Why doesn't WotC license older editions?

[Nikosandros]

Double post.

 

[Bumbles]

Once again, the change did not in any way, shape, or form, benefit WotC.

For you, maybe not. For Wizards? Their answer may be entirely different.

Since I don't see them revealing their internal affairs any time soon, I suspect there's no real way to know. Unless you want to try to buy-out Hasbro?

Me, I know what happens when you keep doing the same old things because you think they were working for you, and if you want, I'm sure we can come up with a movie quote to illustrate it. After all, for every wise old saying, there's another equally wise and old saying to contradict it.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Well, to be fair, WotC might have an advantage to it that we haven't seen.
[sblock=example
For instance, say Hasbro wants to keep greater control of IP it owns. After all, as the creators of Transformers and GI Joe, they have some lucrative possibilities in the things that they make (which ultimately benefits in high-profit-margin plastic toys). Company-wide, Hasbro is enforcing a greater IP control.

WotC gets the memo, and they start thinking "where can we get greater control of our IP?" This might have been part of the 4e's GSL debacle right out the gate, but to the point here, they see piracy of their products. Specifically, they see same-day piracy of their PDF products.

Some suit somewhere has a freak out. "THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE!" he ('cuz it's probably a He) booms from his office with a window and a wooden desk. "We might not be able to stop piracy, but we don't have to do anything to enable it! How much do we make off of our PDF's anyway?"

The accountant shrugs. "Not much." After all, they're charging full cover price for the new titles on PDF files. It's a very, very tiny market. Older stuff probably sells more at $4 per pop, but even that probably isn't much of a blip on the radar. And the pressure's on, man! They need to protect IP! They need to stop piracy! IT IS COMMANDED!

"Kill the PDFs!" says the under-suit actually charged with making the hard decisions. "No one will care, and we need to control this better! We will please our user base in some other way."

Viola!

Of course, this is still borked, and at a very high level, but management making idiot decisions is nothing new (see also: Gleemax). WotC gained something out of it, I suppose. They can say: "We don't like pirates! Rargh!" and have some evidence to back it up. As far as that gets 'em, I guess.
[/sblock]
That's mostly rampant speculation, but it's not hard to see how various other high-level folk might be made happy by what is, in reality, a dumb decision, in a way that we're not really privy to.

HOWEVER, in the interest of keeping conversation fairly non-insane, I do have to point out that this...

Once again, the change did not in any way, shape, or form, benefit WotC

For you, maybe not. For Wizards? Their answer may be entirely different.

...makes 100% no sense. Prof C is arguing that WotC didn't benefit from this decision at all. Saying "Well, maybe WotC didn't benefit from this decision at all for you" is like saying "Maybe 2+2=5 for you, but their answer may be entirely different!" Maybe WotC did get a benefit from it, but whether they did or not doesn't really depend on Prof C's perspective. It's not a subjective thing (though it could be, and probably is, something we don't have complete knowledge on). Either they did and we don't know about it, or they didn't and there's nothing to know, so Prof C is basically right.

But appealing to stuff we can't possibly know is generally not a good argument. "Maybe there's a good reason that we just don't know!" Sure. Totally possible. If you can't think of what that reason might be, though, you're basically taking it on trust and faith, and that's not a reason. That's saying: "I don't need a reason, because I believe that they're smarter than me when it comes to their own business." Totally a valid position to take, probably true, but it doesn't give anyone else a reason to agree with you. It's kind of like telling an atheist to just have faith and believe in God because God has a Plan. That's not a reason to believe, though that is a reason not to need a reason to believe. "I have faith that WotC made this decision knowing the benefits and the costs, and that they made the decision because it benefits them" is not a benefit, but it's a reason not to need to see a benefit to believe there is one.

*big breath*

And I think that WotC thought there was one in the removal of PDF's. I'm not convinced they were right (though I'm convinced that at least the suits are convinced that they were right). The whole "You get $4 and have a marginal cost of effectively nil on books you don't publish anymore anyway and so are otherwise just sitting on" is a good case for putting pack at least PDFs of earlier editions.

And WotC has, IIRC, mentioned making older-edition stuff available somehow again. I'm sure it's not a priority, and maybe they haven't figured it out, and won't until 2030 or whatever, but making the older stuff available is something they see a virtue in. So the PDF yoinking wasn't about keeping older stuff off the market, at any rate.

