I wouldn't be surprised if you added up all the money indie labels make that it surpasses that of the big labels. Instead of having 20 artists under one label, you get 20 artists under 20 labels...I'd have to agree that technology has really changed the music business (you could almost say, any business).

I think the important thing is that at least THIS time we haven't let the thread wander off onto tangents this time around. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

No, but look at how many small labels there are. All the little pieces add up. They aren't going to earn tons of money, but they can get enough to stay in business and operate on lower costs than the big labels. Consider Jonathan Coulton. He started out entirely self-produced, selling and distributing music through his web site. Does he make as much money as Lady Gaga? No. Does he have a strong following and earn enough to have a living doing what he loves to do? Yes.

Consider the situation WotC finds itself in. The OGL and PDF sales made for a significant third party market. Allowing for more choice probably increased the general market, but also hurt WotC's sales some since customers could buy a PHB/DMHB and then get supporting materials from someone else.

Theres also a few people that the OGL got us to buy WOTC... I wouldn't have bought any of the 3rd edition stuff other than the PHB if it wasn't for Mutants and Masterminds. And WOTC received several thousand dollars from me thanks to that as I owned all the generic books for 3.0 and 3.5 + FR because M&M made me decided the system didnt have to be terrible, and a few I bought twice to have a second copy.

Speaking as someone who spent a few hours rooting through a stack of books to come up with a cross-referenced argument, I would say that you can make the PDF worth more than the physical book. One of Shadowrun's longest running problem has always been with the index (it's better now), so you couldn't ever find anything. There are also compiled tables, which make the problem a hell of alot worse when something is misprinted, but are very helpful otherwise. If the PDF's were made to be searchable by subject, rather than by keyword or section title, I would have to spend about a 10% of the time I do now to find answers. It would take having someone on the development team going through the books and tagging entries, or something like that, but it can be done. Give the PDF out for free and then charge people for other things to enhance the game, like a 3D battlemap with avatars the players make themselves. Code and information get free, but a continually developed set of services can't, buy it's very nature, get put on a torrent as it's dynamic.

Think of it like webcomics: you can't charge for the comic, but you make money off the shirts, coffee mugs and convention sales.

Actually, there are several web comics that charge for access.

It's not a perfect analogy.

Care to name a few? I'm not familiar with any off the top of my head. Sluggy which I read semi-regular has a donator section with a certain amount but it's not the core comic. Similarly I have the Schlock Mercenary ap for my iphone and do pay a yearly subscription for the privledge but I see that more as supporting the artist and a convenience fee then actually paying for the comic.

If I'm not familiar with a product, I will not buy a copy without checking out a free PDF copy.

The reasoning is pretty simple: Back in the day, I could go to a FLGS, see something new, pick it up, handle it, flip through it, see if I liked how it was written and how it worked. These days, FLGS's in my area, to save costs, only order products they know will sell through, while not taking chances with untested product. Because of this, I do most of my RPG shopping online, because if I'm going to have to special order something, I might as well do it through Amazon or eBay and save some dough. This means the only way I have of "flipping through" a book before I buy it is with a full PDF copy.

I can tell you, in my case, this approach has actually led to greater sales then before I started doing this. I download RPG books on a whim, but most of the stuff I download, I delete within a couple weeks, because it doesn't appeal to me. I downloaded Shadowrun 4th on a lark, having played an earlier edition once a decade ago. I flipped through the pdf, tried making a couple character, toyed with the system...and now I own physical copies of all the core rule books and a couple optional ones.

A couple other cases were:

- I bought a physical copy of the Palladium Game "Splicers" because I got the PDF, I found myself reading and re-reading it.
- Exalted 2nd Edition won me back by me reading the PDFs and liking what I saw.
- The copies of 4th edition D&D that leaked 2 weeks before the game came out got me interested enough to buy the books.
- I have physical copies of every Cthulhutech book, but PDFs I gave my friends got several of them to buy copies as well
- I just ordered a copy of eclipse phase based on reading the PDF and liking it.

In short, Tabletop RPGs don't need to be so concerned about piracy. Gamers want physical copies, something that you can't really do with pdfs the way you could with MP3's, and we're smart enough to understand we have to support games we like. Make a good product, and you /will/ get my money once I find it. Make it easier to find it, and you get my money faster.

