D&D 4E Piracy and 4e

[ObsidianCrane]

After using the SRD for so many years, I find an electronic reference as invaluable for D&D.

Likewise, this is further compounded by the fact I can carry my pda with net access to hit the SRD, and have selected pdfs on its SD card and have all the rules I need in my pocket.

That's a heck of a lot more convenient than even the PHB + DMG+MM+UA that the SRD represents.

So while I'll be buying the books I want pdfs of them as well - its far easier to carry the game in my pocket than a backpack.

 

[Bandreus]

I have never bought a D&D book without checking out a pirate copy first. That has saved me a load of pain and waste of money.

Also all the books I did buy I still keep the Pirate PDF copy for easy consulting, especially outside my home.

Yet I still bought a load of 3.5 edition books.

When we started Star Wars RPG... if it weren't for the pirate pdf copies we handed over to players we would have never managed to play. Eventually half the players bought a SW book. No pirate copies would probably have meant less sales.

So piracy doesn't hurt D&D much

I totally agree. In the end I do think piracy is actually good for a lot of markets, especially when talking about big companies' products. What piracy do hurt is the small companies efforts to enter a market (think about an indie music label, ie), not the really big moneymakers.

The problem with piracy is companies usually look at it this way: If 1000 people download the pirated version of this product of mine, which I sell it for 30$, I'm actually loosing 30,000$. That's something a bit funny, at least.

Truth is, the most of the people who download pirated stuff either end up buying the original one (they use the downladed version to evalue it before using their bucks), or they just would never buy the product even if piracy was not there (maybe they can't afford it, they think the product's cost is not worth its quality or they just don't care).

The whole problem about Copyright just revolves around how much you are paying for the Copy and how much for the package (printing, paper quality, transport, reseller profit, and so on). So why on heart one should pay as much for the digital version of a book as for the printed one? Also consider if you want both deadtree and binary version of a book you are going to pay twice for it, the legal way.

So, replaying to the question, we will probably see a lot more piracy than five or eight years ago, but this won't hurt WotC in my opinion, maybe ending up to be an effective form of advertisement, as it was for 3.X, bringing in more and more people to the hobby

 

[Shades of Green]

I'm not sure anyone has any accurate data on how much damage piracy actually does.

The thing is that most pirates pirate for one of the following reasons:
1) They want a searchable, copyable, indexed version of a book they already own.
2) They want to look and see if a book is worth buying; if they like it, they'll buy it. If not, they won't buy it.
3) They want to use a splat-book or a portion of it for free. In most cases they won't buy the book anyway, regardless of piracy - they just want feat X or class Y and won't pay money for them.

So I suspect that most pirates probably don't do so at the expense of buying the book; if piracy was impossible, it would not have really altered their purchasing patterns. They would either buy the book anyway, regardless of piracy, or never buy it at all. I suspect that only a few people would actually buy more books if piracy was impossible.

Anti-piracy measures tend to be ineffective. In the computer gaming industry, for example, either your game gets cracked within hours of its release (making all the money spent on copy-protection worthless), or, if your copy protection is too good, it harms the legitimate users and hampers sales. I, for example, haven't bought (and haven't pirated) Half Life 2 and Bioshock despite the fact that I was very willing to purchase them, due to hearing about their extremely annoying copy-protection schemes. And I assure you that both games have been cracked eventually so the legitimate buyers suffer for nothing.

The best anti-piracy measure is value-per-money. Many people pirate because it simply isn't worth for them to pay 25 US$ (for example) for one or two feats or 50 US$ (for example) for a computer game with about 10-20 hours of gameplay they'll only play once. Make that entire book useful - not just a collection of splat to choose from. Make that computer game enduring, with a significant replay value, good gameplay/plot/atmosphere and an easy-to-use editor.

 

[Holy Bovine]

I've often wondered if 'piracy' really impacts sales like people think. I've always thought if someone is going to d/l a book they wouldn't be the ones buying it in the first place so is a sale really lost? I have tons of D&D books. I also have tons of pdfs for those D&D books - is this wrong?

 

[Cergorach]

The current RPG pirate 'scene' grew out of the folks that were interested in Out Of Print (OOP) RPG products. RPG products that were only sparsely available on the secondary market and fetched insane prices ($200 for the basic Karatur boxed set on Ebay), were what motivated a lot of folks. TSR/WotC finally jumped on that train with their digital initiative, first with the Dragon compilation, and later with releasing all their pre 3E products in digital format. But there where a lot of other companies that either went out of business (GDW) or lost their license (Merp) and couldn't release their older products in digital format.

Later when computers became more common (Laptops/PDAs), folks wanted digital copies of the books they already owned so that transporting them and referencing them would be easier.

The original Dragon collection (250 Dragons plus some assorted other magazines) was a steal for the price they asked and well worth the investment. The first batches of digitized D&D products were only $2.99 a piece (didn't matter if it was a huge boxed set or a 32 page adventure), at those prices it was still somewhat reasonable to collect them all. Or buy them in addition to the physical copy you already owned, but the price quickly went up to $3.99 and eventually $4.99.

