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.

You're overreacting.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Michael Hopcroft wrote: 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.

Michael Hopcroft wrote: 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?

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.

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.

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

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.

pete_darby wrote: 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

Overall I suspect that it can only benefit rpgnow and similar ventures that do not use DRM. Raising the profile of pdfs as a format is good-there are still a lot of gamers ignorant of it as a possibility, or who generally do not use pdfs if they are aware of them (I recently observed a fascinating discussion on the white wolf forums for exalted over the way the free pdf was sooo cool because it could 'talk to you' and read back the book-I guess they just are not aware its a built in feature of acrobat 6.0).
The DRM thing is a huge mistake on their part though, and if rpgnow can raise its profile, along with smaller distributors of their own pdfs without DRM i suspect they will gain a massive advantage. Anything that creates hesitation or uncertainty in a buying process will lessen sales at some point. It makes it several steps harder to get your first crucial pdf, raises questions about how DRM works and what it is that people have to check out and so on. People dont like to touch things they are unsure of. The big joke is that DRM is only very limited protection, since freely available software exists that completely circumvents it, allowing copies to be made without DRM.

Oh-another thought-having read some of the discussion on rpgnets forum I suspect that the issue of trust and DRM is rather crucial to many peoples objections. This is a question that is important for indie publishers as well as higher profile companies where pdfs are concerned of course. One suggestion I have not seen (though perhaps it has already been made here-I really must get better at searching out old threads) is that rather than DRM (which doesnt stop pirates and is a pain, limiting user options over cut and past, resaving, platform used etc) why not accept some people will share it and put a link in the pdf to a webpage where you can pay if you like and use the book? Even if they get a copy through less honest means, the honest person can then easily still pay for it...

If we're going to continue to discuss this, let's discuss something that hasn't already been run to death. (For those not aware, search for DTRPG on RPG.net or elsewhere to get a firehose in the face.)

This thread is not closed, but make sure this doesn't become a long re-hash.

Being careful not to re-hash anything here, I don't think I've see this discussed in any depth anywhere, but y'know...

What about the concept of "main rules as loss leader?" and how PDFery is going to affect that?
For some time it's been the case that some larger companies put out large (300+) core rulebooks for big gamelines as *relatively* low prices, and then much smaller (128 page) sourcebooks at only slightly lower prices around the 10 GBP mark.

In this new world can we expect, say, White Wolf to make it's core rulebooks available as PDFs at really much lower prices than the hardcopy, and the supplements at a higher percentage of dead tree edition costs? Do we think that the decision to give away the Exalted PDF without charging will increase uptake on the game line?

What percentage of folks who download the PDF from DTRPG without paying anything would have bought the hardcopy, (or paid for the PDF) but now won't?

What percentage of folks who downloaded it previously had no interest in the game, but might now buy one or more products in the game line?

Is this the big fish learning from the indy "If you love your game, set it free" philosophy (without realising)?

BTW, Vault Collection 2 is also down to $5

Some stats on that would be interesting I agree. There is always a trade off between people who would have purchased a product but decided they hate it afterwards, and those who who would not and discover they love it. I suspect the second category is ultimately going to generate more sales.

Having waded through all 80 or so pages of the rpgnet thread (it was a horrible, but instructive, process) I did notice several things that struck me as relevent here.
First off JG Browning and Philip J Reed both demonstrated the strength of their approach to the market-they made concise reasoned arguements and made sales through the dispute by demonstrating a greater respect for their potential customers than some of the other publishers did and by demonstrating the superiority of their marketing model (sans DRM). The other publishers, in general, seemed incapable of responding to this in any meaningful way whatsoever.
I watched sale after made by the rpgnow model on the forum while I saw sale after sale lost by the drivethru model.
Ultimately I dont think it was the DRM issue itself that drove this dynamic-it looked very much to me like it was the attitudes being expressed. I would go so far as to suggest that the choice to use DRM on drivethru (along with the near print pricing) is a reflection of this attitude difference. Publishers using rpgnow (and for that matter the forge bookshelf or publishing through their own sites) seemed in general to have a healthy concept that while this is a business, it is also a hobby, and only a small sector of the publishing industry as a whole. They treated potential customers seriously, demonstrated an understanding of their needs issues and complaints and said 'we are gamers just like you are'. They identified with the customer.
Ultimately I suspect this is the greatest strength of Indie publishing, and over time I hope that it continues to grow. In a hobby enviroment identifying with the other hobbyists is essential-alienating them is counterproductive. That is not to say that companies cannot survive (or even thrive) once they have caused alienation amongst their own customer base. Thinking back I can readily recall the days when white dwarf magazine here in the UK was very much a fan-led rpg magazine, before it became the 'voice of warhammer'. I was among many people who never purchased another games workshop product when they switched over to warhammer. Considering my excessive rpg product buying in those days my act to boycot them probably cost them several thousand pounds-but they are still there.
What I can see though is a situation where Indie publishers can exploit the legitimate frustrations with drivethru and similar methods to increase their own market share.

Go for it!

Peter Hollinghurst wrote: Some stats on that would be interesting I agree. There is always a trade off between people who would have purchased a product but decided they hate it afterwards, and those who who would not and discover they love it. I suspect the second category is ultimately going to generate more sales.

One of the issues of the DRM debate on a bigger scale than the RPG publishing community is just what is going to happen to the indies. One of the goal of the publishing majors is to have some chip that will prevent your computer from executing software, or experience data if it is not authorized.

The authorization would be put out of reach of individuals (cause otherwise, ya know, pirates could authorize their pirated data), thus preventing indies from publishing their own work, and forcing them to deal with Majors.

We're not quite there yet. But the entertainment industry is trying again and again to get us there. Even if some of the people at rpg.net are only annoyed by the convenience issue, some others see a bigger issue that affects not just customers...

I hope they never will.

There are two dynamics that make it seem unlikely yet-one is that if indies offer good, competitively priced products there will always be a market, and the second is that if there is a market then someone always tends to find a way to sell to it. If control of much of the technology passed out of indie hands I suspect new methods to create and distribute files would spring up. It would be a setback, forcing new methods onto indies, but it would probably not be terminal.
At the current state of play, if rpgnow had been bought out by drivethru (which apparently they tried) and then use of it by vendors was restricted (probably one of the more disastrous moves for indies at the moment), how long would it take before a new service akin to rpgnow was created?
The biggest difficulty is that of course any period of forced innactivity in sales could be serious for some indie game makers.

I think your comment about the future of the industry and restrictions on access to DRM style tech for indies, along with the possibility that some publishers might try and squeeze out indies, raises some important issues. Indie designers sjould certainly keep a forward looking perspective on the opportunities currently afforded us, because change does happen, and often rather fast in the computer market, and pdfs will tend to get caught up with this.

I have seen some indications that several of the publishers involved in drivethru are having second thoughts btw (I emailed several stating I would love to buy their pdfs, but not with the drivethru DRM model and some replies, along with a few posted comments on forums certainly give an impression that a few may be having cold feet). Those of us who oppose DRM should keep up the pressure.

Even though I have no problem with DriveThru myself, I think it's existence could prove to be a good thing for indie rpgs.

The people who plan on boycotting the companies involved with DTRPG will eventually look elsewhere for product, and hopefully they will look at indie rpg's as alternatives. I know I posted many links to games in that alternatives thread, hoping people would just check out some good games that are out there, trying to turn some of the negative into a positive.

I'm hoping some of the games see increased sales, and that their authors will then try and release more material for those games. I know a few games I have had supplements planned, and I sure would like to see some of them see the light of day.