4 ms·
It's interesting, though I can't say how significant, that the (pretty tiny) tabletop-RPG publishing industry, which went electronic in a serious way much earli
by leoc 13y ago
It's interesting, though I can't say how significant, that the (pretty tiny) tabletop-RPG publishing industry, which went electronic in a serious way much earlier than publishing in general, largely abandoned DRM at a very early stage in the process.
- cstross 13y agoTwo words: "fewer lawsuits". RPG companies, with a couple of exceptions (ahem: Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, Games Workshop), are tiny. Which means there's a single desk labelled "the buck stops here". Whereas at a big corporation with billion dollar revenues at stake, nobody wants to make a decision that triggers a shareholder lawsuit -- especially if it's one that's devilishly hard to prove either way. (If you've got DRM on ebooks, then remove it, activist shareholders can in principle try to sue you either for losing revenue to piracy by dropping DRM, or for having lost revenue in the past due to embracing DRM. So it's much safer not to do anything at all ...) It is no accident that the first of the Big Five English-language conglomerates to break step on DRM was Macmillan. Macmillan is the English-language subsidiary of Holtzbrinck, which is privately owned.
- mattl 13y agoEven GW is selling DRM-free epub now.
- rXoX 13y agoVery good point re: "activist shareholders". Too few people appreciate what can happen when corps aren't seen to be squeezing out every last drop...
- pjc50 13y agoShareholder lawsuits are vanishingly rare, though.
- gboudrias 13y ago> (ahem: Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, Games Workshop) Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast now, btw. Abandon hope all ye etc.
- leoc 13y agoAvalon Hill too, of course (or what's left of it).
- dragonwriter 13y ago> which went electronic in a serious way much earlier than publishing in general, largely abandoned DRM at a very early stage in the process. IIRC, most of the early adopters -- who did their own PDF distribution -- in the RPG industry never used DRM at all, the very little adoption DRM ever had was among second-wave electronic companies that were using third-party PDF distribution services that offered DRM as an option (IIRC, the default option, in some cases.)
- pdonis 13y agoThis matches my experience--a friend and I were among those "early adopters" who published PDFs back in the D&D 3.0 days, and nobody was using DRM then; first, nobody wanted to pay the license fees to Adobe or whomever (most of us couldn't afford them in any case), and second, all it would have done was piss off our customers anyway. Later on (in the D&D 3.5 days), as you say, third-party PDF distribution services started offering DRM, but even then there wasn't a lot of uptake that I could see.