it's estimated to be per month, it's going to be nailed by site rips every month. The remainder of its content like the online play portions won't be hit by that, but it remains to be seen which will be the bigger subscriber draw for them (that or the content which can be ripped and zipped). I already think the business model for the DDI is questionable (especially during a general economic downturn in the US), but piracy of bits of its content is liable to be rampant.

And even without piracy, I suspect lots of folks who aren't interested in the online play portions of the DDI may subscribe once a year, yoink the entire site content and then let the subscription lapse. That's certainly going to impact their bottom line.