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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DracoSuave" data-source="post: 5189663" data-attributes="member: 71571">I think, using their experience having actually released PDFs, they found it to be inviable.Anything else is guesswork, but they actually have experience in doing so.  You can question how it 'could make them money' but the fact is, they didn't, and as a business, you can probably gather it was because it was not making them money.Let's say they put it in PDF form.  Few customers actually get both PDF and hard copy.  So if the PDF gets bought or pirated, that's a lost sale on the hard copy.  Hard copies require manufacture.  And that incurrs costs.  In this case, you need to sell enough copies to not only cover the costs of their manufacture, but also the manufacture of future copies, so that you can have a continued supply.PDFs do put a dent in that, and I can see why a company that is in the business of creating hard copies (the buyers of which are their largest market) would not create something that not only harms your primary sales revenue in a 1:1 sense (negating the sale of the hard copy) but also directly affects the loss of other sales from piracy.Would you spend money to lose sales in this manner?  It doesn't make business sense, and I can see their point of view on it.  It's easier for them to -not- spend the money and -not- impact their primary sales than it is for them to make it available. Yes, it COSTS money to produce PDFs, and the worst part is, PDFs put out directly by wizards don't have anything to compete against PDFs that are pirated, especially when said pirated PDFs are the exact same file.  So, from a business standpoint, the only feature you're selling is 'They are legal' which is hard (and expensive) to enforce.Contrast that with DDI which -can- compete with illegal PDFs because it is a far more inclusive product.  Sure, it doesn't include the fiddly rules and such, but for what it is, there's no product, legal or otherwise, that competes with it.tl;dr:If you think that the PDF market is large enough to be sustainable for D&D, you're being naive.</blockquote>

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