What does DTRPG Mean for the indies?

[Michael Hopcroft]

What does the launch of DriveThruRPG.com, the new ePublishing venture backed by at least ten of the major companies, mean for the indpeendent publishers in this field who are locked out?

Does this mean the PDF revolution has been effectively crushed? Are ventures like RPGNow doomed? You wouldn;t believe how much this dveelopment tempts me to fold up my tent and give up. I feel as if I;d been shot.

[ethan_greer]

You're overreacting.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Michael,

What in the world are you worried about? Let me put it this way:

If you owned a local record shop and sold odd, small label albums to a group of dedicated buyers that liked coming into the store and hanging out with you, and maybe a few records to people that came in off the street, would you worry if Tower Records opened across the street? (Ok, you might. I wouldn't.) The same people who buy records from you right now are still going to, and you're different and funky enough that some people are still going to come in off the street.

Fuck, man - this DriveThroughRPG business just validates the idea that PDFs are a good format. It can't do anything but help.

Their insane digital rights management policy is another matter. Let's just say that a lot of the people who buy indie RPGs are the same people who like the alternative. They often run Mac or Linux on their home machine, and ain't buying anything you can only open on Windows with a special key.

[Adam]

The DRM scheme used by Adobe works just fine on OSX Macs - I was downloading files and transferring between my Powerbook and G5 earlier today without a hitch. :)

Best,
Adam

[Roy]

I'm curious to see how their pricing scheme is going to affect the market.  They'll either price themselves out of business or allow other PDF publishers to legitimately sell at a higher price point.  

Roy

[Jack Aidley]

It strikes me that DTRPG is a good thing for the .pdf indie games scene. It should help to legitimise .pdfs as a format.

It's not like buying pdf rpgs is independent of buying print ones. The fact that the big boys have stepped into .pdf publishing shouldn't be any kind of threat because we still have the same things to offer we did before: unique, exciting games that are a little bit different to what you find in the mainstream.

All that happens now is that more people should be willing to pay for, and look for, .pdf games.

[btrc]

The big discussion is going on at:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?threadid=127041&perpage=10&pagenumber=1

I think as a whole, the 48 page thread (and counting) is savaging DTRPG for the DRM scheme, and when the exclusivity requirement is infrequently mentioned, it isn't in favorable terms.

I think competition is a good thing. I don't think DTRPG is the way to do it.

Greg Porter
BTRC

[pete_darby]

Off the top of my head, after a brief look...

The good:

A fair bit of OOP material
A couple of "big names" for little or nothing
Mainstream publishers getting behind PDF

All of which add up to making it easier and cheaper for folks to embrace a wider range of games, and get a bit of historical perspective (Flashing Blades? eep!)

The bad:

DRM, and mainstream game publishers endorsing it.

Gah, partly it's ideological, partly it's because it will futz up and leave some poor schmoe with nothing to show for his cash, partly because it will and has been circumvented by those who don't give a rats ass about royalties, leaving it as nothing but a stumbling block for legitimate users.

Where's the DRM on my paper copy of MegaTraveller? Or can dead tree owners be trusted, but nasty, horrible internet customers can't?

For that matter, I bought single user rights to the text of MegaTraveller over ten years ago... can I get a digital copy for nothing then?

Okay, I'm frothing now, must stop....

But, hey, threat to RPGnow? Don't think so. RPGnow is selling quite different stuff within an admittedly fairly small hobby, but still different, and somewhat cheaper, on the whole.

I mean, I'm more likely to go to RPGnow knowing that Chad has put Monkey Ninja Pirate Robot RPG on there, than be drawn to DTR by exalted for nothing. I may be odd... but I'm not alone.

[Jack Aidley]

Where's the DRM on my paper copy of MegaTraveller? Or can dead tree owners be trusted, but nasty, horrible internet customers can't?

The DRM on your copy is the cost of creating a copy, and the (probable) loss of quality in doing so. Electronic documents can be freely and perfectly copied - that is why big publishers fear them.

[Paul Watson]

What does the launch of DriveThruRPG.com, the new ePublishing venture backed by at least ten of the major companies, mean for the indpeendent publishers in this field who are locked out?

Does this mean the PDF revolution has been effectively crushed? Are ventures like RPGNow doomed? You wouldn;t believe how much this dveelopment tempts me to fold up my tent and give up. I feel as if I;d been shot.

Don't sweat it. Seriously.

I've purchased several PDFs, from the Forge Bookshelf and from RPGNow, and I'll continue to do so in the future. If DTRPG was my only source of PDFs, that would all change. Leaving aside the philosophical issues with DRM technology, the PDFs that DTRPG sells are unusable by me for OS reasons. My computers at home all use Windows 98 and Linux, and neither operating system is supported. And I'm not alone. According to 2003 numbers, about 25% of desktops still used Windows 98. Add to that about 2 million Linux users, and pre-OSX Max users, and you've got a fair chunk of the potential market that is effectively locked out by DTRPGs business model.

