The net effect of piracy on D&D?

[TheFlatline]

That is awesome. The correct way to do it would be to charge a credit card surcharge for purchases below the minimum, but that would be a breach of their contract with visa.

EDIT: And it would be a breach of their contract with visa because US finacial regulation is fucking dumb.

Wait whaaaaa? Can you explain this more please?

VISA's standard Merchant contract includes a provision that prevents you from charging a surcharge to reflect the fee that visa charges the merchants for handling the credit card transaction.

In Australia this was banned.

It's technically illegal in most of the US too, but it's never enforced, to the point where some credit card companies sort of under the table encourage the fee.

[cthulhu]

No, the provision is illegal in australia - quite a few vendors charge the fee.

[Ancient History]

Piracy Doesn't Matter by Adam Jury.

[shadzar]

Piracy today is what business struggles to do with promotion in years past to give away their products to get people interested.

Now people think well everyone knows about it cause everyone has internet and gaming stores, and gaming groups, etc...cause everyone has all the same opportunities in life and enough money as opposed to decades ago.

People that want to buy osmthing will, and others will take what they want. High prices of silly things, and espicially a dying media format leads more people to be elss likely to buy.

Piracy largely came about before the lawsuit that spurred the piracy fight because BIG MUSIC was price fixing CDs and giving little for the money, and blocking others from producing CDs in a competitive market. Well the lawsuit worked and BIG MUSIC was busted, but people look at other things and life and said...."is it really worth that price?"

the DRM filled crap like free music on pop-tart where you have to download a special program or be connected to the internet etc...isnt the same as old days where you walked into your grocer and the lady was frying sausage to get you to try it and hope you bought this new brand/flavor/etc.

the marketing models have driven people to need a testing field to get out product awareness or product support.

i remember back when one book was shared with the whole group as you pitched in to buy it. now you cant really do that cause people have to travel to get them, dont want to be without something to look up, etc. people want their own copies, and the way to get enough people to play...well some will never buy the books/gaming materials.

Take AD&D Core Rules CD-ROM, it had most of the books for a setting free game in it and people could look at it and find things quickly. People like that and where no electronic version is available will find a way to get it. Most wont buy the book, tear it apart and scan and OCR it themselves so....

Prices of electronic versions and ways to read them are also a problem. Charging the same or more for a book for digital, JUST BECAUSE you say it offers more? Its the same thing, and takes less overhead such as storage space, so shouldnt cost even close tot he same price let alone more.

Piracy wont be stopped unless a quality product for a decent price is mas produced enough.

Did piracy kill 2nd edition with AD&D Core Rules CD-ROM? No sales had already dwindled cause the Blumes and LW screwed it all up.

Piracy is really only talkd about by people wanting to get every cent for anything they produce, and are even looking for a way to charge people for sharing books and such like loaning yours out at a table to your friend who needs to look up Statblock X.

It helped 4th edition, from what i remember people getting the leaked copies were finally able to talk about stuff and got more people interested, and i am still not sure that wasnt a planned leak to stir interest.

End result, unlike a board game where only one copy is needed, Magic cards WILL be proxied by people who want to play but not buy them, books will be loaned to people to play D&D for those that are interested but dont want to get heavily invested...

People will buy what they want, and not buy what they dont want...plain and simple. For a dying industry that has given way to many more things it now tries to emulate and capture from those things (video games), then they should return to older methods to get people to buy things....lower priced quality products with lots of samples out there to get people interested.

Think of piracy like a drug dealer...they give a free taste to get you hooked, then start charging. Drug dealers probably learned that from old business models or vice versa...and it still works. Even the oldest profession gives free samples of a sort to get your interested in purchasing.

The business model that has evolved needs to change if they want to A) stop piracy from causing them "harm" (which i doubt it really does), and B) make people want to buy their products by giving something affordable to the masses. The way things are equated...a book is like 4 movies or something like that but last a lifetime...you cant rationalize things your way with others peoples money. A game costs abou $20 for a good board game and you dont need to buy much else....D&D costing int he range of $200 for a group of people to play offers little for that 10 times cost...and there is the problem and the solution.