That would be the problem with that sort of strategy. Most popular comics that I'm aware of give free access and use advertising for income. Some might have a donor section or other related perks, but the main product is free and what's used to try and draw in viewers.

One area that WotC is actually pioneering a bit is with the idea of subscribing to a game system. It's my understanding that most of the character creation stuff in new books appears in the D&D Insider system shortly after release. So even if you don't have PHB2 or 3, you can still build characters using new abilities introduced in those books.

A company could make a core rule book available to download for free, but provide a variety of GM and player tools that are only accessible through a subscription service, in addition to perks like additional material and PDF copies of new books on a point system like Audible.

The trick would be to balance the point allocation and the frequency of new material, so that subscribers felt like they were getting a deal and the company had a reliable source of regular income. It's essentially how IMR got started, but with the focus on fiction rather than source material.

The closest I could think of would be the Exiern spinoff, Dark Reflections. Free for all to read, but new pages aren't put up unless the donation target is met. Once the target is met, the counter resets, a new page is put up, and the game begins again. The amount isn't much, but someone's gotta pay the man to draw.

A lot of it usually appears before the print release actually. There was stuff in there from PHB3 before PHB3 was even announced.

Yeah and WOTC was trying to sell the electronic PDFs for the exact same price as the print-copy book. Considering when they were selling them their sales were huge a big chunk of the pirated copies were people with dead tree versions wanting an electronic copy. This is from the company that when the game was being planned they promised everyone, "You buy the book, you get the PDF." That sure didn't live long.

Also, WOTC's "Tracking" of the PDFs is bullshit. They pulled that number out of their ass. They wanted to can the PDF distribution and have an excuse for why they didn't live up to their promises in that regard, so they found an excuse they could tell customer service to point to when people complained, simple as that. What actually prompted them to pull it down is people were posting the books to Scrib'd.



Ha ha ha! Good one! You made it sound like in a case of corporation with more money vs. one person with no money that the law actually maters. Ha ha!

Seriously though, they rarely care if what they're doing is legal in a different state within the same country, forget a different country. For example, Microsoft's copies of windows turning themself off if they decide you're copy is pirated is illegal in my state. Has Microsoft started releasing different versions for my state? Nope, same copy, and if it happened and I brought it up do you think they'd say, "Opps, our bad, that was illegal in your state?" Nope, they'd go through the whole court case anyway because they don't even have to win, they just have to dick around in court until I run out of money.

On the flip side, playing devils advocate here, the lays from state to state, country to country, province to province, and territory to territory are so varied that if they did do that there would be a thousand or so different versions of windows for each version of windows that exists currently.



Very true. And while I understand that you can make a PDF more valuable than a print book, there still needs to be a price difference because for a PDF to be worth the same as a dead-tree product you would have to include assets in it (labor time for someone book marking it, creating links, distribution plans, etc.) that equals the cost the publisher saved by avoiding publishing costs involved in a physical book. If the game company making the book ended up saving money on the PDF version, after labor and all other costs are figured in, then dammit I want those savings passed on to me or I'm going to be pissed.



Right. Those studies have found that it's not piracy that causes lost sales, but bootlegging. Bootlegging isn't effected by anti-piracy measures because bootleggers have the same kinds of factories and facilities the original manufacturer will have. Anti-piracy measures do however limit what legitimate customers can do, increase the control the producer has over the product, and increase the obsolesce of what the consumer buys. These three points, IMHO, are the real reason for DRM and other anti-piracy measures. For example, Apple's always loved closed systems, they love to control what you buy, how you use what you buy, and what equipment what you buy works on. Then in the 80's the IBM-compatibles came along, with anyone who could code able to make software for them, anyone who could able to make hardware for them, and then apple nearly died. Now the iPod and the iPhone and the iPad come along and new DRM and greater controls, existing in an enviroment where almost everything's locked down and no one's willing to open things up and Apple couldn't be happier. (And yes, I know they finally removed the DRM from the iTunes purchases, but by the time they did it it didn't matter too much anymore, they'd rode that train as far as it would go.)



