Stop Acting Dead*

Warning: content-free opinion piece on Teh Industry and Its Woes follows. 

* Acting dead: a Bruce Sterling coinage that means "...being irrationally averse to spending money where it matters, in a misguided attempt to “save” money to the point that the behavior paralyzes you." (source)


Doing a little window-shopping on ebay, amazon, etc. recently, I noticed the prices that old D&D books can potentially command in the second-hand market:

£60 for a "buy it now" BECMI Rules Cyclopedia,
£70 for a Champions of Mystara boxed set,
£99.99 for a used copy of X10 Red Arrow, Black Shield,
£104 for a copy of T1-4 Temple of Elemental Evil!

Call me an old skinflint - but even with the value of money being what is it today - those are crazy prices for decades-old second-hand books.

And then it occurred to me - once again, and with renewed force - that the company which currently owns the rights to the D&D brand name and to nigh-on 40 years of archive material, are being fools to themselves by not supplying the market demand embodied in these numbers.

The plain fact is that a lot of the people interested in 'the old stuff' are simply not going to buy the shiny new One Game to Rule Them All currently being developed. Chances are that said shiny new toy won't offer the kind of gamer who like out-of-distro games anything that they want or need. These long-standing participants in D&D-as-hobby want support for the games they play; not another New Coke experience. The occasional fake scarcity sop to the alienated base fools no-one.

It's a dazzlingly simple equation:

• There are people out there who have money - real money - to spend on their gaming. Some of these people will provably put $1,000 dollars or more behind a project they believe in.
• WOTC own a great swathe of out-of-print IP of proven value.
• Technologies to put this out-of-print product into the hand of paying customers at little up-front cost to the company actually exist.

Yes, I know that that the HASBRO/WOTC coprophage corporate department consider the internet beyond their walled garden to be the source of all evil. And that they look on pdfs as naught but a license to steal. But the market has shown (again and again and yet again) that people will pay real hard-earned cash to have physical access to Not Brand X approximations of the buried treasures gathering dust in WOTC's hoard. Heck, D&D4E's biggest competitor product was a retro-clone.

This is the second decade of the 21st century and - thanks to the internet, and a lot of very clever technologies being developed by some very clever people - the genie of abundance is out of the bottle. Torrents, print-on-demand, ebook readers, tablet computers, and honest-to-goodness freaking replicators are things that exist in the real world. Last spiteful thrashings of broadcast monoculture dinosaurs notwithstanding, ETEWAF (Everything That Ever Was - Available Forever) is practically within our grasp as a culture.

A sane corporate strategy would acknowledge that we are no longer living in the 1950s and would exploit the potential of these new technologies to give the punters what they want. To do otherwise is to set yourself up as a future case study, rather than a viable business.

A company could potentially make a lot of money supplying pent-up demand for their archival material, rather than insisting that their (stubborn, willful, famously unappeasable) hobbyist market consume the latest de haut en bas brainwave from the bunker. This applies to the movie industry, the music industry, the games industry: any business where the main product is brain fodder rather than physical products.

Making money off Classic D&D is - or should be - a trivial problem in 2012:

• WOTC already owns the content (art, text and trade dress).
• Half-decent layout monkeys are cheaper - and work quicker -  than game designers.
• Print-on-demand obviates the problem of unsold stock.
• Even in a world of free, people will happily pay for stuff they want.

WOTC is in the 'selling D&D' business. All that old out-of-print stuff in their archives - OD&D, B/X, BECMI, AD&D: it's all D&D! Is there no-one in the Renton silo who can work out that the necessary "2. ???" that leads to "3. Profit!" is something different from the tactic they already tried - with dubious success - in 2008 and 2010?

Tl;DR: WOTC needs to stop acting dead and start acting like a 21st century company. Fr Dave makes a similar case in more measured, less grandly sweeping terms.

Edit (2nd April 2012): So Wizards only went and hired odd-but-lovable Zak S (Vornheim, DNDWPS, you may have heard of him) as some sort of consultant/alpha-tester/ambassador to the hobbyist diaspora. This could be awesome if they don't screw it up.

WOTC Poison the pdf Well

In a move of breath-taking moronism WOTC have pulled all their pdfs from online stores.
(source: Paizo, PRG.net, WOTC forums discuss this)

I initially thought this latest let's-shoot-ourselves-in-the-foot-for-Great-Justice move was a late April Fools joke. It would appear not.

One of the few sane things WOTC did in recent years was making old edition D&D material available cheaply and legally. It was a perfect example of why both the internet, and Smithian enlightened self-interest, are "A Good Thing" (pace Sellar & Yateman):

More money for WOTC, more game for customers; everyone won!

But it looks like the above was too complex an equation for the beancounters. So the orders went forth to poison the well from a moronic combination of spite and misdirected greed ("But hey, you can still buy 4E...and pay us monthly for D&D Insider. That's just as good, right? Herp derp."). Yeah, that'll totally work; because cutting off the only legal source of material makes that material wholly unavailable in an era of copy/paste and file sharing protocols.

I imagine the decision-making process went something like this:

Scene: WOTC HQ, Interior, Daytime.

WOTC pointy-haired boss: "Times are hard and money is tight. People are pirating pdfs and that costs us money. We'll have to strangle this piracy at source. Suggestions?"

WOTC minion 1: "Shut down the legal downloads operation."

WOTC minion 2: "Yeah, that'll larn them dirty thieves!

WOTC pointy-haired boss: "Excellent. Make it so!"

WOTC codemonkey: "Oook ook ak ook EEEEEK!"

[WOTC Codemonkey flings poop, spams Ctrl+X]

WOTC pointy-haired boss: "Our troubles are at an end gentlenerds."

The Internet: [censorship = damage. Route around] "lulz @ wotc. torrentz plz"

WOTC (all): *Doh!*

As for the promise of a 'new improved' WOTC downloads site: {bizarro} That'll work so well. I mean, look at WOTC's impeccable track record in online service provision.{/bizarro} Stick to making pretty cards lads; it's all you were ever good at. Leave the complex computer stuff to the clever people who actually understand computers... and rational business decisions... and internet sales...

WOTC business decisions recently are like watching a bunch of drunken chimps crash an Aston Martin in slow motion: simultaneously sad and hilarious. All we need is "Yackety Sax" as the soundtrack.

This story in one picture:

*click* "Gate locked sir."

edit: In light of WotCs forthcoming release schedule - notably the promise/threat of "Dark Sun" novel re-releases - I'm wondering if this sudden decision to hoard their old IP like a miser does his gold isn't actually part of WOTC's latest hare-brained marketing strategy. Why go to the risk and expense of trying to make something new when you can just strip mine and 're-imagine' an old success? It works for Hollywood...

re-edit: Even the non-gamer tech press think WOTC have been huffing the gas a little too hard.