Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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WotC wants to make money and plenty of people have expressed interest in being able to get both for less than the cost of getting them each individually.
Um... DRM e-books should not be thought of as permanent, they become inaccessible if the DRM system shuts down. PDF watermarks are pretty much the same as 'no security at all'. This is not to say that there isn't a better solution than what WotC did, but it's their decision and I never had any illusions that they were selling me anything other than what they are.
Lack of a physical option is probably because it would cost more to produce than they would make from selling it.
100% agree on DRM. But it would be a start, at least. They could, for instance, allow DRM to be read by common e-reader services to maximize the odds of the material being accessible in the future, even if WotC were to vanish overnight.
I'm not saying anything about whether WotC can or cannot do this, or even about whether it makes business sense. I'm just saying that it is unfriendly to the consumer by choice--especially to those of us who prefer to have hard copies of things. I'm not under any illusions; they've been telegraphing this course for a long time. But this is an internet forum, and therefore a natural place to whinge about things.
I also don't agree on the cost point. Several TTRPG companies publish smaller materials in the form of zines. They don't need to be hardback books. They could bring back Dragon+ in physical form.
& I've already addressed how durable magazine paper is long-term in the past(it's only slightly better these days), thus the kinetic satisfaction is only temporary unless you know how to non-electronically preserve magazines to a degree where that kinetic satisfaction is maintained to your lacking.
Likewise, 4e's HEAVY piracy scene turned off investor firms from PDFs. Hasbro lost their money in their eyes. It's not Beyond's fault in this case, or even WotC's:It's Blackrock, The Vanguard Group, & other boomer money blobs ordering Hasbro to increase RoI to make up for what they see as loaned money lost to piracy.
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
It's not even a matter of "what they see", it's a matter of fiduciary duty. Piracy objectively represents lost revenue. Publicly held companies are legally obligated to avoid making decisions that will obviously lose revenue and devalue stock, all other things being equal. Ergo, when they've objectively had one major incident/loss pursuing a particular model, it'd pretty much have to be a breach of fiduciary duty to pursue that same model again down the line when the reason for the loss has been identified and remains a relevant concern.
Sorry, I was responding to another post, but that was essentially my point. Clearly there is a large enough market of people who are willing to pay for physical copies that they also offer physical only copies in the store here as well.
That's very, very debatable, but Wall Street at least has convinced itself it does
Active characters:
Edoumiaond Willegume "Eddie" Podslee, Vegetanian scholar (College of Spirits bard)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Peter "the Pied Piper" Hausler, human con artist/remover of vermin (Circle of the Shepherd druid)
PIPA - Planar Interception/Protection Aeormaton, warforged bodyguard and ex-wizard hunter (Warrior of the Elements monk/Cartographer artificer)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
I don't think it is, really. It's that they have adopted a different business model, and it seems to be working, so why mess with it? Selling PDFs does not encourage DDB subscriptions, and it's not going to bring in so many extra sales as to make up for that. (Indeed, it may well cannibalize book sales, and so ultimately be a wash, even if piracy is irrelevant.)
"Piracy is lost sales" is the easy argument that gets used in PR and legal battles over DRM, but the actual results are more complicated, and probably industry-dependent. And if they thought that distributing PDFs would make them more money, they'd do it. It's not like there aren't D&D books out there in piracy land (I assume), and they seem to be doing just fine.
But for most people, DDB is better than a PDF. It's a value-add. People will buy DDB versions of books they already have. That's likely much less true for PDFs.
Most publishers do PDFs instead of something like DDB because they don't have a choice. There's demand for digital versions of their books, and they don't have the infrastructure to do anything more than a PDF.
Unless literally every person who uses a pirated copy would refuse to buy the product legally, yes, it does represent lost revenue.
To the extent anyone might be making money using pirated material, thus doing an end run around licensing permissions, that would also be lost revenue.
This isn't exactly a good arguement for the type of product this thread is talking about. The three exclusives are no different from previous products that WotC provided as PDF's in recent years other than that they are exclusive to DDB. If they had used the same model as their DM's Guild PDF's, I would have purchased them, but as a DDB exclusive, they hold no value at all. I think it is easy for people on these forums to think that the majority of players use this site, but that has not been my personal experience.
People wanted the product, and found a way to get it for free instead of paying for it. Let’s not pretend the only people who do this are people who can’t afford the books.
It seems a reasonable conclusion that someone here, on the forums of this site, is likely to use this site. Moreover, them complaining about this specific product offered by this site being available as it is, rather than as PDF's also seems very... specific.
Which leaves out any revenue added from people who sampled something, then made actual purchases later -- either in a different format, or by the same artist/company/whatever after they'd become a fan
It also leaves out stuff like the music industry using the piracy boogeyman to cover their asses for being very, very late to the party on digital -- and those bad decisions cost them way more "lost revenue" than Napster ever did
Also, the amount/percentage of revenue piracy represents, lost or otherwise, varies wildly by industry. Lost revenue from book piracy is a rounding error at best compared to video game piracy, for instance
Active characters:
Edoumiaond Willegume "Eddie" Podslee, Vegetanian scholar (College of Spirits bard)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Peter "the Pied Piper" Hausler, human con artist/remover of vermin (Circle of the Shepherd druid)
PIPA - Planar Interception/Protection Aeormaton, warforged bodyguard and ex-wizard hunter (Warrior of the Elements monk/Cartographer artificer)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
You mean the specific player options that are specifically limited to DDB only? You don't think people that don't use DDB might have a desire for those specific items, but not want to use DDB to do so?
