As I've mentioned here, I'm starting to think that piracy--at least as far as tabletop games are concerned--actually helps out the product when done in small-to-medium amounts.
The biggest entry to playing tabletop games is getting other people to play it. You can have the best system in the world on your hands but if no one else wants to play it then the system fails. There are various reasons why people don't want to start playing in the first place; some of it is just because of this self-sustaining cycle (you don't think you'll find interested people so you don't purchase it, same for the next guy) but some of it is just because some people aren't even willing to pay ten bucks for a set of core books.
The thing is, even if people are playing your game for free they serve as anchors for people who are willing to pay money for your product. I know because I am one of them. Up until the March errata fiasco, I seriously owned every 4th Edition book except for Draconomicon, Eberron Campaign Guide, and some of the published adventures. This is because I could find a group for this. On the other hand, I doubt that more than a third of the players I was with at any time actually paid real cash money for either the books or the character builder. Even so, if they didn't pirate the copies of the CB or the books, I wouldn't have had enough people to ensure a game. Which means that I wouldn't have made those legal purchases.
That said, how much piracy needs to take place before it actually starts hurting WotC's bottom line? While I'm sure that they or any gaming company would love for a group to have purchased all of their books, the reality is that they may have to settle for less than half of their playerbase actually doing so. Otherwise it's a goose that laid the golden egg scenario.
The net effect of piracy on D&D?
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Lago PARANOIA
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The net effect of piracy on D&D?
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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JonSetanta
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A decade ago I spent $60 or more to buy the core 3 set of 3.0 books.
Then I bought the 3.0 Psionics and 3.0 Guide to Planes books later.
Even then, this is addition to the $60 or so I spent on the core 3 for AD&D years before, which were made obsolete by 3.0e.
A few years later even the 3.0 books were semi obsolete by 3.5, which I refused to buy since I already bought the previous half-edition.
All of my books had changed (and improved).
So in a nerd rage I dove into piracy. PDFs, torrents, sharing pools of resources with friends.
As of now I have 3.92 gigs of official 3.0 and 3.5 publications on disk, in addition to even more third party and similar extra publications I pick up every now and then, each with their own folder for separate game systems.
I haven't spent a cent on 4e or Pathfinder, as it should be.
Feels good man.
Then I bought the 3.0 Psionics and 3.0 Guide to Planes books later.
Even then, this is addition to the $60 or so I spent on the core 3 for AD&D years before, which were made obsolete by 3.0e.
A few years later even the 3.0 books were semi obsolete by 3.5, which I refused to buy since I already bought the previous half-edition.
All of my books had changed (and improved).
So in a nerd rage I dove into piracy. PDFs, torrents, sharing pools of resources with friends.
As of now I have 3.92 gigs of official 3.0 and 3.5 publications on disk, in addition to even more third party and similar extra publications I pick up every now and then, each with their own folder for separate game systems.
I haven't spent a cent on 4e or Pathfinder, as it should be.
Feels good man.
The Adventurer's Almanac wrote: ↑Fri Oct 01, 2021 10:25 pmNobody gives a flying fuck about Tordek and Regdar.
As I'm living in Russia "to pirate or not to pirate" wasn't generally even a question until I got my own job and learned what Amazon is. I can say though, that I blew a significant sum (over 1k of dollars) on 3.X books when I already was deep in the hobby and could afford them. Plus some on other systems. I still always download stuff before buying it, to avoid buying crap (RPGs still are quite an expensive hobby by local standards).
Last edited by FatR on Fri Nov 26, 2010 10:01 pm, edited 2 times in total.
The problem with piracy is that you don't actually lose sales. When people have money, they pay because having the actual copy is just better than flipping through a PDF.
Piracy really hurts for crap books. I mean, when there is one good feat in a book, you are not going to buy it. You are going to ask your bud who did buy it to bring it when you play.
And that's the problem. RPGs are reference books, first and foremost. People who seem to try to sell flavor texts seem to be missing the point because that's the crap you pirate.
I mean, I'm not bringing a book with flavor about the City of Sharn to a game. I am bringing a book with my spells in it because I'll need to look at them during the game.
Piracy really hurts for crap books. I mean, when there is one good feat in a book, you are not going to buy it. You are going to ask your bud who did buy it to bring it when you play.
And that's the problem. RPGs are reference books, first and foremost. People who seem to try to sell flavor texts seem to be missing the point because that's the crap you pirate.
I mean, I'm not bringing a book with flavor about the City of Sharn to a game. I am bringing a book with my spells in it because I'll need to look at them during the game.
Last edited by K on Fri Nov 26, 2010 11:20 pm, edited 2 times in total.
