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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4874982" data-attributes="member: 2067">Well, to be fair, WotC might have an advantage to it that we haven't seen. [sblock=example<img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":]" title="Devious    :]" data-shortname=":]" />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......makes 100% no sense. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> 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.</blockquote>

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