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Really Important Stuff
OK, maybe not that important, but kinda weird.
Two of my interests coincided today: marketing and D&D.
If you have no interest in these topics, time to move on.
Wizards of the Coast, the current producers of Dungeons and Dragons, announced yesterday that they were going to stop all sales of .pdf versions of their products. OK, stupid move, but there you go.
What's interesting about that is that they also made all the companies that were selling their pdf files for them to take down the content that people have already purchased. By noon today. I had purchased a few through Paizo, one of the independent sellers online, and got the email: Anything you haven't downloaded, do so now. Tomorrow it will be gone.
This was a particularly boneheaded move.
They say they've done this to combat online piracy, which of course they blame for the fact that their newest products aren't selling well. Never mind that:
a) we're in a recession
b) their newest products suck
Yeah, must be the piracy. Thank you, Metallica.
You may have heard at some time the phrase "supply and demand". If there is a demand for something, there will be a supply. By suddenly cutting the supply of online content, they're not combating piracy. They're encouraging it.
By doing it in such a stupid way - with not even 24 hours notice for people to get the content they've already paid for, they're just pissing off the people who were formerly their customers.
So now not only is there a large number of people who want electronic content, which they now have no way of getting, they also have a new, and in many cases legitimate, sense of entitlement. How can piracy do anything other than increase given the circumstances?
Sure, copying digital content without permission is bad, it's illegal, people shouldn't do it, blah blah blah. But when are people who are in power to make these kinds of decisions going to start basing their policies on what people will do rather than what they think they should do?
On the grand scheme of things, this is hardly as important as the way we wage the Iraq war, or the "war on drugs", or the constant pushes for "abstinence only" sex education in our schools, but it's born of the same mentality. Ideology trumping reality. It's stupid and guaranteed 100% to fail.
Two of my interests coincided today: marketing and D&D.
If you have no interest in these topics, time to move on.
Wizards of the Coast, the current producers of Dungeons and Dragons, announced yesterday that they were going to stop all sales of .pdf versions of their products. OK, stupid move, but there you go.
What's interesting about that is that they also made all the companies that were selling their pdf files for them to take down the content that people have already purchased. By noon today. I had purchased a few through Paizo, one of the independent sellers online, and got the email: Anything you haven't downloaded, do so now. Tomorrow it will be gone.
This was a particularly boneheaded move.
They say they've done this to combat online piracy, which of course they blame for the fact that their newest products aren't selling well. Never mind that:
a) we're in a recession
b) their newest products suck
Yeah, must be the piracy. Thank you, Metallica.
You may have heard at some time the phrase "supply and demand". If there is a demand for something, there will be a supply. By suddenly cutting the supply of online content, they're not combating piracy. They're encouraging it.
By doing it in such a stupid way - with not even 24 hours notice for people to get the content they've already paid for, they're just pissing off the people who were formerly their customers.
So now not only is there a large number of people who want electronic content, which they now have no way of getting, they also have a new, and in many cases legitimate, sense of entitlement. How can piracy do anything other than increase given the circumstances?
Sure, copying digital content without permission is bad, it's illegal, people shouldn't do it, blah blah blah. But when are people who are in power to make these kinds of decisions going to start basing their policies on what people will do rather than what they think they should do?
On the grand scheme of things, this is hardly as important as the way we wage the Iraq war, or the "war on drugs", or the constant pushes for "abstinence only" sex education in our schools, but it's born of the same mentality. Ideology trumping reality. It's stupid and guaranteed 100% to fail.