While the quality may be disputed today, Chainmail was $5 if i remember right and is about that when it was sold in eBook format. You want people to buy more that normally wouldnt, make something they want to buy.

D&D was only helped by some things getting out there in "other ways" cause the nature of the game and getting people to play.

Net affect: it helps D&D is my opinion.

[Username17]

I would go a bit farther even than Adam Jury. Piracy is good for products people want. Piracy is a form of word of mouth. If your product is high quality, then more people looking at it will sell more copies. If your product can't sell itself, you probably shouldn't be selling it. And if people are pirating it, they are giving it the opportunity to sell itself.

-Username17

[FatR]

I wouldn't say that piracy is strictly beneficial. But (again, using myself as example), it only really hurts the products with unaffordably steep prices. During last years, I bought every PC game that I liked enough to get through, and that was sold locally, but not every console game that I similarly liked, because they cost three-six times as much here (sometimes over 100$ for big titles right after release) and I cannot afford such expenditure easily.

[fectin]

Piracy is complementary good with products that deliver good value. It is substitute for goods with poor value.

There. Now you can build economics charts, and possibly even get a paper out of it.

[TheFlatline]

I would go a bit farther even than Adam Jury. Piracy is good for products people want. Piracy is a form of word of mouth. If your product is high quality, then more people looking at it will sell more copies. If your product can't sell itself, you probably shouldn't be selling it. And if people are pirating it, they are giving it the opportunity to sell itself.

-Username17

I have a copy of Eclipse Phase on my bookshelf because they distributed the PDF for free. It was enough to get me interested in the game.

Not all games are D&D where you'll probably play a game where everyone has copies of at least the PHB. Odds are, you will only sell 1-2 copies of a core book to any given gaming group. If you're really lucky, you'll sell more, or there will be some freak like me who buys multiple copies of a core book to encourage game adoption within his group.

Paper books are still generally superior to electronic format, and I'm willing to wager that for most gaming groups, every group you get to start playing your game that has pirated it will buy at least 1 core book eventually to supplement the group.

That's only core books though. I really don't see pirating copies of the Book of the Undead from D&D resulting in increased sales. The more peripheral and less-used the book, the more sales will hurt it.

[Draco_Argentum]

Steam sales work so well because its a temporary reprieve from an otherwise high price. This stokes the "I'm getting a good deal" fires and puts a hard time limit which promotes snap decisions. Dropping the barrier to purchase to such low amounts drives the rest. At $5 we're talking the amount of cash I spend on unhealthy sugary beverages in a week.

The same model won't automatically work with pdfs. The barrier to piracy is higher on Steam games than it is on books since the game is often severely limited in function whereas a decent book scan is near as good as the real thing.

[JonSetanta]

I have a copy of Eclipse Phase on my bookshelf because they distributed the PDF for free. It was enough to get me interested in the game.

Someone, somebody, in that company spammed /tg/ for a week when it first came out. Very subtle like "Hey what is Eclipse Phase? Oh look, here's the obscure site of a brand spanking new RPG, and the free file for it.."
Many claimed it was viral advertising but damn it sure did work.

[adamjury]

sigma: While I obviously can't _prove_ to you that we didn't do that, we didn't do that. Or if others are the company did it (there are only 3 of us), they sure didn't tell me about it.

Between the low price of the EP PDFs and the Creative Commons licensing (and the quality of the book, of course), I think we generated buzz in the right way to cause it to "jump" to /tg/ in a positive way.

We're quite conscious of our online marketing/promotion efforts, but I don't think we're astroturfers.

Edit: and jumping back a few posts, our informal surveys show that a typical EP group of 4-6 people has 3 printed core books at the table. That sampling is probably biased as it comes from surveys of fans who are active on our forums, FB, etc -- but I think it shows that the title is propagating well through groups, beyond the "1 GM has the book and all the players borrow his copy" situation.