I pretty much bought the L5R d10 base book, clan books and Shadowlands books for the art and flavor text. The mechanics are at best opaque and I will probably never play the game. But I love the way the books are written. I also recently bought an old copy of the Shadowrun Sprawl Guide, despite having previously owned it and having it on my computer. And if I ever find a copy of the Street Samurai Catalog for a decent price I will buy it too, never mind that I won't get to use it at all.K wrote:And that's the problem. RPGs are reference books, first and foremost. People who seem to try to sell flavor texts seem to be missing the point because that's the crap you pirate.
Good flavor text sells, good rules sell, good books sell. Despite or in some cases because of piracy.
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power word wedgie
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Well, I think that it cuts both ways. You are correct ... the issue with roleplaying games is that you need a group, and if you can't find one it doesn't matter how many books you have. Thus, in turn, the pirates are at least giving a forum for those who pay, and probably would no longer pay if they couldn't find a group. However, it becomes a fine line, since slowing the motto becomes why pay for anything when you can get it for free. I think that the music industry is suffering from that, and I'm guilty of it; I can't remember the last time I bought an album.
Also, there is the aspect that when digital files were not freely available, it helped "herd" people into newer gaming systems, which in turn helped perpetuate the gaming industry. Though people liked older systems, they could never find a group since the books were hard to find for newer players. That no longer is the case, so the jump-start for new systems is no longer there.
Finally, I think that the paper aspect is slowly receding. Yes, many people still like to turn the pages and prefer print format. However, I can tell you over the last three to five years that for me the paper nostalgia is pretty much gone. After moving a few times, I'm getting sick of hauling around my books. I'm getting to the point of scanning in all of my books and discarding them; it is a huge waste of money, but I getting the positive side is that I could have spent it on crack instead. And part of my mentality has to go with just how I work: five years ago, I used to file things in cabinets, but now I scan everything and keep it electronically. What's this issue with this? Well, it seems to be easier to pirate electronic copies much easier than paper copies, which perpetuates the issue even more.
Note that I'm not complaining: frankly I think that it is the new reality. With the economy and frugality the way it is, discretionary income for gaming systems takes a back seat very quickly. I'm thinking that WotC probably isn't going gangbusters, and I was under the impression that the board games were keeping them afloat, not roleplaying. (But things might have changed since) Possibly, over time, the hobbyist will keep roleplaying going, not companies, for the simple reason that there just isn't an economic model for it. Or I could be all wrong ...
Also, there is the aspect that when digital files were not freely available, it helped "herd" people into newer gaming systems, which in turn helped perpetuate the gaming industry. Though people liked older systems, they could never find a group since the books were hard to find for newer players. That no longer is the case, so the jump-start for new systems is no longer there.
Finally, I think that the paper aspect is slowly receding. Yes, many people still like to turn the pages and prefer print format. However, I can tell you over the last three to five years that for me the paper nostalgia is pretty much gone. After moving a few times, I'm getting sick of hauling around my books. I'm getting to the point of scanning in all of my books and discarding them; it is a huge waste of money, but I getting the positive side is that I could have spent it on crack instead. And part of my mentality has to go with just how I work: five years ago, I used to file things in cabinets, but now I scan everything and keep it electronically. What's this issue with this? Well, it seems to be easier to pirate electronic copies much easier than paper copies, which perpetuates the issue even more.
Note that I'm not complaining: frankly I think that it is the new reality. With the economy and frugality the way it is, discretionary income for gaming systems takes a back seat very quickly. I'm thinking that WotC probably isn't going gangbusters, and I was under the impression that the board games were keeping them afloat, not roleplaying. (But things might have changed since) Possibly, over time, the hobbyist will keep roleplaying going, not companies, for the simple reason that there just isn't an economic model for it. Or I could be all wrong ...
One thing that I think 3.5 suffered from is splat books where it is 50%+ filler. Let's look at Complete Arcane for a second, it's 192 pages long, I've never used the back half of it. The front half of it is also rife with filler, they copy the block of text which explains what +1 spell caster level means in every frickin' PrC and every PrC has a useless, poorly built sample character and some lame fluff. You could seriously distill the good parts of Complete Arcane into 75 pages, maybe even 50 pages.
Books like that left me feeling kind of ripped off, books like Unearthed Arcana are a lot better because it has almost no filler. I have most of the completes, but if WotC didn't try to sell me a 75 page book for the price of a 200 page book I'd have all of them and a lot more.
Books like that left me feeling kind of ripped off, books like Unearthed Arcana are a lot better because it has almost no filler. I have most of the completes, but if WotC didn't try to sell me a 75 page book for the price of a 200 page book I'd have all of them and a lot more.
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Ancient History
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Piracy hurts different industries in different ways, and even the players within the different industries more.