 

[Bumbles]

Well, to be fair, WotC might have an advantage to it that we haven't seen.

And so I wonder why you think what I said makes 100% no sense. You seem to have understood what I said well enough. You may not agree, but you seem to have gotten it.

That's saying: "I don't need a reason, because I believe that they're smarter than me when it comes to their own business." Totally a valid position to take, probably true, but it doesn't give anyone else a reason to agree with you.

That's ok, I realize that I'm not going to convince anybody because I know so little. Believe it or not, I'd like to know more. But I realize that there are times when ignorance is a weakness, and when you can think something's a bad idea even if it has negative effects, yet to the person involved, it's really not so bad to them.

Believe it or not, there are folks who don't pick up small change off the street.

Ah well, listening to Hasbro's earnings report in the hopes of them mentioning something related to the PDF issue, but I'm not hearing much so far.

 

[diaglo]

Didn't Paizo have some connection to SVGames? Shared some owners or something?

iirc it was Jim Butler who produced the scans.
originally he had proposed it to TSR/WotC. and back then were all ears.
they had them free as downloads on their site from ~1997 on... H1 was one of the first ones.

then as the project expanded and he promised free pdfs on CD if you donated your modules and books (which were destroyed in the process and not returned) it got moved.

SVGames took up the mantle for a while. but didn't have much business luck.
Paizo and a few others picked it up from there.

 

[I'm A Banana]

And so I wonder why you think what I said makes 100% no sense. You seem to have understood what I said well enough. You may not agree, but you seem to have gotten it.

Probably just a weird structure thing then. You seemed to be saying that whether or not WotC had a benefit was subjective. Glad we understand each other then!

But I realize that there are times when ignorance is a weakness, and when you can think something's a bad idea even if it has negative effects, yet to the person involved, it's really not so bad to them.

The big question in my mind is whether or not WotC is deluding themselves into thinking that it was a good idea.

The piracy thing has a history of making companies do insane things that are also horrible business decisions. The companies don't believe these to be horrible business decisions, or at all insane. Many companies -- especially bigger ones -- have a long and storied history of doing things that are really dumb just because of some short-term gain. Mostly, this is a normal human trait magnified on a grand scale and given an absurd level of free reign.

So it's possible with this PDF issue that WotC is patting themselves on the back for doing something exceptionally dumb, but they just don't know it, or can't see it, or refuse to see it because that would mean big changes that the management isn't flexible enough to handle.

I don't know a lot of good reasons to dismiss someone who wants to give you $4 for a copy of something you've got sitting in your closet. "Piracy!" isn't a good reason, but it's the only reason people can think of for WotC doing this, and the only real reason they've given. If people are missing the real point, they certainly chose the wrong red herring to give the public when explaining themselves!

 

[winddomino]

While what you say is true of some people, there are quite a few who move on to new editions because that's what the market does, even if they'd prefer an older edition. And even if that's only a small percentage of the market, it's a small percentage of a small market.

It costs X dollars, minimum, to produce a halfway decent book. That's the case whether you're marketing to the entire market, or only a portion of the market. That split would more than counteract any small additional income--and it would be small, in WotC terms--to be found marketing to the followers of previous editions.

 

[Bumbles]

Probably just a weird structure thing then. You seemed to be saying that whether or not WotC had a benefit was subjective. Glad we understand each other then!

Yep, you seem to have understood what I was saying.

The big question in my mind is whether or not WotC is deluding themselves into thinking that it was a good idea.

Certainly a valid question, but I don't know how we can answer it.

And as I recall some postings on the piracy issue, it doesn't just make customers act crazy, it makes some of the pirates behave in a crazy fashion.

Insanity. It's breaking out all over!

 

[Nikosandros]

then as the project expanded and he promised free pdfs on CD if you donated your modules and books (which were destroyed in the process and not returned) it got moved.

That part was really ridiculous: give away your OOP book in exchange for a $5 PDF... yeah, right...

 

[billd91]

That part was really ridiculous: give away your OOP book in exchange for a $5 PDF... yeah, right...

Oh, I don't know about that. There are people with multiple copies of things that wouldn't mind sparing one...