Graz'zt said:
I mostly endorse it. Everything but #1. No way in Hell would I pay a monthly fee for access to older D&D products. PoD sure. PDF sales, sure. DDI subscription to access 'em...nope.
It's a good thing I also say things like "Sell cheap PDFs, don't be scared of pirates, and Print On Demand is a good idea."
I wouldn't use the DDI as a cure-all, but the convenience and speed of it could be useful even for people who own PDFs or Lulu versions of the older books. It's not THE answer, but it's one prong of the answer. It's how you make it easy for people who want your stuff to give you money to use it.
Because if you do that, you can worry less and less about pirates.
I don't think that WotC should be afraid of pirates, but I do think that chasing after pirates is a good thing. Just ignoring the pirates and condoning their actions as a result doesn't help anybody but thieves and scum.
In any enterprise when you make things people want, you will be competing against people who make knock-offs. Store-brand groceries. Cereals in bags. Chinatown Coach bags. Digital piracy. Basic theft. It's going to happen, and you can't stop it. You can't use these as excuses to stop letting people give you money for things. You can certainly use it as an excuse to make the paper version better, or to make the rules able to be accessed in multiple places for a small fee, but if you just retreat into your shell, you're just shooting yourself in the foot over something that you can't stop. You can't achieve security; don't go crazy trying to. Put in place basic precautions, but the best way to fight piracy is to give people what they want at a reasonable price. Check out Hulu. It's the TV industry's best answer to torrent sites because it's just like watching TV, only BETTER. It's more convenient to watch a show on Hulu, most of the time, than it is to go download it....and cheaper than cable.
I'll tell ya this: selling PDFs for $30 was NOT more convenient than downloading the book.
TwinBahamut said:
I think he would be better off just listening to your first idea.
I don't think the first idea is a panacea. It's part of the solution but, as others pointed out, it can't be the entire solution. People generally want to give you money in a lot of different ways. Leeds just needs to set up the buckets to catch it (rather than taking the bucket away because someone might be catching some overflow).
I couldn't care less about open gaming. Cooperating with publishers so they can use the DDI to provide greater support for GSL products seems like a better idea to me.
The GSL -- even revised -- is borked. It accomplishes WotC's goals, but those goals are borked. They are too freaked out over brand identity. It is a game that is shamelessly based on public domain (and, in the case of Tolkein, sometimes not-so-public-domain) works and modularity (every DM has their own version of the game). Why work against that? All that does is put up walls where there shouldn't be walls.
It doesn't matter if YOU don't care about open gaming. This is another channel of money that WotC can get to flow into itself. More people in the hobby = more people playing D&D (even if they start off with some 4e of a different flavor). Wizards needs to care about open gaming.
I'm really not sure if there is any way for WotC to do this. It isn't the way I got into the hobby (I was lured in by raw D&D brand recognition), so I can't think of what they could do. I think simply stepping up in marketing might work better for them.
Brand recognition doesn't get six adults to sit in a room for four hours a week pretending to be an elf. You can't focus on individuals -- you need to focus on groups, because an individual can't play D&D by himself. Again, this is good to do through local gaming stores, and it's something that's basically impossible through the big-box retailers, so if WotC is serious about supporting the FLGSes, this would be a golden way to do it. Real, flesh-and-blood social networking.