When you're a very small company, supporting yourself on sales can be difficult. Independent creators are unlikely to sell enough to live on. To them, every potential sale lost to piracy can be felt right in their pocket book. But then you look at Eclipse Phase and see a company that has embraced piracy as inevitable, so they use it as a means to an end rather than something to be worried about.
Which is where Wizards of the Coast pretty much dropped the ball. TSR had a shitty grasp of the whole internet thing, but WotC is internet-savvy. Their concern about piracy, however, eventually turned into a huge financial blow because they stopped selling online pdfs, period. This is a case where WotC, the biggest player in the industry, was wound so tight about internet piracy that they shot themselves in the foot and killed all potential online sales just to prevent the loss of hardcopy sales.
It was madness.
Because, as much as they're a bunch of thieves and crooks, look at Catalyst Games Lab, who regular releases old sourcebooks as online .pdfs for relatively small prices. These are books you can bittorrent anyway, but for the small outlay of scanning and cleaning up a little, CGL can sell these things forever. The production costs are sunk and were carried by a dead company anyway, so anything over 50 sales (if that) has got to be profit.
If there is a relatively affordable and legal alternative to piracy, people will go for it. I'm not sure what percentage we're talking about here, but you know it exists: look at iTunes. The trick is to make the material easily accessible, high quality, and at a price-point which people will add-to-cart instead of balking.
I don't think that piracy actually hurt D&D, except insofar that WotC denied themselves sales by killing their own online document system.
When you're a very small company, supporting yourself on sales can be difficult. Independent creators are unlikely to sell enough to live on. To them, every potential sale lost to piracy can be felt right in their pocket book. But then you look at Eclipse Phase and see a company that has embraced piracy as inevitable, so they use it as a means to an end rather than something to be worried about.
Which is where Wizards of the Coast pretty much dropped the ball. TSR had a shitty grasp of the whole internet thing, but WotC is internet-savvy. Their concern about piracy, however, eventually turned into a huge financial blow because they stopped selling online pdfs, period. This is a case where WotC, the biggest player in the industry, was wound so tight about internet piracy that they shot themselves in the foot and killed all potential online sales just to prevent the loss of hardcopy sales.
It was madness.
Because, as much as they're a bunch of thieves and crooks, look at Catalyst Games Lab, who regular releases old sourcebooks as online .pdfs for relatively small prices. These are books you can bittorrent anyway, but for the small outlay of scanning and cleaning up a little, CGL can sell these things forever. The production costs are sunk and were carried by a dead company anyway, so anything over 50 sales (if that) has got to be profit.
If there is a relatively affordable and legal alternative to piracy, people will go for it. I'm not sure what percentage we're talking about here, but you know it exists: look at iTunes. The trick is to make the material easily accessible, high quality, and at a price-point which people will add-to-cart instead of balking.
I don't think that piracy actually hurt D&D, except insofar that WotC denied themselves sales by killing their own online document system.
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Draco_Argentum
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mlangsdorf
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SJ Games argues that less than 40% of the final price is printing and warehousing physical product. Per them, most of the expense is editing, which increases in cost with the square of the length of the product.
I don't know how true that is, but most of the companies that are still selling PDFs and books are not giving more than a 25-40% on the PDFs over the physical books, so its at least a supportable argument.
I don't know how true that is, but most of the companies that are still selling PDFs and books are not giving more than a 25-40% on the PDFs over the physical books, so its at least a supportable argument.
Well, not even the publisher makes the total price. The distribution warehouse sells to the game store for another chunk of the sale price, and the store marks it up even more. So a book gets sold to the distributer for $12 who sells it to a store for $20 and the game store sells it for $30.mlangsdorf wrote:SJ Games argues that less than 40% of the final price is printing and warehousing physical product. Per them, most of the expense is editing, which increases in cost with the square of the length of the product.
I don't know how true that is, but most of the companies that are still selling PDFs and books are not giving more than a 25-40% on the PDFs over the physical books, so its at least a supportable argument.
Online sales make sense because you can skip both middlemen and get a bigger share of the profit. So if you spent 300K on writers and editors and sell ir for $6.00 online and it costs you $1 per book to sell it from servers and customer support, then you only need to sell 60K copies to start making a profit.
Sell a million copies and you make 4.7 million in profit.
Those are gross simplifications because server and customer support costs tend to be static and not per book, but you get my point.
The ultimate model for online sales currently is steam. One web store and one application has had a tremendous impact on the entire market.
The lesson is probably to extract premium pricing upfront, then engage in an endless cycle of aggressively promoted sales and discounting because your incremental costs are nil.
Gabe Newell has some slides about how the 'freeplay' weekends combined with 50-75% discounts increased profits (not just sales) on that game because sales spiked so much.
The lesson is probably to extract premium pricing upfront, then engage in an endless cycle of aggressively promoted sales and discounting because your incremental costs are nil.
