Wizards of the Coast’s new model?

Wizards of the Coast is working with a new licensee, Trapdoor Technologies, to deliver digital tools for Dungeons & Dragons 5e.  In May, Wizards of the Coast announced Kobold Press designed two of the adventures to support the Tyranny of Dragons storyline.  DriveThruRPG has been powering Dungeons & Dragons Classics for awhile now.  I think this may represent a subtle shift in how Wizards of the Coast is handling Dungeons & Dragons.

I’ve already talked at length about how I feel Wizards of the Coast should focus on their core competencies and let others develop tools for the game in the context of the OGL. It looks like Wizards of the Coast is doing this, except instead of an open source model they are planning to work with specific licensees to fill the void.

While I would personally prefer an open source model, this makes sense from Wizards of the Coast’s point of view.  They can focus their internal resources on the rules and farm tasks that go outside their core competencies to other groups while still maintaining a tight control over how their intellectual property is used.  Seriously, this is win-win for them.

Hopefully, they will open things up a bit more down the road, as Mike Mearls said they would in 2015.  I still maintain that a robust gaming license is good for the hobby, and that what is good for the hobby is good for Dungeons & Dragons.

Dragon & Dungeon Magazines on PDF: The worst of both worlds?

I understood it when Wizards of the Coast (WOTC) first announced that Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine would be published in-house as PDF only magazines.  The high-cost of printing media like newspapers, magazines, and comic books, combined with declining readership, have been devastating to companies in the publishing business, Many of these companies have had to file bankruptcy, increase prices dramatically, or (like PC Magazine or WOTC) move a formerly print product to an online only distribution model.

Moving Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine to PDF also made sense as part of the larger digital initiative. To sell subscriptions to Dungeons & Dragons Insider (DDI), they needed content. Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine have strong brand recognition in the industry, so it made sense to position these assets as the primary content generators for DDI.

As always, the problem is in the implementation. WOTC has managed to lose the benefits of printing physical copies of their magazines without fully leveraging the advantages of an online distribution model.

I have always felt the advantages of paper magazines were two-fold. The first is a sense of nostalgia. Many of us have fond memories associated with Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine over the years. A more tangible benefit is that they encourage casual reading and rereading.  Greywulf, a fellow RPG Blogger, recently tweeted following about the loss of physical copies of Dragon and Dungeon:

I have a couple of hundred copies of Dungeon and Dragon mags dating back decades. PDFs just aren't the same. ::sigh::

When was the last time you randomly pulled out a twenty year old PDF and took it to the bathroom with you? No, thought not.

Similiarly, Bob posted the following to the comment section of my blog:

.... Still pissed that I can't get physical copies of Dragon and Dungeon at Waldenbooks.... Kobold doesn't come out enough.

(As an aside, does Waldenbooks even still exist?  I thought it was bought by Borders.)

Regardless, I have to admit that I also miss the tangible product.  However, I probably use the PDFs more because of their immediate accessibility.  If a player of mine wants to use a power out of Dragon 374, I can pull it up instantly on my laptop.

However, the scenario above points to one of the areas where I feel WOTC has dropped the ball in their online distribution model. They lack of ability to perform searches on this content.

Think about it.  Let’s say you wanted to create a kobold lair. Imagine if you could logon to DDI, type in kobold, and pull up all of the Dragon Magazine articles about kobolds.  It would not only assist in the prep work, it would make it much more likely that those articles would be used!

On the other hand, PDFs bring several nice features to the table, like portability and offline access.  The fact that you still have the PDFs even if you are no longer a subscriber to DDI is also nice.  So I am not sure I would want to eliminate PDFs from the picture entirely.

So what would be my perfect world?  Well, I would continue to publish the articles to the website throughout the month, just like they do now.  These articles would be in a searchable database with links directly to them.  At the end of the month, these articles would be gathered up into a single PDF, just as they are now.

So what about the print lovers?  In my perfect world, these articles would be available for print on demand.  Since this is bound to be a bit pricy, maybe they could adopt a build your own model similar to Time Inc’s Mine.  I wouldn’t mind building my own “Best of Dragon” every six months!

Of course, we don’t live in a perfect world.  I wouldn’t bet on any of these features being implemented soon.  Wouldn’t it be nice if at least some of them were though?

Thoughts on the Greg Leeds interview and piracy.

Greg Leeds, President of Wizards of the Coast, recently granted an interview to EnWorld about the cessation of PDF versions of their products.  If you haven’t read it already, I highly recommend you take the time to read it before continuing on.

I am sympathetic to Mr. Leeds concerns about piracy.  After all, a lot of work goes into these books, and Wizards of the Coast has a right to make a profit on their work.  Unfortunately, I believe that Wizards of the Coast is taking the absolute wrong path by removing PDF’s from the market place.

In fact, I would argue that Wizards of the Coast’s PDF strategy was flawed from the beginning, which is why piracy of their books became so rampant.  The history lesson that the recording industry has taught us is that when the people want something and they cannot obtain it for a reasonable price, they will turn to illegal methods to acquire it.

Wizards of the Coast’s PDF products were extremely overpriced, both on an absolute scale and when compared to the rest of the marketplace.  They charged full cover price for their PDF products, which meant that the PDF’s could not even compete with the dead tree versions of their products available on Amazon.com!  Considering that the PDF versions of their product do not incur printing or shipping costs, this seems like highway robbery.

A more reasonable pricing structure is already being used by many of their competitors in the marketplace.  New releases on PDF cost about $10 less than their dead tree versions.   This price is maintained for six months or so, then dropped by about $5.  Eventually the price settles anywhere between $9 to $15 dollars for older material.

This pricing structure helps them recoup costs in the beginning by selling the PDF at a higher price point while the book is new and demand is high.  Dropping the price over time encourages purchases when demand is lower, an incurs very little additional cost to Wizards of the Coast.

Of course it should not be surprising that Wizards of the Coast did not come up with a reasonable price structure, since they seemed to be reluctant to be in the PDF market place in the first place.  Wizards did very little to promote sales of their PDF products.  They did not promote the PDF versions of their product on their website, which would seem a logical venue.  Another tactic would be to provide a one time code with the dead tree version of there books which could be used for a $5 discount on purchase of the PDF versions.  The opportunities to cross-promote the PDF versions of their product seem endless.  The fact that they did none of them shows where their priorities were.

As I said earlier, when people cannot get what they want at a reasonable price through legal channels they will turn to illegal methods like piracy.  The inverse is also true.  While some people will always engage in piracy, many will turn against it when offered a reasonable alternative.  iTunes and the Amazon.com MP3 Store have proven this in the music industry.  Wizards of the Coast could have turned around their legal PDF sales as well.   Price restructuring, ease of access, and working with their partners to improve distribution channels would have been required.  It would have been hard work, but the payoff would be a robust PDF business.

Instead they chose the easy route.  They have declared the business “too hard” and shut down all legal options for their customers.  I fear that this choice will cost them dearly.  Their customers now have no option except to turn to piracy for digital copies of their book… and trust me, they will.