A situation where piracy has screwed the common gamer:
http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/14693.html
Also WotC’s attempt to fight back against the pirates:
http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/14690.html
Major suckage. I liked buying digital versions of rule books.
Also major hurt for the online sellers… 20% of their profits gone just like that.
Too bad. I hope they can find another way to distribute their products online safely.
And, as usual, supporters of piracy claim “it has nothing to do with piracy”. Can you say “expectable”?
I quitted D&D after the release of the fourth edition :evil: , but this new crap idea from the Evil Wizards worries me for a different reason.
The WotC PDFs accounted for around half (ballpark figure, of course) of http://www.onebookshelf.com/ sales, for example. I hope that the PDF online shops can survive this development :roll: …
I’m not a huge 4ED fan myself: the changes aren’t to my liking. However 4ED is very popular and well taken by those who do like it. According to Hasbro’s financial releases, the game is a gold mine. You really can’t blame WotC for wanting to make money. They are first and foremost a corporation: they need money to make more money. That being said, they also make good game books. Just because I dislike 4ED, doesn’t mean I can’t recognize they have good ideas, which I sometimes borrow and redesign to work with OGL stuff.
Therefore I bought WotC PDF’s: I didn’t need the hardback books, because I don’t actively run or play 4ED campaigns.
The digital PDF market was truly an honor system. You got a download and gave your word to not distribute it to others. There was no DRM or file locks: just this faint small print at the bottom, that said who downloaded it and where they got it from (your license seal so to speak). Fuck piracy for screwing that up.
PDF sales for the Player’s Handbook 2 were said to be in the mere hundreds for some online distributors. It shocked everyone. Despite high praise from reviewers and gamers, the sales reflected a dud. WotC even started asking gamers what they did wrong with PH2 - the common answer was they didn’t do anything wrong: it was a great book. People are praising the lack of power creep, careful rule balance, and zero sucky classes. Piracy [u]DID[/u] have an impact on sales.
Now we gamers are going to pay for it, and so will the online stores. Because if WotC is going to lose sleep over it, they’re not in the business to just let it happen. The deal was they’d give good material, we’d give good money. Seems too many people broke their end of the bargain…
… And little things like the economic crisis at the moment making a lot of people think they don’t really need an expensive optional book for a rules system that’s already working out okay for them? What impact did that have?
Wizards would come out looking better in this instance if they simply refused to release pdf versions of NEW products. This would enable them to compare sales and piracy rates for things that did have PDF version and didn’t, and not screw over the people who paid for PDF copies with promises of ability to redownload, and not set themselves up for resentment in the obvious fallout: “Well, I want a digital copy of the rules, and I would have paid for them, but now I have no choice but to pirate…” Of course, many pirates are self-justifiers who say they would have paid for things when they in fact would not have. However, it’s also perfectly clear that there is a strong benefit to being able to have the rules in digital format, and by locking themselves out of that market they make the illegal option preferable to the legal one.
Now, if they have any brains, they’ll fix the situation by making properly cross-referenced PHP online-only versions of rulebooks available through subscription to their website. That’s one thing even the PDFs don’t have - proper cross-reference linking. And if done through some clever webcode instead of raw HTML, it’ll be at least slightly difficult for people to download all the pages and make their own home edition. Not impossible, but enough work not to be worth it for most people. AFAIK, the Compendium isn’t quite there yet, but with some improvements…
Even taking that into consideration, 70% sales drop is much too drastic (and only on the digital market; the hardcover is doing fine). 50% maybe… but nearly four-fifths the market? Not even the auto industry’s SUV sales are hurting that badly. Also the piracy rate is insane. According to one torrent provider, PH2 was downloaded by 45,000 unique IP sessions.
Even if that’s the case, and a massive chunk of the market is gone, WotC would rather people NOT own it (and thus not having bought it), than have people pirate it for free. In one scenario neither gets anything they want, while in the other, the company gets screwed. Obviously companies like doing the screwing; not getting screwed. 
It’s also pretty well known that WotC has a LOT of lawyers on tap… they probably wanted to let their dogs go for a walk. It’s also no secret that WotC doesn’t like the digital PDF market to begin with (it’s their largest competition)… they only went after it, because it was a profit potential. When that potential goes away, obviously WotC isn’t going to stay with it. It’s not like PH2 was the only title that got pirated and lost money on the digital front (that new undead book suffered too). It was merely the straw that finally broke the camel’s back.
When a big company gets screwed, there’s always two side effects: the customers get screwed, and the middle man (shops) are screwed even more. Nothing new… but the central culprit in this case, is digital piracy, not government interference or a hidden corporate agenda.
While I think that piracy was the culprit, I do not think they are abandoning it, but rather remodeling it possibly in a way to make certain they have a central online resource so to speak so that when they do they can exclude the middle man and also limit piracy at the same time. There is clearly a demand for PDF versions out there; they know it. The problem for them is how to safeguard it so they can rake in as much money as possible.
And there is no good solution. Anything you might come up with which would actually be effective at preventing world+dog from pirating the book is guaranteed to be crippled in some way as to make life difficult for the consumer. Nobody’s been able to come up with DRM that actually works, for fundamental theoretical reasons (the goal of DRM is to prevent access, yet DRMed products must grant this access, therefore they’re inevitably swiss cheese). The only schemes which actually seriously dent piracy are invasive because the ease of workarounds is so great.
So either WotC puts up with the piracy, or they pull the product entirely, or they chain it up so tightly they may as well have pulled it entirely. Remember the early days of music stores? Extremely restrictive DRM? Then when the DRM was relaxed (Apple) sales suddenly skyrocketed? The same thing seems to be happening with eBook stores – really bad DRM and low sales. (Nobody’s really founded a successful business yet, except Kindle, which is so new it’s hard to gauge whether it’s got lasting power or not.)