Gabe Newell has some slides about how the 'freeplay' weekends combined with 50-75% discounts increased profits (not just sales) on that game because sales spiked so much.
Those stats are fucking insane.In fact, it dramatically increased sales. Illustrating his point, Newell showed the results of a Left 4 Dead promotion Valve ran last weekend, which cut the price of the game in half to $25. The discount (and promise of new content for the game) rocketed sales of the game on Steam by 3,000 percent.
"We sold more in revenue this last weekend than we did when we launched the product," says Newell. "We were driving a huge uptick in revenue and attracting new customers." And while people believe that we're "screwing" retail, Newell showed that brick-and-mortar sales were unaffected by the online discount.
I have no idea why ebook sellers haven't atleast given this a shot.When Valve held its recent holiday sale, titles discounted by 10 percent (the minimum) they saw revenue (not unit) increases of 35 percent. At a 25 percent discount, revenue was up 245 percent.
At 50 percent off, revenue was up 320 percent, and at a 75 percent discount, revenue was up an astonishing 1470 percent. Newell stressed again that those revenue boosts represent actual revenue dollars, and not unit volumes.
Last edited by cthulhu on Sun Nov 28, 2010 7:18 am, edited 2 times in total.
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TheFlatline
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Even when people sell ebooks, they screw it up. I went to an indie publishing website and found a pdf for 4.99 I wanted to buy. I tried to buy it and was told I hadn't spent enough money to actually *buy* the PDF. I wrote to them and said that the web site doesn't have any BS about minimum purchases, and that I had no idea what the minimum amount actually was.
They said 5 dollars was the minimum purchase price due to the cost of credit card transactions and that I'd have to buy something else in addition. I kindly pointed out that they could have increased the price of the PDF by a penny and I'd have been a happy customer. They basically said stuff it in a polite way. I know they want me to buy another 5 dollar PDF and double their profit margin. I told them they'd be getting no business out of me as long as they had products that if you purchased individually, you weren't allowed to actually buy because they were "too cheap", where they spring this on you in a half-assed way.
So I pirated the goddamn thing because they wouldn't *sell* it to me.
And people wonder why indie publishers have trouble...
They said 5 dollars was the minimum purchase price due to the cost of credit card transactions and that I'd have to buy something else in addition. I kindly pointed out that they could have increased the price of the PDF by a penny and I'd have been a happy customer. They basically said stuff it in a polite way. I know they want me to buy another 5 dollar PDF and double their profit margin. I told them they'd be getting no business out of me as long as they had products that if you purchased individually, you weren't allowed to actually buy because they were "too cheap", where they spring this on you in a half-assed way.
So I pirated the goddamn thing because they wouldn't *sell* it to me.
And people wonder why indie publishers have trouble...
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.
EDIT: And it would be a breach of their contract with visa because US finacial regulation is fucking dumb.
Last edited by cthulhu on Mon Nov 29, 2010 9:00 am, edited 1 time in total.
Here is one Publisher who does get it:
Www.webscription.net
Www.webscription.net
Wait whaaaaa? Can you explain this more please?cthulhu wrote: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.
All the prices there still seem needlessly high. I buy stuff from GOG because it doesn't have DRM and it's like 5-10$ per game. I don't buy stuff from microsoft's website with an identical interface because it's full store price and there's all sorts of DRM stuff shoved into the products.Korwin wrote:Here is one Publisher who does get it:
Www.webscription.net
Last edited by Lokathor on Tue Nov 30, 2010 2:39 am, edited 1 time in total.
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.Lokathor wrote:Wait whaaaaa? Can you explain this more please?cthulhu wrote: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.
In Australia this was banned.
Webscription has no DRM, new books cost $ 6 older ones $ 4.Lokathor wrote:All the prices there still seem needlessly high. I buy stuff from GOG because it doesn't have DRM and it's like 5-10$ per game. I don't buy stuff from microsoft's website with an identical interface because it's full store price and there's all sorts of DRM stuff shoved into the products.Korwin wrote:Here is one Publisher who does get it:
Www.webscription.net
If you buy an month-bundle you get 5 to 6 books for $ 15.
Every book has some sample chapters.
Reasonable enough for me.
Hmm, I guess i just looked at the "collections" page, which is like 24+$ each.Korwin wrote:Webscription has no DRM, new books cost $ 6 older ones $ 4.Lokathor wrote:All the prices there still seem needlessly high. I buy stuff from GOG because it doesn't have DRM and it's like 5-10$ per game. I don't buy stuff from microsoft's website with an identical interface because it's full store price and there's all sorts of DRM stuff shoved into the products.Korwin wrote:Here is one Publisher who does get it:
Www.webscription.net
If you buy an month-bundle you get 5 to 6 books for $ 15.
Every book has some sample chapters.
Reasonable enough for me.