Tuesday 7 April 2009

WotC are corporate hams

The news has spread like wildfire throughout the RPG blogging community that Wizards of the Coast have ceased selling PDF downloads, citing piracy as their main concern. Way to alienate every single one of the fans you still have left.

I've no idea why WotC/Hasbro thought this would be a good idea. Now there's a big hole in the market people will be downloading their pirated PDFs for free, this whole act completely encourages pirates to put the books online to download.

But what about those people, like myself, who have paid for the PDFs? If we lose any from our hard drive then we're screwed because there's no way of downloading them back.

Piracy has been around for a long time, remember the furore about taping CDs? Those must have been such hard times on the wealthy booming music industry. It's obvious that people want things for free so they will do their damnest to get them. However, the majority of people, and we're talking gamers here, who aren't exactly the most criminally minded individuals in the world, will buy PDFs.

It's like if the police turned around and said, "Well, people are robbing, killing and raping. Let's just put everyone in the world in prison. Problem solved."

And surely this is a lousy decision as far a market competition goes. People who would be downloading D&D can now turn their attention to other games like...T&T.

Maybe it isn't so bad after all.

2 comments:

  1. I made a joke in an email not too long ago saying "...those Pathfinder and OGL bastards better start hanging together or they'll hang separately..." or something like that. I think we're seeing the start of the 4th ed crack down.

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  2. My money's on Paizo and the other independent publishers getting far more out of this than Wizards. Those OGL bastards are unfortunately the only real links we have left to good old fashioned D&D.
    Unlike T&T, which remains the greatest thing ever in the universe ;)

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