Well well, D&D 4e is already such a huge success that WotC have re-sent the books to the printers before the release!
I truly am happy about that since I was worried that the appearance of the pre-press printer files of the Core books on the net would cause a dent in demand.
It’s now not much of a secret that any lucky or enterprising geek (or anyone with such friend) as had the Core Book in one form or since the last 48 hours or so.
I’m not going to comment much on the leak only to say that I’m astounded at the speed those files have been spreading! I’m starting to believe that we’ll all need to rethink how we perceive and protect intellectual property because the Net is making things far to easy. And I don’t think that policing and barriers are the way to go.
I’m not qualified to give out solutions, suffice it to say that in the realm of Role Playing rules book, I’m in no way ready to use PDFs at the game table, I want physical books… and Hardcovers trumps printed PDFs!
So here’s what I propose all naughty geeks do to atone for this anticipation-fueled indiscretion:
Why don’t you call your FLGS and ask if they need help with D&D Games Day that is scheduled for Saturday June 7?
If you are a DM (full or part time) go and offer to be a DM for the day. Chances are they will accept.
Plus as an added bonus, you’ll get to read and play an exclusive adventure written for that day!
If you have liked what you saw in the Core Books, it’s time to share the enthusiasm and show how awesome that game can be to others who aren’t so sure yet!
I just called my FLGS (Librairie Donjon in Montréal) and I asked the manager if he wanted me to DM for Games Day and he was very happy I offered. So If you live in the Montreal Region and want to have a game DMed by the Chatty one, call Frederick Alexandre at Donjon (514-387-8510) to subscribe to my game!
I know Graham is doing it in Winnipeg. Are there others that have already signed up or that are considering it?
I strongly believe that if you got to see the books early, you owe it to yourself to become an herald of the new game 🙂
Have a great weekend people. I can’t wait to start designing Solo monsters and Elite NPCs!
Chatty so far, the evidence is in favor of the value of leaks and available free electronic copies for book sales. Even for the most popular authors out there, you know what a bigger problem than piracy is? Obscurity.
The best real world example is Baen books. They’ve been giving away e copies of selected authors’ works for quite a while now. Know what the biggest result has been? Each time an author adds their books to the free books list, their sales go up, not just for that book, not just for their Baen catalogs, but for all of their books.
In general any method of sharing a book yields eyeballs seeing the book which yields more sales. And D&D, taken as a meme set, has an incredible replicator function. (If you pick up the D&D meme, you tend to try to spread it to as many of your friends and relatives as possible.)
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that
The same has been observed over at last.fm where songs you can listen to (but not download) freely have driven sales of albums/songs up.
I would tend to agree with your assessment. D&D spread is definitively Meme driven.
I can’t wait for my children to be a bit older so we can start a campaign!
Chatty’s Minions 4e campaign! Has a nice ring to it… pity it doesn’t translate to French so well.
Hum, it has been a decade and more since I studied French. You couldn’t make it into a bilingual pun?
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that
Volunteer DMing is a great idea. I bet you could donate Cheeto’s and Mountain Dew too! (That would be tax-deductible, right?)
I can’t wait until the 4E goodness arrives at my door!
I’m not going to comment much on the leak only to say that I’m astounded at the speed those files have been spreading! I’m starting to believe that we’ll all need to rethink how we perceive and protect intellectual property because the Net is making things far to easy.
Are you really just figuring this out?
And I don’t think that policing and barriers are the way to go.
Well, that’s a bit more recent, at least. Heck, if you worked at a record company, depending on which one, you’d at least be on par with the people there and maybe even ahead of the curve!
Seriously, though, piracy is not the great evil it’s made out to be. Most of the commotion is just a bunch of suits trying desperately to save their dying business model. You should still buy things you support, but a bunch of teenagers downloading everything they can fine with little spending money aren’t going to make a very big dent in anything.
Asmors last blog post..The Reports of my Death…
No I’ve been thinking about that for a long time. I phrased that like this because it’s the first time I voice it on the net.
However I think you are 15 millions of ways wrong about the ‘bunch of teenagers’ line. I’m willing to bet that 80%+ of households with both teens (and or geeks) and High-Speed internet have HDs full of pirated material. I can’t back my claims but I’m around enough geeks to see how pervasive it is.
And I’m not taking a moral stance on this. I’m no better than anyone (actually I think it’s impossible to be law abiding… all my physical CDs are on my iPOD, a blatant violation of North American copyright laws apparently)
I really don’t care about the suits but I care about the artists. That’s why we spend so much on music services and that I pay 40$ a year for Last.fm
That being said, if the current business models (for music) could just die and we could move on to a new order of micropayments and such, I’d be a lot happier.