Also consider issues with printing the DTRPG files, significant ease-of-use issues, and the price. Most offerings are priced close to the cover price of the print version of the product. One publisher is offering PDFs at 95 cents off the cover price. The stated reason is a desire to not compete with the LGSs that sell their printed products.

In a nutshell, I really don't think they're even trying to compete in the same market space  as RPGNow et al. They're trying to define a new market space, and only time will tell how well they do.

[jrs]

What does the launch of DriveThruRPG.com, the new ePublishing venture backed by at least ten of the major companies, mean for the indpeendent publishers in this field who are locked out?

I don't see anywhere on the site information about DriveThruRPG's publisher selection policy.  In fact, they invite publishers to contact them.  Michael, are you aware of any independent publisher being turned away from DriveThruRGP?

Julie

[Clay]

Michael, you're always tempted to fold up your tent and go home.  You gotta fight the urge man.  Just hustle more and make a bigger noise so that people don't forget you're there too.

[greyorm]

I noticed the price thing immediately.
If I wanted to pay $24 for a PDF copy of a game I'm going to have to spend more money to print out after purchase, I'll just buy the physical book from an on-line vendor and pay for the shipping. The instant gratification factor simply isn't worth that much bloated pricing.

So...I laughed and left.

[C. Edwards]

Well, I went to DTRPG and created an account. Then I downloaded the free copies of Exalted and Gamma World d20. I'm not likely to ever buy anything there because, as others have mentioned, if I want to be paying those kind of prices I'll just get the hard copy.

Many of the products there are fairly large, high page count files. It took me roughly 2-3 minutes to dl Exalted and about 8-10 minutes for Gamma World d20. That's with a big fat satellite connection on my end. I think that, for those with less than speedy internet connections, most of the products offered on DTRPG will be more trouble to dl than they're worth. Unless you seriously want one of the products that's out of print, why not just spend that money down at the FLGS?

-Chris

[pete_darby]

pace DRM, there's not just the price, but file size, and the fact that, AFAICS, you don't know whether you're getting a scan or digital source for your money. If it's the former, that could account for the huge file sizes of some products

So it's overpriced for a pdf, got good old drm, you don't know whether you're getting a scan or proper digital, and you need to be on a broadband connection (or have a hell of a lot of time available for your modem)

ON the other hand, it's an electronic version of books that, presumably, the publishers have been asked to publish electronically, or research on P2P networks have shown to be popular downloads.

Plus availability of OOP product... which is almost always good news.

So it's, essentially, a small additional revenue stream for the publishers, a way of keeping stuff available beyond supplement churn, and a sop to one argument from the chuckleheads on P2P ("Dude, I had to download a pirate copy of your rulebook to use on my laptop!" "Ah, now we have a digital copy for you to buy"... "Hey, I already bought your rulebook!" or "Dude, but I can get it free!", at which latter point the phrase justifiable assholecide is coined).

But I wail and gnash my teeth because, at a lower price point, or a more widely applicable standard (win98se upwards only...), or a more intelligent form of DRM (watermarking has been mooted), it could serve to vastly increase the revenue for the publishers, as I don't think that, at any price point, pdf damages paper sales of the same item (perhaps that's what the Exalted giveaway is a test of, since I imagine corebook sales should be pretty flat by now). What low prices, expecially micro-prices, damage is piracy, as, on the whole, folk would rather pay a small amount to a legitimate owner of IP than nothing to a pirate (guilt can be a wonderful thing). If this weren' true, iTunes, etc wouldn't be clocking up the downloads (despite the fact that their business model actually rips artists even worse than CD sales).

But I know, I'm big on talk, I own no presently marketable IP that I could release in a gesture of experimentation here. In the parallel debates on RPG.net, I've seen more figures pulled out of various nether regions to prove points than I have since, well, the last time file-sharing was debated. So all this is from the PoV of a reasonably well informed consumer, who wants both paper & pdf, who wants the writers and publishers and artists, heck, I can show love for distributors here, to get paid appropriately for their work & services. And that's what's so frustrating about DTRPG... it's a baby step, and I can see it going two ways at the moment:

1) It makes a good amount of money for the publishers. They take this as validation of the present version of DTRPG, with the limited DRM, high price points, etc. Well done for them, slight shame for gamers.

2) It doesn't make a good amount of money for the publishers: they pull out of PDF publishing.

It may be cruel to RPGnow, but I'd like to see it go a third way...

3) They don't make enough money initially, and one of the companies decides to drastically lower their prices (while properly re-formatting the books to all digital, etc). Their sales magnify enormously, file-sharing of those products drop to near zero. Increased uptake of electronic books helps fuel increased purchase of paper books.

Then, you know, cats & dogs living together, yadda yadda.

DTRPG starts competing with RPGnow... yeesh. It'd certainly benefit the publishers on DTRPG. When it gets down to value for customers, it may help RPGnow when they see exactly what the two rivals are offering (I'm thinking... DTRPG, mainly pdf's of paper books, RPGnow, more stuff designed as pdf's from the outset, which to my mind puts the advantage to RPGnow)

Meanwhile, whispering vault pack for $5 on rpgnow.... heheheheheheh.