You now started to get folk that found the 67% price increase not acceptable and folk that thought it was stupid to pay twice for a product they already owned (in book form). Imagine how many folks resorted to piracy when publishers started to ask prices ranging going to 50% to 100% of the retail price, sometimes the PDFs were much more expensive then the physical books. A lot of folks understand why WotC uses it's current pricing scheme, but that doesn't mean that it's accepted by a lot of consumers.

You've got a couple of different motivations for folks to scan RPG books:
1.) Functionality: You need the text in an electronic format, either because of search ability or writing your own adventures, or because of the compact nature of the electronic format.
2.) Rarity: The product is OOP or very difficult to obtain.
3.) Rage against the Machine: Someone mentioned anger, that is sometimes a motivation or part of the motivation. For the price of a single book, you can do a lot of damage against a corporation.

Keep in mind that these are smaller sub communities, members rely on each other to pull their own weight. So if Bob scans A and Alex scans B, the bigger the community, the more work you get done. These days computers and scanners are a lot more powerful then in the past, a single individual can scan a book within a hour (depending on size, color, and resolution), and do a quick OCR in also a hour (fully checked OCR will take a lot more time, depending on the quality of the scan and the software used). Scanners will certainly not do 'it' for the faceless folk that download 'it' 99% of the time, they do it for themselves and the other active folk in the community.

I would also like to point out that it's an effective tool to pressure companies to change their ways. I remember a couple of instances were scanned copies of D&D books were out a couple of days before official release. Eventually WotC saw the 'light' and made digital versions available, while that might have increased piracy, at least the folks that are willing to buy them legally can do so (and make WotC money). I think that if pirates did not show that there was a market for pdfs then companies like WotC and WW would never have changed their ways to the electronic format. The same goes for the Music (Itunes), Movie, and Software (Steam) industry.

 

[Belphanior]

Really?
I just made a test - it took less than 8 minutes for me to download Elder Evils.

I obtained Elder Evils literally 70 seconds after I read Rechan's post, one minute of which was spent on downloading. Don't get me wrong, I deleted it and haven't spread it to others. This wasn't about pirating but about a test; it's very easy to obtain their stuff if you know where to look (don't ask I ain't telling), very quickly, and in very high quality I must say.

Eight minutes? Too damn slow for today's pirates I bet.

 

[Cergorach]

I have serious doubts about 4E scans already being available at 'ghost' sites, those things have a nasty habit to be quickly available at certain locations, I haven't seen any indication of those. Not to mention that it would be big news in the RPG community. This looks more like an attempt to spread fear and rumour, or just an attempt of a poster to look cooler then he actually is...

Is 4E piracy going to hurt WotC more then with 3E, I think so. High quality scans will be available faster and easier then with the release of 3E (and later 3.5E). Not to mention that there is a lot of anger about 4E flowing around, thus certain folks will be more motivated then they were before to release quickly and in high quality. There also a lot of folks that are looking sceptically at 4E, I suspect that a lot of those folks will download 4E to get a look at it to see if it's any good to them.

While their DI is going to attract a lot of folk, I also suspect that there are going to be a lot of unofficial electronic tools or at least datasets. While character creation tools like PCgen are legal, the 4E datasets will not be legal, but they will be made by community members and spread in the same way as the pdfs.

 

[Ipissimus]

I just did a quick search and discovered a plethora of NASCAR DVD rips and videos made from the stands... I rather doubt that's cutting the profits from television companies or ticket sales.

I think Spatula and Shades of Green hit the nail on the head. I don't download, it's a waste of my bandwidth. And the funny thing is, everyone I know who does has more books on their shelf than I do, and I've got a lot of RPG books. What do I do if I hate a book but just want a single feat from it? Borrow it off my friends.

Now, if you want to claim that my borrowing infringes on the creator's intellectual property, I'd like to see you try to arrest everyone who's ever loaned a novel or book to a friend. Then, we have to dismantle the libraries because, obviously, they are distributing much more intellectual property legally without the same reciprocation as if everyone had to buy the book themselves. At this point, you get into the murky (and insane) areas of what informarion people are actually allowed to retain in their brains that a few lawyers are trying to push.

I think part of the unrealistic assessment of the damage piracy does to businesses is caused by laywers pushing the litigation culture. The other part of it is that businesses are there to earn money and will generally do anything to obtain it. It's not really about morals, it's more about squeezing all the blood you can out of the stone.

I seriously doubt that piracy has a significant effect on RPG producer's revenue mainly because everyone has the option that I do: I just don't buy it. I don't need 95% of the suppliments that WOTC has produced, they're just not value for my money. Now, I do plan on subscribing to DDI because just the rules compendium will be invaluable to me. Dragon and Dungeon will be like the chocolate icing on that particular cake. But then, if I find that it's bad, you can bet that I'll cancel the subscription. I'm not so enamored of DnD or anything, really, that I'll spend my money just so it can keep on going.

 

[amethal]

I'll be interested to see what happens to WotC's 3rd edition PDFs once 4th edition comes out.

What I am hoping is that they will come down in price damatically, and will be available to buy for the foreseeable future.

What I am worried about is that they'll keep the price high, and then withdraw them once the d20 licence grace period is up.

 

[WhatGravitas]

...and haven't spread it to others..

Unless you're downloading a hosted file (which is unlikely), you're probably sharing it in the very moment you download it (if you use current file-sharing, which is likely).

Cheers, LT.