I just hope that we’ can find a system that will allow to get quality products like Hardcover RPGs and Cool computer games before the pirates win 🙂
Heh, we just wandered into one of my realms of activism.
all my physical CDs are on my iPOD, a blatant violation of North American copyright laws apparently
That is a direct and open lie promoted specifically by United States Record Companies (the actual Canadian companies in the CRIA are not buying into the kool aid pool.) In US law we have strong protections for format shifting as a form of fair use. In Canadian law it is Fair Dealing instead. So long as you keep the MPs who work for the US record companies and business interests in check, it will stay that way. (I think it is Jim Prentiss, but I am not positive that he kept his job after last time he tried to subject you folks to US corporation sponsored usage rules in opposition to Canadian industry directives. (I don’t know the US congress folk that well, so I’m stretching to name Canadian MPs.)
Piracy != lost sales in any meaningful manner, at least via means like p2p networking. The piracy that hurts artists is bootlegging piracy. The sale of illegal physical copies has a negative impact on sales. File sharing is a completely different beast. I’ve seen two economic loss models proposed by industry representatives. The first is “There is X megabytes of p2p traffic in sound file formats. At 4 meg per minute, 45 minutes per CD, and 15 $ per cd, that translates to X/12 dollars of lost sales.” The second one I’ve seen is “We expected to sell X units this year. We sold nX units (where n<1) Piracy cost us (X-nX)*$15 in profit.”
X, by the way is an unexplained estimate, also known as a guess.
The first one conflates all piracy with lost sales. That is bullshit. Most piracy is of things the pirate would not have bought legitimately. (Several companies have demonstrated that if your prices are reasonable for digital media, most people buy the media. It is only when prices are far out of line with perceived values that piracy becomes a problem. A lot of publishers screw up the e-book system. They make their e versions hard to use and as or more costly than the physical books. When they sell poorly and pirated versions show up, they then say “see! e-books don’t work” Companies that sell e-books for significant discounts over paper books and make them available in easy to transfer easy to use formats? Make a great deal of money on their e-book branches. (Baen books pretty much chops out the entire production cost of their books from their for sale e-book prices, and they provide them in a huge range of non-drm formats. They are a huge money maker for baen because copying bits is cheap and easy.)
The second one is indefensible. If you used that line of reasoning in your work, as a biologist, you’d not have work any more. This is what the CRIA and the RIAA present to MPs and congres folks.
(Also, in Canada, there is a reason you pay a significant extra tax on storage media. You have a system in place to encourage file sharing. It is US interests that are spreading the meme that you are hurting yourselves by allowing “piracy”:
(Now most of the above applies differently to pdf only publications.)
Caring about the artists is why I’ve not bought any music from any band whose publisher is a member of the RIAA in the last several years (I’ve recieved a few CDs as christmas gifts, one of which was from my teenage brother, and was thus incredibly sweet but I’ve only bought new CDs from non-RIAA members for a while now.)
Oi, I could probably keep going well past this thing’s character limit, so I’m going to pack it in now.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that
Woot! I rolled a crit on Bait Mike Philips! 🙂
No seriously, interesting points.
I know I’m going to regret this but how do you feel about piracy of games? (not the DRM issue, I leave that to Shamus Young) That does hurt the creators a lot no? Would lower price and absence of copy protection fix that too?
(and no there are no limits to comment size… that would be hypocritical on my part given my nickname)
Heh. For RPGs that is a complex question.
I know you said not the DRM issue, but one of my axioms is that DRM is a negative force in any communication medium. It makes your product less useful for the people who want to buy it every time and it essentially does nothing to stop bad actors.
As I see it, there are three major categories of game that are relevant to our discussion.
The first is small press PDF only releases. They are the ones who are hurt the most by piracy. Their entire revenue stream competes directly with pirated copies and they tend to be working with the smallest budgets (though also with the smallest expenses.)
They also are usually smaller products so a home printed version is much more reasonable than it would be for either of the other two categories, so the fact that it is (or should be) hard to get non-watermarked products printed at any good faith print shop is less of a reason for someone who pirated one of their games to come back and pay for it later.
The second category actually is a super category.
It contains two groups that have a key difference that almost warrants splitting the category. This is larger presses who also sell electronic copies of their current work.
These folks are likely to be the ones who best understand what they are doing in a digital market place, though that is not a guarantee.
The two subgroups are companies who go out of their way to make their product easy to use electronically and or sell it as a reasonable discount vs their bound editions (If you charge the same price for your ultra low overhead digital edition as you do for your expensive physical edition, you ate getting pirated and I don’t really have any sympathy.
The same if you make it hard to transfer your product from computer to computer or difficult to use in any other manner ) and those who don’t. The first group is less likely to be hurt by piracy.
If you charge a reasonable amount for the quality of the product you are selling, the people who will pirate your works are the people who wouldn’t have bought them in the first place.
