RPG Illegal File Sharing Hurts the Hobby

[Ogrork the Mighty]

They're not leading by example and speaking for themselves. They're demanding that you do what they say. The poster that Ogork is referring to demands that if anyone uses material from a sourcebook that they personally own a physical copy of the sourcebook. Which means that if you legitimately own a .pdf copy you can't use it. Or if your buddy owns a copy you can't use it to make your character, even if he's playing at the same table. That's what he means by someone playing copyright-police. Just a self-righteous jerk trying to make himself look better by arbitrarily laying down the law on people who don't happen to want to buy the books in hard copy, or who think it's all right to share. Hell, even Mr. Rogers thinks it's all right to share.

Thank you. My thoughts exactly.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'm an entertainment lawyer who gets to see first hand what piracy does to artists and labels, primarily in the music industry.

That aside, lets just say I was appalled when I recently met a guy claiming to have over 1,000 illegal RPG PDFs.

Assuming he's using 1/10th of that, that's still 100 lost sales to him alone...and that doesn't count whatever he's passed along to others. I'm not into PDFs myself- I like hard copies- so I don't know what they cost- but I'll assume they cost $15/each on average. That comes to $1,500. If he does this long enough, he'll get himself into grand larceny range ($5k).

What does $1,500 mean? To his FLGS, the profit from that amount of sales pays an employee's weekly paycheck. The share of that that goes back to the publisher might be a goodly chunk of the company's monthly rent, or pays off an artist for his work on a project.

 

[Alzrius]

I agree with Orgrok and Dr. Awkward. That policy of banning people who use PDFs (and it's not just illegal ones; he even said he doesn't allow the SRD) is way too inflexible. Live and let live I say...or is it don't ask don't tell?

 

[Vigilance]

Piracy hurts RPG sales.

In other news, water is wet and the sky is blue.

Chuck

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

In other news, water is wet and the sky is blue.

Chuck

Where's the numbers, chuck? Where's the numbers.

--fje

 

[Crothian]

Where's the numbers, chuck? Where's the numbers.

Exactly, it's obvious that all the RPG people from all these different companies, some who absolutely hate each other, got together and started this conspiracy.

 

[bloodydrake]

Feathercircle Paizo has em for pretty cheap

 

[kingpaul]

I don't even allow the SRD. You want to play something? Then you buy the book its in and bring it to the table.

I can understand the position on the d/l'able PDFs, but I'm confused on this stance. What's wrong with players using the SRD? Its free for distribution.

edit Make that d/l'able PDFs that aren't available as PDFs. Some books are only available as PDF, and to require a hardcover when none exists is an interesting proposition to say the least.

 

[JohnNephew]

Are they? Do you have any proof?

Yes, and yes.

WotC's spokespeople have recently said that the market's never been better, for their books at least. I suspect that if WotC is doing well, small press publishers are at least able to ride those coattails. I have no reason to believe otherwise, but if you've got some numbers to prove your case, go ahead and lay them out.

Many roleplaying publishers have quietly scratched their heads at that WotC claim; it raises more questions than it answers.

If you look at the monthly reports in Comics & Games Retailer, the sales of D&D have declined significantly, as reported by individual hobby market stores. (There are many problems with C&GR methodology, but if there's anywhere that it gets closer to being statistically meaningful, it would be on the broad trends of the biggest lines, such as WotC/WW/Palladium, where most of the stores who respond to the survey provide sales data on those lines.) If you talk with game stores and distributors (as I do pretty much every day), almost all will describe serious problems in the RPG category; some may tell you that even WotC new releases sell on an order of magnitude less than they used to (as the RPG buyer of one of the largest game stores in the country recently told me). Most describe sharply curtailing orders in the RPG category, especially in the d20 category.

It's possible that WotC has enjoyed major sales growth in some market that is not visible to the rest of the RPG publishing field. (Has the 3.5 Player's Handbook been quietly moving up on the NYT Bestseller lists, reflecting sharp growth in book trade sales?) It may depend on the functional meaning of terms like "never," "been" and "better," in the specific context in which the WotC spokesperson was using them.

Here's an example. I could tell you that some of our d20 products have enjoyed a triple-digit-percentage increase in sales this past year. What I might not be telling you, if I was trying to convey the image that this product line was strong and growing, was that to achieve that "growth," I had to liquidate them at a price lower than the original cost to print them.