And yet it is still lost revenue, which a publicly traded company is obligated to avoid when it’s a demonstrable “if X then Y” scenario.
You're missing the point here completely, which is that publicly traded companies spin all sorts of nonsense as 'fiduciary duty' to justify the things they want to do
Does WOTC lose some effectively meaningless amount of revenue to piracy of D&D books in 2025? Sure, I suppose. Have they taken the best approach to addressing the "issue"? I doubt it
Active characters:
Edoumiaond Willegume "Eddie" Podslee, Vegetanian scholar (College of Spirits bard)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Peter "the Pied Piper" Hausler, human con artist/remover of vermin (Circle of the Shepherd druid)
PIPA - Planar Interception/Protection Aeormaton, warforged bodyguard and ex-wizard hunter (Warrior of the Elements monk/Cartographer artificer)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
I don’t know if it’s meaningless. Say what you will about WotC and trusting them on issues, but one thing we can trust is they are running a business and their goal is to make a profit. There are people in offices with MBAs and spreadsheets comparing various sales and distribution models, and they’ve decided (based on factors the rest of us aren’t privy to) that pdfs are not a money maker for them. And they almost certainly factor in how many sales they miss out on from people who would sample then buy. As an example, it’s been a while since they got rid of piecemeal purchases of only parts of books; if they’d realized that the changes they made weren’t working from a profit standpoint, they would almost certainly go back to allowing it. They might be making a mistake in their assumptions on pdfs, but it’s going to be an honest effort.
That other companies do release pdfs, as some people argue, isn’t material. They have their own people with their own spreadsheets saying it’s a good idea, but they have different business structures which give them different results.
I admit, I'd forgotten they ever released these sorts of things as PDFs. (Though I think at least some of the others were done for charity, weren't they?)
That does change the equation for these books, if not their books in general. However, it's possible that the PDF versions never sold as well, and they've decided not to bother anymore. Or they're using them to push the bundle, and maybe they'll release them at a later date. Or not. (As we all know, they're not that good at communication.)
In any event, if you do want it, but DDB-only doesn't work, you can print/save as PDF the appropriate bits from your browser. Despite what others have said, they're not going to ban you for it. (For one thing, it all happens in your browser after you load the page. You can literally turn off wifi and it'll still print.)
Of course, if you want to encourage them to release the books as PDF, you shouldn't do that. (And sending them feedback on the subject won't hurt.)
Even under the wildest interpretation of "maximize shareholder value" (which is not the same as "maximize revenue"), this doesn't follow. Publicly traded companies release things in trivially copyable formats all the time. It's all about cost-benefit analysis. There will be some lost sales to copying (and, while they talk about "one piracy == one sale", that's not going to be how their accountants measure it), but if that's the format that they believe will maximize sales, that's the format they're gonna use. (And that's before you get into weird political maneuvers, like the music companies letting Amazon sell music as mp3s at a lower price in order to break the Apple monopoly they'd created by mandating DRM in the first place.)
WotC certainly loses money to piracy. The exactly amount of money they use is hard to calculate and debatable, because you don't know what portion of pirates would buy anything if unable to pirate. As for whether they've chosen the best option: we don't know, and I doubt they know, but I will note that making games always-online (even when there's no reason it should be necessary) is a popular solution in the video game space, so it's not like D&D Beyond is doing anything all that unusual, and comparing D&D to other RPGs is just like comparing AA and AAA games to indie games -- they don't really have the same issues.
The only pdf 5e products I know of were Extra Live charity projects (which is an entire complicated side issue because they weren't even provided by the regular D&D product team), and it should be obvious that piracy of charity products does not impact Wizards' bottom line.
Intellectual property is still property and still has owners. Furthermore, the IP in question is a luxury product. They are not holding back any lifesaving cures or anything like that.
And of course their revenue is meaningless to others. That does not mean they have no moral standing to care about theirs, any more than any of us would be in any way immoral caring about earning income, ourselves.
It is easy to be cavalier with other people's lives. I'd love a Lamborghini, but strangely, that company has not offered me any convenient copies of any of their cars (in any form actually drivable in any practical commute) at any price convenient to me. People seem to accept that and not go complain on their website.
Or, they noticed after that 'last time' that there were copies of the PDF's on various free distribution sites, to a wide spread enough extent that trying to shut that down was deemed impractical, so that this time, they went this way to try to avoid a repeat of that.
Well, again, given we are in the DDB forums, yes, I expect the vast majority of people here to be people who use this site. But as for a 'desire for those specific items' again, when the demand for PDF versions is specific to them, then it begs the question, why just them? I find that question particularly significant in conjunction with the possibility I mentioned above, namely that they felt burned after the last time.