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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steve Conan Trustrum" data-source="post: 2624167" data-attributes="member: 1620">Your statement is addressed to a false commentary, however. The "big" publshers don't mainly complain about the competition, but rather the damage to their branding. In fact, that's why most ofthe 'big" print companies have left RPGnow: it doesn't do much for their branding to be selling the PDF version of the product they've spent thousands of dollars developing and producing on the same page as the d20 product put out by the guy who clearly has never read the OGL, the guy who took a free download directly from WotC's site only to slap their own art into it and sell it as theirs, or the guy who decided it would be good to save cash and have the PDF illustrated by a buddy who can do little better than stick figures. How many brand name companies in other industries would let their company sell to buyers who wanted to put their product in a dollar store? Quite simply, they wouldn't because it would damage their brand.I personally still have major issues with the split and am not its biggest fan--I think there could have been other steps before going to this point, but it doesn't mean that one ignores the fact that there WAS/IS a problem of this sort in the PDF rpg industry and that it is the reason why the "big" guys complain, not because of any competition because, let's face it, VERY few of the little guys are actually competing for sales with those companies. It's not arrogant for anyone to say that. It's them bluntly stating a legitimate problem many of the smaller publishers would rather not recognize; so many of the small guys have no other experience in the industry that they take criticism as a personal insult and so their latest product has seen no changes or improvement over their earliest. Many of the neophyte publishers do things like use free Geocity accounts for their "company' web sites or have hand-drawn and scanned logos because there are a lot of people who want to earn money from PDF rpgs but nowhere near enough of them realize they have to spend some money first! That is not the sort of thing that an established publisher wants his product sitting next to, and rightly so--it certainly isn't arrogance for them to say it or for them to desire not to sell their product next to something that looks like it was put together for use in one's house campaign rather than sold as a product. Despite my worries about other problems that may arise because of the split, hopefully the desire to move up to the new site will be sufficient incentive for some people to realize that their ego has little place in a serious business, even one that can be as fun as producing rpgs.</blockquote>

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