Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="joethelawyer" data-source="post: 4744323" data-attributes="member: 55764">So what does WOTC do next?  Come on, we're mostly DM's here, and are used to plotting the actions of arrogant powerful bad guys.  Assume the bad guy just screwed up and blew his cover as a villain, and needs to recover a bit.  What does WOTC do next?         First, apologize profusely.      Second, the smart thing is to allow a grace period for people to go back and download pdf's from RPGNow, if they already bought them.      Next, I would allow all sites a grace period for sales of pdf's, for all those who didn't get a chance to get what they wanted.      Fourth announce your intentions as to pdf sales.  You have to keep up the pretense of piracy for the reason you pulled the pdf's in the first place, even though 95% of the customers don't believe you.  State that you intend to make pdf's available once you get some form of DRM plan in place.      Ignore questions as to whether you will allow access to older editions.  Then make an announcement sometime later that due to your dedicated mission of listening to your Valued Customer feedback, you will be making the older pdf's available, after you of course convert your CURRENT product line over.  The delay tactic worked with the GSL modifications, so it ought to work again with the suckers, I mean customers.      Later, after much delay, the older product pdf's never actually get converted, or only some token ones do, the phony reason stated is because of staffing resources, technical problems, cost vs. return, or whatever you think they'll believe.      In the meantime, make the pdf's available only through DDI.  This shores up the disappointing revenue stream by hopefully getting new customers to sign up for the pdf’s, which is after all the real reason you pulled the  pdf's anyhow. At least for another quarter or two, you have saved your job.   You also get the claim the move as a major expansion of DDI, which is destined to bring in more revenue.  After all, look how many pdf's sold the day you announced that pdf's were no longer going to be sold?  That’ll look good for the next quarterly meeting coming up in just a couple weeks.      Sales projections are of course made based on that BS, and a future disaster looms when those revenue goals are not met. But hey, you have another quarter or two with a job. (Note to self---spiff up the resume, befriend Erik Mona on Facebook).      In the meantime, the formerly fractured customer base rears its head and looks around, decides that hey, we may be cousins who fight each other a lot, but we are cousins after all.  Only I am allowed to beat my cousin’s arse!  How dare WOTC do that to my gaming cousins!!  That’s the last straw!  I’m never buying from WOTC again!!       If only a percentage of those people follow through on that promise, other game systems, From Paizo and Green Ronin all the way to the Retroclones experience a growth in their customer base.      The new feeling of brotherhood amongst gamers lasts until Diaglo proclaims that the only true Dungeons and Dragons is OD&D.  It all goes to hell from there.</blockquote>

Verification