No More D&D PDFs, Wizards of the Coast Sues 8 File Sharers

An anonymous reader writes "On April 6th, Wizards of the Coast took all of their PDF products offline, including those sold at third-party websites like RPGNow.com. From the RPGNow front page: 'Wizards of the Coast has instructed us to suspend all sales and downloads of Wizards of the Coast titles. Unfortunately, this includes offering download access to previously purchased Wizards of the Coast titles.' Wizards of the Coast also posted a press release to their website that states they are suing eight file sharers for 'copyright infringement,' and WotC_Trevor posted a short explanation about the cessation of PDF sales to the EN World Forums."

Comments

[Don't] Profit!

[AKAImBatman]

Unfortunately, due to recent findings of illegal copying and online distribution (piracy) of our products, Wizards of the Coast has decided to cease the sales of online PDFs.

Step 1: Point gun at foot and pull trigger.

Wizards of the Coast has instructed us to suspend all sales and downloads of Wizards of the Coast titles. Unfortunately, this includes offering download access to previously purchased Wizards of the Coast titles.'

Step 2: Open yourself up to lawsuits for breach of contract.

(GMSkarka) Typical short-sighted reaction from WOTC, which makes zero sense at all, when you consider the fact that the most widely-spread pirated copies of the 4e products contain printers marks -- which means that their piracy problem pre-dated any purchases.

Speaking as somebody whose entire income is largely dependent on my PDF sales, this really pisses me off.

Step 3: Ignore all evidence and make assumptions in an effort to piss off both the users and the publishers.

Step 4: Lose all profits!

Re:[Don't] Profit!

[erroneus]

I think as people in this economy are becoming increasingly desperate, people are grasping at straws while they fail. Could this be considered a sign that there is failure approaching when a company starts resorting to litigation for income?

Re:[Don't] Profit!

[Dotren]

Mod parent up... that had me cracking up

Seriously though, is there a business conference that happens annually now where presenters try to sell the audience on the benefits of alienating your customers by providing sub-par purchasing and product use options? Do they start the whole thing off with a keynote on how to use copyright to extort and sue your customers?

I think, in recent years, its become readily apparent that a company's true customers are it's stock holders and board members. The consumers are just raw material to be milked for money in ANY way possible.

Sorry if that went slightly off-topic, it's just frustrating to see so many product/media providers jump on this bandwagon. Whats next? Some sort of physical DRM for printed copies?

Re:[Don't] Profit!

[mseeger]

Typical case of "Suicide due to Fear of Death"

Re:[Don't] Profit!

[DragonWriter]

Step 1: Point gun at foot and pull trigger.

WotC is such a small part of Hasbro that there is very little that they could do with through WotC that would be shooting themselves in the foot (and shooting WotC in the foot is meaningless, WotC isn't an independent entity.) I suspect, also, that WotC, or at least D&D, has been disappointing to Hasbro since the acquisition, and has never been profitable enough, and I wouldn't be surprised if they are at the point where desperate moves that are perceived as having some (though low) probability of improving the profitability in that area are warranted prior to simply cutting their losses and moving the resources elsewhere or simply not expending them at all anymore in a cost-cutting move. IOW, this may well be a natural part of Hasbro proving to themselves that D&D (except, perhaps, in the online-game form) simply cannot be salvaged as something profitable enough for them.

Re:[Don't] Profit!

[MeanMF]

Oh you can still get them..You're just no longer allowed to pay for them.

Re:[Don't] Profit!

[ajs]

This is their second salvo, of course. The first was when they decided to yank the rights to Dragon and Dungeon magazines from Paizo, the company that salvaged those two titles from their late-1990s slump and made them popular and useful again. Wizards is no longer the cool company that Richard Garfield and crew took from obscurity to gaming geek super-stardom. Since the Hasbro buyout, they've moved further and further into a campaign of systematically alienating and angering every one of their customers, partners, authors and fans.

It's sad, really. There were (and probably still are) some good people there. Oh well, Steve Jackson will enjoy the business, anyway. They still have plenty of PDFs for sale, and even a few for free!

Re:[Don't] Profit!

