WotC screws the pooch again..

I just happened to catch a tweet from Wolfgang Baur (monkeyking) announcing WotC is pulling all sales of PDF’s from RPGnow (effective NOW) and Paizo effective midnight. Speculation is it is either in line with this press release related to a lawsuit they filed today or they are planning to bring all pdf sales in house. Either way it is incredibly short sighted on their part. If it is related to the lawsuit, this snippet seems more appropriate to THEIR actions in pulling legitimate sales and not those of the pirates they are chasing.

“Violations of our copyrights and piracy of our products hurt not only Wizards of the Coast’s financial health but also the health of whole gaming community including retailers and players,” said Greg Leeds, President of Wizards of the Coast. “We have brought these suits to stop the illegal activities of these defendants, and to deter future unauthorized and unlawful file-sharing.”

If it is their intention to bring all pdf sales inhouse, expect two things. An increase of anywhere from 50 to 100% price increase. A horribly broken system for downloading the files that limits sales to the point they beomce non existant.

Either reason WotC has for doing this is sure to cause all those pdf’s to become even more available via torrent than they were before, because it will be the ONLY efficient way to get them, and if you have downloaded anything via torrent you know how sarchastic that statement was.

I personally just grabbed a couple of Planescape products I was missing from Paizo while I still could. Oh well. WotC/Hasbro really does just not know how to make a smart call. If only they would choke their sales to the point Paizo can just buy the whole thing, lock stock and barrell, we might actually game to be proud of again.