Pirates Force D&D Books Offline

[ninjaerrant]

Y'know, from stuff I've heard from older gamers, WotC attempts to deal with piracy strike me as being very similar to the attempts to stop "copyright infringement" that caused TSR to finally go belly up.

For the company it really shouldn't be a case of moral high ground, or anything like that, (since when has WotC had morals anyway?) but a simple matter of what will work best for their company. And I can't see any way in which crippling their own sales,and annoying their fan base by waving their arms in a totally ineffectual manner at pirates will do anything to improve profits.

 

[cobrausn]

And no matter what you or any pirate might say, digital IP owners think it is in their best interest to make pirates lives as miserable as possible... and sometimes annoy their clientelle, if need be.

Doesn't bother a pirate though. In the slightest. Even a teensy eensy little bit.

The pirate who cracks something themselves, they enjoy doing it. Doesn't bother them. If it's harder, they get better props for doing it. Doesn't bother them at all.

The pirate who just downloads just had to go to a torrent site, type anything they want into the search.. download it, and run it.

The ONLY person who's bothered by DRM is the legitimate consumer. The people who buy the game, and have to put up with the DRM because it's the right thing to do.

In some cases. I have a feeling Ubisofts craptastic and incredibly invasive DRM is going to put the hurt on them.

If I were a game developer I would just pre-pirate the game with a version that wipes your computer clean after the first couple hours.

And I would also make many enemies and probably go to jail.

 

[Altorin]

And no matter what you or any pirate might say, digital IP owners think it is in their best interest to make pirates lives as miserable as possible... and sometimes annoy their clientelle, if need be.

Doesn't bother a pirate though. In the slightest. Even a teensy eensy little bit.

The pirate who cracks something themselves, they enjoy doing it. Doesn't bother them. If it's harder, they get better props for doing it. Doesn't bother them at all.

The pirate who just downloads just had to go to a torrent site, type anything they want into the search.. download it, and run it.

The ONLY person who's bothered by DRM is the legitimate consumer. The people who buy the game, and have to put up with the DRM because it's the right thing to do.

In some cases. I have a feeling Ubisofts craptastic and incredibly invasive DRM is going to put the hurt on them.

If I were a game developer I would just pre-pirate the game with a version that wipes your computer clean after the first couple hours.

And I would also make many enemies and probably go to jail.

you haven't heard the news? the first game utilizing Ubisoft's DRM has already been cracked, and it was up on torrent sites before its street release date.

but yeah, that DRM would be effective, at least for a while. At least it would hurt pirates, not legitimate customers.

 

[SimuLord]

In some cases. I have a feeling Ubisofts craptastic and incredibly invasive DRM is going to put the hurt on them.

If I were a game developer I would just pre-pirate the game with a version that wipes your computer clean after the first couple hours.

And I would also make many enemies and probably go to jail.

Altorin beat me to this, but yeah---Ubi's DRM is already a dead letter, and it didn't even take until the release date of the first game infected with it in order to get it cracked. Absolutely no surprise there.

And I love your idea of the poison pill. Stick a computer-slaughtering virus on there and pirate your own game to the torrent sites. That's something I can get behind!

 

[Jumbucker]

And this is another good reason for me to just keep my old books and play with them. 3.5ed is juuust fine with me.

 

[The Cake]

Yeah, I like 3.5 as well. I always have found it easier to read the book than look through a pdf/the SRD

 

[hebdomad]

Not a good sales model.

I honestly think access to the rules should be free. This acts as 'bait' for new players to get into the game. However, if you want the beautiful printed version of the rule book, game boards or miniatures, you'll have to pay. Heck you could even sell paper craft scenery kits.

Allot of online games use this model, and it works wonders for the cash flow. (just google "free to play MMO") The "Free to play, but cost money to enhance the experience" model, would work very well for D&D.

 

[UltimatheChosen]

This is retarded! They are going to put DRM into something which has already been uploaded to all the torrent sites.

I think a bigger part of it is to not put LATER books online.

Granted, that won't stop people from just scanning them, but maybe WotC doesn't realize that?