[Opportunist]

That's basically what makes me shake my head in disbelief.

First: Those books are no longer in print and WotC is not losing a dime if they get copied. Unless, and I'd consider this highly unlikely if anything, they want to roll the printing press for those items again.

Second: It's anything but hard to get a hand on that copy. Instead of paying WotC for it, you have to hunt for it on torrents. Yeah, you could get sued. How well that works as a deterrent is evident. Not to mention that people will have zero problem with their conscience, since they could not even buy it, even if they wanted.

Finally, and most importantly: P&P RPG enthusiasts are, if anything, packrats. They want the printed copy if there is one available, if the book is good. I've seen books that are readily available in PDF form (from other publishers) go for three and four digit sums on ebay because they can't be bought anymore. I'm in a similar boat, I want my book in my hand (ever tried bringing a laptop to a fantasy RPG session? Talk about mood killer). I won't pay 300 bucks for it, but I'd certainly go to my shop and get it if I could! So any PDF being "ripped" is not a lost sale by any measure. It's about the best advertising you can get. Players don't read the book and then toss it away like a novel. RPG books are used more like encyclopedias, perused and consulted regularely to look up details. And gamers want that in book form. Not laptop, not a copy they tossed through their printer, they want a book!

So where the heck is the lost sale? Where is the damage?

Or does WotC fear that people could find out their latest edition sucks even more than the previous ones and people refuse to buy it entirely, and stick with AD&D 2nd forever?

Re:[Don't] Profit!

[geekoid]

Steve Jackson? gah. Screw GURPS, too many damn specific rules, combat takes to long, and running on a bell curve with their point system make no sense mathematically.

I gave up on that pile of needless complications 4 years ago.
Try savage worlds and have some fun. Play characters that can actually be cool right out of the gate, and only get cooler. There rule book cost 10 bucks.

What's that? 10 bucks too much to try a new game? well then, I suggest you take it for a Test Drive

Do I sound a little fanatical? probably, but I ahve played it since it's release, and still enjoy it, and have played and ran in almost every Genre available.

Re:[Don't] Profit!

[Opportunist]

SJGames is an example of someone "getting" gamers.

GURPS is about the most flexible and adaptable game system. It allows you to build your own game with just the basic rulebook. Yet there are quite a lot of books, and funny enough, they also get bought. You don't need them. It's not like in other systems where you can't play a ranger without the ranger book because the info you need to make one isn't in the main book. It's not even that those books give you many new rules.

Most of the time, they give you background information.

As an example, take the "high tech" book, dealing mostly with firearms through the ages, from medieval times to now. Instead of just noting down a list of weapons and what stats they have, you get background information how those weapons worked, when and how they were used, generally you get a book about guns. More as sidenotes, you also get their stats and some suggestions how to convert their behaviour into game terms. Instead of "it is this way, take the rules and shut up" you get "this is how it works, and that's how we think this is reflected by stats".

Personally, I feel I get a lot more out of the book that way. I get to know why and how things work, and I get a feel what could work in a given setting and situation and what could not.

Re:[Don't] Profit!

[dcollins]

They want the printed copy if there is one available, if the book is good. I've seen books that are readily available in PDF form (from other publishers) go for three and four digit sums on ebay because they can't be bought anymore. I'm in a similar boat, I want my book in my hand (ever tried bringing a laptop to a fantasy RPG session? Talk about mood killer).

Allow me to offer up some counterexamples. I was just at an annual gaming retreat with friends last weekend, where we played classic D&D and other games. (a) I ran an OD&D game, and to my great pleasure, one of the players had bought the OD&D PDFs and printed and bound his own little books from them. (b) I also ran an AD&D game, and instead of hauling the big hardcovers with me, I did indeed have them on a laptop, as I've done before, and it didn't bother anyone (kept below table height on a chair next to me).

Here's the upshot: I was just today going to write my player and recommend he also buy the Supplement I PDF to add to his OD&D books. But now he can't do that. Bizarre.

Re:[Don't] Profit!

[Beardo the Bearded]

I have every DnD 4e PDF book. I downloaded all of them without paying for them.

