Will WOTC's Ending PDF Sales Because of Pirating Increase Pirating of their Stuff?

[DonTadow]

I can't believe that people at wotc are this stupid, i don't. I have seen ocr copies of WOTC books that were never released. Heck, people have been downloading and sharing dnd books online or over a decade. Talk to publishers and you find out its a quiet part of the business. The people who download rarely will buy but their friends will and it takes five people to have a game, so you count on at least 3 of them buying the copy.

There obviously other motives. I just hate that smaller companies like rpgnow is screwed, they seriously put a lot of money into marketing their 4e line.

Of course, what we will see is every wotc release scanned, ocr'd scrubbed of any copyrighting protection and distributed, just like the old days, except there won't be any official copies anymore. Even by those who don't use 4e.

Did anyone not learn from that time Whitewolf wanted to charge everytime you played a game at their table.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I know you could dismiss my question by saying, "Wow, sounds like that company hired all the evil people!" However, I think the truth is more that when companies take advantage of a beleaguered work force, at some point those people get actually hurt (emotionally, physically from sleep deprivation or stress or whatever, and so on) and act out. They're not evil, they're just human.

And so I'm wondering, seeing these self-inflicted wounds that WotC keeps fostering, if some people there are not quietly and perhaps maliciously saying yes to stupid ideas (or suggesting them!) with the thinking that the stupid company that laid off their friend deserves it. Maybe it's not even actively malicious. I know a lot of employees who "survived" layoffs during the dot-com bust, and many of them simply stopped caring. If someone made a poor decision, these employees would just shrug and say, "Whatever." They used to have some care, some spark that would incite them to raise flags and debate poor decisions, and then at some point, they just gave up.

If that's WotC now, I almost feel bad for the execs who do not realize that their workforce is no longer covering for them. So poor leadership flourishes unfettered.

This is a major problem with the corporate mentality, and one that spills out and affects society in general. The thing is, labour is inherently valuable. When you hire someone, you're increasing the worth of the company, because an employee is--practically by definition--worth more than he's paid. The difference between employee productivity and employee compensation is the value of labour. When a small private business owner hires an employee, they give up some of the responsibility for making a profit to the employee, thereby freeing their own time for either expanding the business or gaining leisure. A small business owner wants to hire people, because it increases the value of the business.

By contrast, a publicly-owned company views labour entirely as an expense. If an employee can be removed from the payroll, it increases the profit margin by the value of the employee's salary. Since the only thing that matters is quarterly profit expectations, the question of whether the employee's departure will negatively impact the company is irrelevant. The attitude is, "well, we can force the other employees to take up the slack, and if they don't like it, we'll fire them too." This can only go so far before one of two things happen: either someone notices that the company is suffering and makes some changes to policy, or the company drives itself into the ground by turning its own employees against it, as you describe above.

People know that their labour is valuable. And they resent being told that their employment at a company is merely a necessary evil on the way to profit generation. I think that the policy of viewing people not as valuable contributors to a project, but as instruments for someone else's gain, is the reason why so many people are so dissatisfied with their lives, despite living with historically superlative wealth and advantages.

 

[Shadowsong666]

Oh - looks like i missed some good stuff the last days.

Well, i think the decision of WoTC is just absurd and doesn't help at all. It will not change piracy as it is and it won't stop pirates getting the WoTC products they want.

OK, so lets see how the things are going online for all the Star Wars Saga Edition stuff in the pirate world - quick info for the uninformed: there have been no official pdfs of SWSE ever.

Lets take a look at the download sites:
Mega, Rapid and what they are all called: You get the books - all of them.
WotC was not able to stop piracy of their products - the not so digital ones...

Lets take a look at the torrent world:
TPB as example: I am able to get all basic books of SWSE with a torrent.
Did they stop piracy with going the "no pdf way" - NO.

Lets take a look at the usenet:
After a quick search you are able to get all the basic things here too.
Again, WoTC did not stop piracy. Still you find all the pdfs online...

