piracy is a problem

[Edwin_Su]

There was a post a while back wondering if piracy would be a problem for 4th edition.

Well it is the books started to appear on news groups about 18 hours ago.
I just checked 14 public torrent trackers 8 of them had the books, in 3 of then they where in the top 10 most downloaded likes in the last 24 hours.

But in case of gaming books hard copy rules, so still getting a few copied of the books for on the gaming table.

 

[pogminky]

Piracy isn't cool.

 

[Family]

Shhhhhhhh...udap

 

[Ashrem Bayle]

*shrug*

I got the PDF. I also have the core set pre-ordered.

And if WOTC made at least a tiny effort to be competitive in the PDF market, I'd have bought their PDF instead.

But they haven't, so I didn't.

 

[Inyssius]

Well, duh. I think that you'd have to be pretty stupid, or have spent the last ten years in a cave, to not suspect that the books would be available online before they're even released.

The question was, will the overall amount of piracy over time be significantly detrimental to 4E's overall sales over time?

We still can't answer that. Duh.

 

[Byronic]

Shouldn't we wait for the financial figures before seeing how much of a problem it will be? And check amongst the people who have an illegal copy whether or not they bought a hard copy.

Then we'll have a good idea of how much of a problem this *really* is for fourth edition.

Unless you believe that pirated downloads are a problem even if you buy a hard copy. In that case yes, it is a big problem.

[edit: at the risk of turning this into an alignment thread there's a surprising amount of Lawful Good people on this forum. And people were wondering what Lawful Good really was...]

 

[ShadowyFigure]

*puts hand up* I have the PDFS, I also have preordered all three boks and I'm buying 2 extra phbs for at the table.

Either way I would have scanned them for personal use, printing pages so the books take up less space is useful ya'know.

 

[LowSpine]

The only people who have a pdf and aren't going to buy them are the people who wouldn't anyway even if there wasn't a pdf (the main percentage).

The core books will not suffer much because of this.

On the other hand later option books may. But if they do it will be because of the sheer volume of them churned out (impossible to keep up without going without food or shoes) and the state of their quality of content (oh, I was going to get it but it looks rubbish).

 

[SteveC]

This is a lot of jumping to conclusions. I have seen a number of people post about these files, and I'd say that just about all of them have also said that they have the books on preorder.

For right now, getting the books via download is a curiosity about seeing something you can't see anywhere else. Will people download the books and never buy the real thing? Maybe. But how many of them will actually be playing the game? Not many at all. When I run my 3X game I bring my laptop and use the SRD rather than lug books, but that's because it's both convenient and legal.

Now when you're talking about sourcebooks, you might have a stronger argument. The Swordmage may likely make the Forgotten Realms book popular to pirate and not buy, just for that small section. Hopefully WotC will realize this and give folks a way to legally buy the new character class without the stuff they don't want.

--Steve

 

[Family]

SteveC, may I be your minion?