I regularly run a DnD campaign, I'm a DCI member, I run RPGA events, etc. I do own the 4e PHB, but that's because I damaged one at a store and felt obligated to the store owner.

Here's why I pirated all those books, and why I am going to pirate the rest of them:

Because fuck you, Wizards of the Coast, fuck you. When you brought out 4e, it was supposed to be a self-contained series of books. There were three books - the DM guide, the Player's Handbook, and the Monster Manual. I pre-ordered them from my local store (significantly more than at Amazon, but I wanted to support my local store.) and was ready to try out the new system. I was ready to pitch all my dead tree 3.5 books to see what you'd learned from 3 and 3.5.

Then you wanted $15/month to access your online content.

Then you announced that there were more CORE books coming out. There's a release party every month now. Twelve books a year? Are you insane?

Then you killed the SRD.

You see me as a cash cow. Fuck you. I'm not paying you a thousand dollars to get all the books when the full set was supposed to be a hundred - or just fifty online.

If you had released all this content as one package and said, "this is fourth edition", I would have bought the set.

You're liars, you're fuckups, and I do not reward incompetence with my cash.

Re:[Don't] Profit!

[LordKazan]

Your entire post is based on a truckload of faulty assumptions. I know people who bought legal D&D PDFs, they're spitting nails. Anyone who likes D&D should be spitting nails.

Hasbro, through WoTC, is not just attacking the illegitimate PDFs but they nuked from orbit all the legitimate ones.

You blabber about DRM - but as someone else pointed out it wasn't users who bought the PDFs that shared them on torrents, etc - it was PUBLISHERS EMPLOYEES: they all had publisher watermarks.

DRM wouldn't have stopped that. DRM cannot stop piracy: it never has and it never will. DRM can only stop technologically inept users from making fair use. Anyone who knows any technologically inclined person (and how many D&D people don't know a technologically inclined person) can get around DRM like the DRM wasn't even there.

4e is nothing but table top World of Crapcraft.

Re:[Don't] Profit!

[Chyeld]

Minor note: The Cyclopedia is actually not 2nd edition AD&D, it's a republishing of the alternative line they had going when AD&D came out.

It was originally meant to be the 'intro to D&D' rules which would transition to AD&D but ended up being it's own separate line entirely. Prior to being released as the Cyclopedia, it was called the Box Sets as unlike AD&D, the Box sets were sold as paired Player and Dungeon Master guides based on level ranges.

• Basic Set - Levels 1-3
• Expert Set - Levels 4-14
• Companion Set - Levels 15-25
• Master Set - Levels 26-36 (max 'mortal' level)
• Immortals - literally playing gods

Re:[Don't] Profit!

[Brian Boitano]

If D&D (as a traditional RPG) is already performing near or below that bar, then taking an action which has a low expected direct cost that might, the probability is low,improve it to reach that bar (but is likely to fail) may, assuming everything that appears more likely to succeed which has equal or less cost has already been tried, make sense as a last ditch effort to save the line before shutting it down.

Incomprehensible sentence hits you for 1d6+1!

Re:[Don't] Profit!

[Basilius]

Whats next? Some sort of physical DRM for printed copies?

If you dig back into storage and find some of those early 1st edition dungeon crawls, you'll find that they were printed in a lightish blue ink.

Mimeograph machines and black and white copiers at the time (I don't think color copiers were commercially available yet) had real trouble with that color ink.

This was intentional. It was, in effect, DRM.

Re:[Don't] Profit!

[oldspewey]

This D&D guide will self destruct in 60 seconds.

... unless you can successfully roll for save vs. lawyers

How embarassing..

[qoncept]

The most effective part of this move will probably be revealing the names of these 8 file sharers that are playing D&D.

Won't stop illegal downloads

[furby076]

People will just do what happened BEFORE WotC started selling their rip-off priced pdfs (pdf should not cost as much as the hard-bound book) they will scan them in and put them online.

The moment you release your information to the public you open it up to be copied.

BTW their 4e application (a nice piece of software) requires a subcription to update it (that is fine) my beef with it is if your computer gets reformatted you MUST resubscribe (pay money) to get a full version of it. I think that is crap. If I paid for the software to utilize and decided not to pay for my monthly subscription renewal then I should not have to pay again to reinstall the software.

