The Little Raven
First Post
SSquirrel said:Except that the situation I posed is WotC taking their DDI ball and going home, kinda like if your cable company went out of business or decided to stop selling cable service to people. You are totally behind the service, but they pull the rug out from under you out of nowhere is when it causes issues. Which is a future possibility only, not even really a super likely situation IMO. I was just generating the scenario that I personally would be hoping to avoid and upset about most. I did mention Dragon and Dungeon as downloadables, but that was outside the issue, other then most likely making up some portion of your monthly fee for DDI.
That sucks, but it's the peril of subscribing to a service. It wouldn't be the first time a service has died in the midst of my participation, and I doubt it will be the last, but that's the way the cookie crumbles, and I accept that. Know what you're getting into before you get into it is all I can suggest.
Besides there are other venues available to pick up those missed episodes. You can buy them rather cheaply for $2 an episode at iTunes. Those ARE yours and you download them and watch however much you want. ABC also has many shows on free viewing on their website. You just have to watch the SAME commercial over and over So ABC has more and better digital options than D&D does currently as right now it is either full price for print or print price for digital. Soon it will also throw in monthly subscription price and I really do hope it all goes well, I just don't see it as anything close to as good from a consumer viewpoint as selling reasonably priced pdfs.
Sure, I can do that... with some shows, but not all. Carnivale, for example, was an awesome show that got the rug pulled and now can only be found on DVDs or pirated on the internet.
You also mentioned distributors not being happy about cheaper pdfs, which is interesting b/c other game companies sell their pdfs at half price yet still get into the same stores that WotC does.
Comparing someone like Paizo or Goodman to WotC, in terms of how much revenue their products generate, is silly. If WotC started undercutting game stores with reduced-cost PDFs, the stores would suffer greatly because WotC holds such a huge market share. If Paizo did the same, the stores probably wouldn't notice at all, because most don't carry things unless it's from one of the big dogs (and no, Paizo is not a big dog). WotC needs retail stores far more than any of the d20 publishers, so they can't afford to alienate retailers and distributors.
I know that retail stores threatening not to carry companies is one of the main reasons for video games having the same downloadable price as they do in stores typically, but I have not heard teh same for the RPG business.
Might be because you don't pay as much attention to this stuff. I remember a huge furor going on when DriveThruRPG hit it big, and they explained why they weren't selling reduced-cost PDFs.
I mean, even Paizo sells over-priced PDFs, but I don't see complaints about those.