Or, one year might be "better" in terms of profit, because the development costs of core rulebooks were amortized across the first print run but this year, selling reprints, we're only including actual manufacturing cost in cost of goods sold.

I'm not saying that WotC did such things...I'm just saying that someone who is not revealing raw data can describe the data in ways that may be strictly true but are aimed at reinforcing a particular image they want to put forth. Look at how party officials spin election results, even when the raw data ARE available for anyone to see.

Of course, I'm a publisher, so you have to take what I say with a grain of salt, too. You have to assume that I have an agenda, too.

I could tell you that if you compare the first generic d20 product we published with the last generic d20 product we published, the former's first six months' sales were at least TWENTY TIMES that of the latter. I would put it that way to support my contention that the RPG market is facing tough times. But then you would rightly question why I chose those specific descriptors. What is "generic d20"? (I might have chosen that so that I was comparing the last Penumbra supplement, but to deliberately exclude Northern Crown.) Why did I say "sales" and not "revenues" or "unit sales"? I could draw a very different picture from the same data before me if I spoke about the "sales" comparing, say, In the Belly of the Beast ($8.95) with the Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary ($44.95). I could say "The Penumbra fantasy Bestiary had higher sales," which could be true of dollar sales but not of unit sales...but without specifying, a reader might assume I mean both. Why did I not specify language? If a major book had just been translated into several languages, I might honestly say that stores sold more copies of that book than ever before, but perhaps none of them were in English. (Caveat: I don't stand by these specific claims, because I'm not at my office computer with sales reports at my fingertips. Take this all in broad strokes.)

So, in the end, don't believe what publishers say (which may be true, or may be a game industry incarnation of Baghdad Bob -- "Our competitors are smothering themselves in their unsold, inferior products while our victorious game is being joyously purchased by every human on earth!"); believe what we do. Follow the money. Look at who published the most d20 products two or three years ago; look at their release calendars over the past twelve months. Any changes, patterns? Sure, there may be explanations for any given item -- this product line was dropped because of problems with the licensor; that one was delayed because of a late artist or a problem at the printer; this non-RPG product line was added to the schedule because we just woke up one day thinking it would be prudent to diversify (or realized we now had the higher amount of capital necessary to invest in it); that publisher collapsed only because of a personal falling out of the partners. Like particle physics, it's hard to read much into the behavior of the individual quanta. But you can look in the aggregate, and that tells you where the money is flowing. After all, money to be made greases the wheels immeasurably: publishers who smell a windfall will spend the money to air ship half the print run to meet their release date (or use a domestic printer rather than going for cheaper production overseas), pay extra to another artist to fill in on short notice for the guy who flaked, buy out an unhappy partner, or accept the demands of a difficult licensor in order to keep the new releases flowing. And above all, if it works, keep doing it; and if you have reason to believe it's not working as well, or may stop working, start trying alternatives.

If you're a retailer or distributor, it's in your interest to provide feedback to the publishers/manufacturers, so they will do more of what is working and less of what's not. Thus, I trust what I hear from those tiers more than what I hear from any publisher spinning their circumstances to the fans at large; I have a pretty good idea what the retailer/distributor agenda is in giving me information -- it's to make more money by helping me do my job better, giving them what they need. When I made the decision in 2003 to drop d20 (a strategic shift that took two years to play out), I was paying attention to our raw sales figures and the trends I saw, and listening to the retailers and distributors and their growing problems with the category; had I disbelieved my lyin' eyes, and instead acted on the cheerful never-been-better reports put out by some publishers (which would have led me to increase investment in the category), we would be in a world of hurt today rather than enjoying one of the most successful years in the company's 15 year history.

To return to the thread topic: much of that success has been from products (such as the Gloom card game) that can't be effectively pirated over the internet, because their value is significantly related to the physical object of the game itself. Heck, we give the rules away for free on our website, for people who lose their rules or want to learn how the game plays before buying. Most everyone agrees that another recent big success in the hobby has been D&D minis -- again, not something you can very well upload to p2p networks.

Coincidence?

-John Nephew
President, Atlas Games

 

[sydbar]

Piracy is wrong, but so is robbery, and both have been common in the rpg industry, there even was a thread about it a few weeks ago here on the boards. The problem is that there will always be people that think they deserve something for nothing, and will do what ever it takes to get what they want, till someone comes up with a way to rewire people from those thoughts , it will be a big problem.