Re:Won't stop illegal downloads

[furby076]

Manufacturers can tell retailers to cease and desist from selling their products - electronic or otherwise. If they had a contract which said "Retailer is paying WoTC in advance for 100 licenses of our material for X dollars" then the retailer could say "sure we will stop selling it, but we only sold 20 so you owe us the cost of 80". Otherwise they have no recourse. Yes someone could come up with a lawsuit "I spent 40,000$ creating an ecommerce site specifically for your product which you no longer allow me to sell...you owe me money". But it all depends on the contract they signed. If WoTC had in their contract "we can tell you to stop selling our products at anytime without recourse then you must do so and you can't sue us" well it sucks for the retailer. It all depends on the contract - but to say "that is crap...." without knowing the contract is baseless.

I love it when people scream "sue" without knowing the facts.

They might claim it is about infringement

[phantomlord]

What this is really about is them trying to force people to go out and buy 4E material. Having low cost OOP material out there diminishes the value of their current product by saturating the market. D&D is about the story, not about the numbers... so if you have original setting material, it isn't hard to adapt it to current rules.

They lost me a long time ago when then current head of the AD&D product line tried to assert ownership over all third party content, including homemade settings that weren't tied to any particular rule system, claiming that anything that used the AD&D rules was a derivative work.

Re:D&D is dead

[TheRealMindChild]

Everyone should get a saving throw!

Re:D&D is dead

[furby076]

No it isn't. I've been playing since 2nd edition. So far 4e is pretty decent. Yes it has some annoying aspects (daily abilities, more limited abilities to choose from) but it also has some nice ones (when you raise your stat scores you get to raise two of them instead of one, magic items are simpler, healing is simpler, etc). So it has it's positive traits and it's negative traits but overall it's not bad. It's also a much faster combat system.

While I hate buying the books over and over again I also realize that WoTC needs to do that every so often to get more sales. I was annoyed from 3.0 to 3.5 because that was a sham (3.5 was fixing 3.0), but 4.0 is a complete revamp so warrants it. There is still plenty of 3.0/3.5 material that you can play that. There are some companies that didn't even change and will continue with 3.5 material.

This will yield opposite results

[Duane13]

So instead of making still LOTS of money off of legal PDF sales, now EVERYONE who wants PDFs will find them on torrents. This will make the torrenting of them more prevalent.

WotC wants 3e DEAD! At any cost

[swordgeek]

Recently I went looking for some 3rd edition books, since I thought they'd be getting scarce soon.

Scarce? I was mistaken. 3.0 and 3.5 are GONE. Every local gaming store, every local used book store, every online store in Canada, and everywhere else I checked were out of old editions.

Especially curious was the fact that one of the gaming stores had about 15 full sets of 3.5 at Christmas, but by the second week of January, didn't have a single copy of any sourcebook from that era. Nada.

Does anyone know if WotC has done a big buyback? It almost seems like someone has been scouring the bookstores methodically, snatching up everything that would suggest an older edition ever existed.

Ah well, screw 'em. I'll play what I want, and if I can't buy the material, I _will_ download it. Way to go, Wizards!

Re:WotC wants 3e DEAD! At any cost

[TheSpoom]

Trying to take things off the internet is like trying to take piss out of a pool.

The sooner companies learn that, the better.

Sword of Litigation +1

[spookymonster]

WotC attacks the gazebo!

Re:oh noes

[furby076]

realizing people pirate anything not nailed down

Great you just gave WoTC a new business model. Whenever you buy one of their books you must buy the installation package which will have a WoTC technician come out and nail the book down into your coffee/gaming table.

Hubris

[SirGarlon]

Back when Wizards of the Coast took over D&D, one of the striking things then-Vice President Ryan Dancey said was that TSR (the former publisher) has obviously not listened to customers and had lost relevancy for that reason.

Now, Ryan Dancey is no longer at WotC, and WotC is not listening to customers, and what do you know? WotC is losing relevancy. People are going to buy the products they want, in the format they want, from the retailer they want, and you can never make them buy something different. It's as simple as that.