I suspect that for the most part, not having a hard copy of a book makes things more difficult, so piracy will also tend, if your product is, you know that key feature of any game, fun, then piracy is going to be at least partially a reasonable user funded method of advertising your products.
For these companies, by the way, their products are often large enough that a home printed edition is especially ungainly, so assuming good faith acting on the part of local print shops, you are pretty safe from printshop piracy.
Of course, it also frequently turns out cheaper to buy a hard bound edition than it is to get a perfect bound edition from a print shop. (Companies selling out of print back stock in e-editions fall here, and honestly? This is a bonus revenue stream so I suspect that if the company isn’t already poorly run and in trouble, piracy of their oop stuff isn’t hurting them much.)
Third group *coughWizardscough* doesn’t sell electronic editions of their current paper books. Piracy in this case only marginally competes with the revenue stream created by their products, and the pirated copies usually spend quite a while as poor quality scanned pdfs without any OCR processing, so they really really don’t compete much. (I hear that the wizards of the coast 3.5 books have only recently been systematically OCRed.)
A big thing is that a lot of pirates for game books fall into three categories:
1. Players who, if they didn’t pirate the books, would just use their DM’s books. Pirating ties them more closely to their games, and eventually they’ll get fed up with not having their game books at the table while they play. No loss, small potential gain.
2. Players with limited resources who are not willing/able to shell out the cash on untested products. They frequently pirate materials, use them for a while and then, it the material is something they are going to actually use, they will often go buy a legitimate copy. This is also the category who is most likely to pirate a book by a company they don’t game with, then buy that game if it turns out to be the sort of thing they like. It means that they are much more likely to spend money on companies whose work they aren’t familiar with.
Hypothetically, this sort of person might have downloaded, I don’t know, say the 3.5 core books one month, and then bought all three of them the next paycheck on the strength of reading the PDF copy they read. I wouldn’t know anyone who did that.
Third category is the person who pirates a work just because. They weren’t going to buy the book anyway, they’d just have mooched off of their fellow players. In this case, it strengthens the play experience and makes the other players more devoted to the system they are playing (I generally find it a lot of fun to play with newbies and with very experienced players. This helps turn intermediate and casual players into experienced ones.) The company isn’t missing any sales that they would have had without the pirate.
My long term plans include getting published, so I do intend to put my money where my mouth is in the not too distant future, by the way.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that
*snerk* that was half again as long as the first post… I thought I had managed to make it more concise.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that
Micheal, It might be lengthy but it’s an interesting and well spelled out point of view, with which I agree.
Whoa! Thanks for the dissertation.
Monte Cook is part of your 2nd group. He discounts the PDF at at lest 50% so Ptolus was a 60$ PDF.
WotC sells their books electronically, much like a DVD release, after a few months… and like movies, bad books appear faster than good ones… except the prices of recent PDF books are near criminal (they were last time I checked).
ah ok. Last time I looked, the 3.5 books from Wizards had zero digital sales representation, but that _was_ a while ago.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that
I cribbed and adapted from Eric Flint and Cory Doctrow mostly (and then applied it to a slightly different medium than either of their focuses)
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that
indeed, the Eberron books are all up on Drivethrurpg for the hardback price. I bet they don’t make many sales like that. (An additional problem with many companies’ e-book releases is the inability to edit them or copy and paste text from them. It is another place where an OCRed scan of an e-book is much more user friendly than the legitimate purchased item.)
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that
I downloaded the three core books two nights ago. I feel no remorse what so ever over the act because I am still keeping my pre-order on amazon. Your right chatty, hardcover tumps pdf always.
You know what? You’re brilliant Phil. I think I need to get off my lazy backend and go to my FLGS to plan som D&D Day stuff.
Yaxs last blog post..Pimp my character – a community project
I have to say that I have the same ethical issues pirating a PDF version of a hardback I own that I would have downloading a cracked copy of a video game that I own – which is to say, absolutely zero.
And for what it’s worth I actually emailed WotC about their ridiculous “same as the hard back price ebook” policy, and got a response. It said, basically, that they wanted to encourage people to buy from their FLGS rather than buy electronically or directly from them, and basically ignored my point about how the people that want PDF versions, if unable to buy them for a reasonable price, are unlikely to visit their FLGS and settle for a hardback.
Basically I think they’re just dropping the ball here, and it’s to their own detriment. I would prefer to buy PDFs than hardbacks, but I’m not paying the same price. So instead I’m buying the 4th edition 3 core books (preordered at Amazon) for my mate’s birthday present, and that will be the last purchase I make from WotC for the foreseeable future (we’re not actually planning on playing 4th edition anyway, so this isn’t the sacrifice that it appears).