Yeah, this is true. The music industry's current problems can largely be traced to big publishing studies used to control the market lock stock and barrel. They used their lock on the market to artificially increase prices. EX: CDs cost less to make than Cassettes. When CDs came out however they charged more for CDs than cassettes and pocket the savings for themselves. What's actually happening now is a correction that's been a long time coming. Whenever you artificially inflate something it always comes crashing down eventually. Blaming it on piracy and conducting a witch hunt you know you will never have to complete and that you can manipulate to get your way is a great, if morally bankrupt, strategy though. The only downside is if people get pissed enough to stop giving you any of their money. And that'll never happen.

Off the top of my head I don't know one I can post here. Back when Project Wonderful was solely a web comic host they had several subscription web comics there.



When CDs first came out in the mid 80's the record labels priced them to make the same profit per sale as they made from cassettes. As the popularity of CDs increased, the record companies realized they could keep the price high even though the price to produce CDs had decreased (it wasn't until around 89 that the price to produce a CD matched the price to produce a tape). They then used that money to hype up the "artists" (most were simply wannabes who were more interested in fame than money) they wanted to be huge stars instead of talented people with long term potential (look at how many one-hit-wonders and never-beens came from the 90's compared to any other decade) since they could pay them less and often trick them out of royalties or other compensations.

What you're seeing as a correction, is actually a shift. A shift from a few big record labels to hundreds of smaller labels. In NYC during the 80's the only time you heard an artist that wasn't signed to one of the big labels was when you were waiting for the train in the subway. Now anyone with a few hundred dollars and half a brain can set up a website and a publish on demand account so anyone can get ahold of their music.



I'm fairly certain they see it as less of a witch hunt they'll never have to complete, and more of a pocket boogie man they can bring out anytime they want to threaten their customers into giving them more money buying more stuff from them.

Joey Manley's webcomics empire -- Modern Tales, Girlamatic, Graphic Smash, and a couple other sites here and there. I don't know how well they do but they've been around for quite a while.

Speaking as someone who's listened to six decades of one-hit wonders, do you have anything to back that statement up other than your gluteus maximus?

Well, I can only speak from a german perspective, but when my Windows XP refused to activate (it was a license I bought from a friend who refurbishes and sells old laptops, so I got the license sticker and all from him, guess the old owner was still using the license as well or something...) all I had to do was call Microsoft support, and many people I know have done the same, as long as you tell them "I know, it's a legal license, I bought it, got the sticker right here!" they will always give you the activation code. They have to, because otherwise, they might be shutting out legal customers who just had the bad luck of their key coming up in a random key generator.

Still, it sucks, and yes, the whole "Windows activation" policy is still illegal or semilegal at best in many countries, but as you said, it's not like if the law would do anything about that.

There are no hard numbers as there are many different definitions for one-hit-wonder, but most definitions put more than twice as many OHWs in the 90's than any other decade.

Not helpful. Ad Hominem.

Hey, not to change the topic, but has anyone been able to confirm Bull's claim to a six month extension? Not to say his word isn't good enough, it's just bugging me that the official announcement didn't list a time frame for the extension.

I just want to make sure things are corroborated and not post con-frenzy hearsay.

It's also what I've heard.

The latter part is one of the weirdnesses that plague the American judical system. Before ... well, coming form the land of ridiculous damage settlement cases, I don't really see what you are laughing about there, though I admit the outcome of a case in America might just as well be decided with a flip of a coin, so it's nothing you really should hope for. Also, needs some sleazebag big-time anti-corp lawyer to back you up, and I imagine those aren't as common as TV serials would have us believe.


In evil socialist countries with mandatory legal insurance, that tactic does not work. Of course, socialism is evil, so this surely is bad in some way. Look at Delta's experience for the effect this has on Ms and it's licenses. Yeah, still illegal, but they'd rather not push their luck in court.


Many webcomics have payable extras though - Drowtales and Penny&Aggie have pay-only parts of their stories. Only page that goes solely for pay, though, is some rather sleazy place called ... Slipscape or Slipstream. Cannot remember the name, but found it a bit of an odd pun.

Slipshine. I'm ashamed I know that.

The rumor I heard, was that the websites set up to sell the PDFs were not reporting accurate numbers of sales and were just pushing out copies of the data. WotC found out on a fluke (twice???), and with no easy solution to the problem just gave up.

The 'twice' part may be an accurate part of what I heard, or it may be a purple elephant marshmallow; often added to rumors due to poor memory/reading.

I kinda doubt that rumor. They could have simply started selling the PDFs on their own site if that really was a concern.