Fortunately the 3.x rules are open source so D&D can never die, in spite of WotC's seemingly intentional efforts to run their business into the ground. It just can't be called D&D for trademark reasons.

Hey Publishers! PDFs cost too much!

[whistlingtony]

Hey Publishers! (all of them!)

You have a problem with piracy? Perhaps it's because all of you sell the PDF at pretty much full cost of a real book. Why do you do that?

PDFs don't have printing costs. We know you can sell them for less.
It's handy to reference a book while playing. It's still kind of cumbersome to reference a PDF while playing... the PDF is less valuable to us.

If you greedy BEEP would sell good quality PDF files for say.... $3, I'd drop $100 right now. If you would make old books available, I'd drop another $100 right now.

No Way am I paying $25 for a FILE.

You brought it on yourselves.

-Tony

Re:D&D is dead

[Opportunist]

I'd attack them with a cluewand, but it doesn't work on anyone with an int of lower than 3 or corporations.

Re:Quite a shame...

[Chyeld]

TSR was the love child of two people with a creative idea and the willingness to put it on the line to see it bloom.

Unfortunately, like most companies formed this way, the business aspect was ignored in favor of the 'beloved product'.

They never really had a business plan, and if you viewed the history of the company since it's inception, you'd notice that the way they 'made money' was simply coming up with new ways to repackage their idea. And then the founders got into a fight and lost pretty much the whole deal to a numbnut who didn't even like gaming.

Is it any wonder, when they were purchased by Wizards of the Coast, a company that had a similar history, that the business plan never changed?

And when Hasbro purchased WoTC, they weren't doing it for D&D they were doing it for Pokemon and to a lesser extent, MtG. They also haven't put any thought into what they should be doing with the older, legacy, properties that came along with the purchase.

Unlike TSR or WoTC though, Hasbro is a bona fide corporation, they have cube farms and quarterly meetings, middle management and legal divisons. And unlike TSR or WoTC, Hasbro isn't in this for any 'love' of anything other than money. It shouldn't be any surprise that of the three, Hasbro has been the most willing to screw over fans and partners while doing it's double takes and meandering in an attempt to realize a profit on D&D. Not that TSR or WoTC have ever had a history of not doing so, simply that their actions were usually the result of infighting between people who actually felt they had a stake in things instead of some impersonal jackass looking a bottom line on a report.

Ho-hum

[Runaway1956]

I can't make an argument against this attitude that is anywhere near as eloquent as Eric Flint posted on Jim Baen's free library site.

http://www.baen.com/library/

Jim put his money where his mouth was, and GAVE AWAY book, after book, after book. More, if you happen to be disabled, you can contact Baen Books, and they will give to you NOT ONLY the books from their free library, but their mainstream books that are in print.

Baen books had a lot of money at stake on this gamble. But, they PROVED CONCLUSIVELY that giving stuff away free MAKES MONEY for them. Every time they released a title that had been out of print, sales of that book skyrocketed.

Over at Baen, the author has to approve his title for the free library, and some authors don't seem to use it. Those authors who have jumped aboard the free library enjoy an increase in income.

Baen books puts the lie to all the DRM crap, and proves the corporate lackeys to be totally wrong.

In the case of D&D stuff - if they had any brights at all, they would allow the stuff on P2P to continue, but add some cool stuff that is NOT readily downloadable via P2P. Any intelligent individual can come up with schemes for that. In fact, it would be a small step to release P2P ready material that at the very least promotes the non-P2P, and possibly even DEPENDS ON other non-P2P material.

It constantly amazes me that lackwit idiots run the corporate world.

Traveling salesmen and tinkers learned this lesson before electricity was discovered, for God's sake!!!

Annoying and stupid

[pluther]

And who the hell at WotC came up with this idea? Combat piracy by making it impossible to get the products people want through legal means? Yeah, that sounds brilliant. The only thing that could top that would be to cut off access to the content they've already purchased with very short notice. Oh. Oh, yeah.

I did like Paizo's response to this, though. They announced a 35% sale on all of their pdf's for the rest of the month, and that all purchases of their printed products would include a pdf version at no extra charge.