Yeah Gazza, I am not sure how Mexico handles this, but both the US and Canada have format shifting covered by their respective laws and judicial precedent. (I know you are fine to scan your own books for personal use, so I assume that you are fine downloading someone else’s scans of books you own.)
I happen to prefer a pulp edition of a book for use at the game table, but when I am working on materials for a game (as a player or a DM) I prefer having a searchable text to work with. That’s one point where I have to disagree with Bobert2. PDFs trump pulp in quite a few situations. The two formats don’t have parity, but physical copies are not inherently superior for all uses.
Any book that I am likely to actually use in my games I’d prefer to have in both formats. I’d love for them to do what Baen does with a lot of their books and include a cd with the OEM pdf with each physical book.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that
I happen to prefer a pulp edition of a book for use at the game table, but when I am working on materials for a game (as a player or a DM) I prefer having a searchable text to work with.
Oh, hells, yes! I’m trying to work with the Birthright setting right now from the original boxed set, and flipping back and forth, trying to link names to people is a pain in the neck. I really find myself missing the search function my PDFs and web sites have. :/ I’m this close to ponying up the cash for the PDF versions, and I paid full-price for that boxed set at my FLGS.
– Brian
brianms last blog post..Reinforcing the Wave
Brian
Yeah, any time you are doing a conversion like that, it is absolutely worth the money to get a searchable copy and pastable edition of the source material.
Are you aware that there is a 3.5 total conversion of Birthright online? It isn’t perfect or all the way done, but a lot of the heavy lifting is already done if you are aiming at 3.X (They even have a wiki, which is sort of cool, though not the absolute best format for everything ever.)
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that
I thought WotC had solved “lost revenues through piracy” with their new digital initiative? Just like it’s hard to pirate World of Warcraft, subscribers to D&D online + tools would give WotC revenues even from people who’ve not paid for their books.
Great idea on offering to GM at the FLGS! Nice one. Too bad I just read this post, else I’d have mentioned it in today’s e-zine issue.
Johnns last blog post..Issue 403 – 15 Holiday Adventures
To Michael@19 – I’m not sure what Mexico does either, but definitely it’s technically against the law to download a PDF of a physical book that I own in Australia. In fact, up until quite recently, it was also technically illegal for me to scan my own (or rip a CD to MP3 format, or whatever); fortunately, we’ve recently had “fair use” laws similar to the US enacted over here (within the last year or so).
Which is not to imply even remotely that Aussies didn’t DO anything like that – just that technically we were criminals by doing it.
But to answer your question – yes, I have no problem downloading someone else’s scan of the PH if I’ve already bought the hardback. Don’t see why I should have to do the heavy lifting if someone else has already done it for me. As I say, it is technically illegal – but I don’t feel it is IMMORAL, and realistically it is highly unlikely that a cop is going to bust down my door and demand to check my laptop for D&D PDFs.
Gazza, I only bring up Mexico because there was some mention of general North American laws, and I really have no idea what Mexico’s legal system looks like. I know fairly little about Canada, but I know almost nothing about Mexico.
*sighs* And I remember reading about copyright issues in Australia, but I have to admit that I don’t remember what it is I read. Even when my news coverage isn’t provincial, my memory is.
Another important question that is going to be more and more relevant is how local courts are going to handle licenses. A lot of companies are trying to get around first sale doctrine (the thing that allows used book stores to exist) by licensing their products instead of selling them. So far in the US, the court results are mixed, but the precedents mostly fall in the category of “you are transferring your product in a manner that appears to be a sale, so your license doesn’t hold up.”
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that
sweeet. i’ve been reading the 3 core books non-stop, and now you’ve given me the veritable ‘Hail Mary’ for the seed of guilt that has been growing. *starts heralding*
Pucks last blog post..I Had the Sudden, Irresistable Urge to Share This Comic with Someone
-Chatty- this just came up.
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/02/canadas-dmca-a-guide.html
It looks like Jim Prentiss is Canada’s villain on copyright issues. Definitely worth opposing. You don’t want a DMCA-like ruleset in your country. It does no economic good and it greatly harms individuals.
Gazza
Apparently my post last night was eated. *sigh*
I mentioned Mexico because there had been some mentions of North American Copyright law, and while I am reasonably aware of how the US and Canada fare, I really have no idea how Mexico’s system works, and they really are part of North America.
Gah! I know I’ve read about recent media related civil liberties issues in Australia, but damned if I can recall if what I read was good or bad, or specifically what issues there had been movement on. *sigh* even when my news services aren’t particularly provincial, my memory is.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that
Michael… I’ve unspammed your comments… I’m trying a new Anti-Spam system that should ‘learn’ by my calls.
Sorry.
Phil
capchas seem to dislike me. sorry for the double post.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that
No problem… it’s actually the Anti Spam…
I’m investigating.