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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnNephew" data-source="post: 2721065" data-attributes="member: 2171">Contrast CCGs and RPGs.  For CCGs, that obsessive collector urge drives an important part of the game's market, leading to huge financial success for games like Magic, and enabling the publishers of such games to expand and invest in all kinds of exciting new products (such as buying D&D from the failing remains of TSR, launching high-investment lines like prepainted D&D/Star Wars minis, etc.).  Some would-be obsessive collectors can't shell out the money for a complete set of Moxes...should we feel bad for them, as you do for the underfunded RPG collectors?For RPGs, most of those obsessive collectors can now satisfy their compulsion just by downloading files for free.Knowing that file sharing is here to stay and growing, if you had $100,000 to invest in a business and you loved games but needed to make a living with your nest egg...which one would you pick for the long haul?Similarly, if you squat in peoples' cabins or vacation homes while they're away, they still have it -- you're just putting it to good use when they're not.  As long as you clean up your messes before they get back, I'm sure it's perfectly OK, whatever the law says.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I saw two books of ours show up on a pirate p2p directory website last week.  Two books that we sell through RPGNow, specifically (one is a core rulebook, the other an out-of-print supplement for the same).  If it hurts anyone, it hurts small publishers as well.File sharing is here to stay.  Few people who have made up their minds will be swayed by arguments about whether it is ethical or if it hurts publishers/authors.  There are enough unknowns and ambiguities that people will pick the evidence that they like, to support whatever they want to do and believe to feel good about themselves.Game publishers just have to accept piracy as a fact of the landscape, and take it into account when they decide where to invest and how much.  It may be that a lot of the RPG field should be ceded to amateurs and self-publishers, perhaps to business models like Greg Stolze's "ransom" plan, where once the author gets enough money an item is released free to all the world, so that piracy is irrelevant.-John NephewPresident, Atlas Games</blockquote>

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