Grab a wayback machine and lets go - IRC.
Grab your brain, know your way in the internet and you find SWSE books getting distributed atm...
Damn, still no way to stop piracy.

Sorry WoTC, but i think robbing me of the ability to buy your PDFs online was a bad decision. You lost money. If i am not able to get the digital stuff from you i think i might look for another way. Hopefully, me and other people who go digital won't turn to piracy. But thats not in my hands, isn't it?

Will it increase piracy?
I do not think so - but what i know for sure: it will not increase sales.

 

[Blue]

If there is PDF piracy, it shows that people want PDFs of the material. Of the people that would purchase a PDF if it was available, some percentage of them will turn to the only remaining means of getting the PDFs, which is illegally obtaining them.

Eh, I have hardcovers. But I still don't see this as a smart move for WotC. If you're going to move to some other digital distribution system, have it in place before you cut off selling PDFs.

 

[gamerprinter]

A little bird told me...

Now I find this both interesting and extreme, and really too smart for the folks at WotC to actually pull off, but... a little bird told me...

Now that the PDFs are pulled off the sales shelves everywhere, every nickel pirate will download an illegal copy of the mediocre release of PH2 - which has been pointed as the cause of this incident, by the socalled "eight pirates."

This will insure the widest possible distribution of said mediocre product to date.

Sometime next week, WotC, having listened to their fanbase will allow the PDFs back on sale, perhaps only at WotC sites, rather than the general RPG Drive Thru, and everyone wanting to support online media will go out of their way to order PH2.

WotC will sit quietly watching their failed product to have market ownership.

Of course I won't pirate a copy or buy one, if they do offer to start selling PDFs again, so the tactic won't work on me.

GP

Admin edit: Folks, this is an excellent example of the sort of thread-baiting and trolling you should post if you want to get booted from a thread. If you want to make a point, it's pretty easy to do so without using verbiage that is guaranteed to raise hackles and start arguments. We'd appreciate it if everyone took extra time to make sure that their anger isn't leaking through and affecting how they're posting. ~PCat

 

[Insight]

I don't understand why people feel the need to edition-bash or product-bash when it's so obviously off-topic. Go write your own review if that's what you want to do.

 

[grickherder]

I wonder if some people out there will take it as a challenge...

Definitely. As others have said, it's a statistical certainty that the guy willing to do it exists. I wouldn't be surprised if there's someone out there who's reaction to this is to make available nice OCR scans of all D&D products his/her new hobby.

It'd be a relatively cheap hobby too. $100 for the scanner. Good OCR software costs you nothing (hey, the guy's a pirate, remember?). D&D books don't have the fastest release schedule, so that's easy to keep up with.

A small investment for some torrent site street cred.

 

[fissionessence]

I wouldn't be surprised if there's someone out there who's reaction to this is to make available nice OCR scans of all D&D products his/her new hobby.

It'd be a relatively cheap hobby too. $100 for the scanner. Good OCR software costs you nothing (hey, the guy's a pirate, remember?). D&D books don't have the fastest release schedule, so that's easy to keep up with.

He doesn't need the scanner. Someone else will buy the books, scan, and begin distribution for him. He just needs to download it and clean it up.

~

 

[Fenes]

Another thing to consider is that the moral barrier to pirate is lowered a lot if you're not pirating instead of buying the product, but pirating a product the producer made unavailable and does not even want to sell.

It's really hard to sing the "oh, you are an evil criminal!" tune if you're not even selling the pirated products anymore - at least if you've got an ounce of self-respect left. And any claims of losing business and profits due to piracy of 3E material is quite laughable if you're not making any business anyway with 3E material anymore because you refuse to sell.

It's still illegal to pirate 3E pdfs, of course, but not on the same level as it was when there were legal alternatives.

 

[Bagpuss]

It's still illegal to pirate 3E pdfs, of course, but not on the same level as it was when there were legal alternatives.

Actually it is illegal at exactly the same level it was before.... ethically it might be more acceptable, but ethics and the law do not always agree.