Piracy, the Trove and how they affect the Hobby

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1. browsing a book at the store. That has sold me on books (cool, this game looks fun, or cool, this module has some good content) and unsold me (hmm, not enough I can use for the cost). The 5-10 page preview just isn't enough in many cases.
DTRPG tries to do that with their previews, and some do with the QuickStarts. I think that those are valid ways to do it and you can get the information you need from it - if it's done right. And that's the rub. I've been convinced by browsing more than one QS or preview to spring for the whole thing. But some are just useless. PWYW is another way of doing that, but most (a) don't value the PDFs at the same rate as the creator and (b) don't come back to buy.
2. borrowing a book from a friend because I'm curious how game X handles situation Y
Yeah, that would require DRM and infrastructure. Though not strictly legal, the lack of DRM other than watermark makes it so ethical people (i.e. people that will buy or delete the copy) can do it.

3. getting new players into my game where they used to just come over to my house or wherever I was running the game and read my copy of the game to generate their character and then look up spells or other rules during play

I love cut rate player's guides for this. I think more companies don't do it because of the additional cost, but it's a great idea when it can be done.
 
I just love previews on DTRPG where it’s literally the first few pages of a book. A couple of blank pages and then the credits and then maybe a “why this book exists” prologue.
And people get upset when you tell them the preview is useless. IMO you need: A TOC: an Example of the character creation, an example of skill resolution/combat, and it's nice to have some sort of background fluff.
 
IIRC there's a streaming service called Hi-Yah that, well, can you guess...?

They are good. They have a lot of newer movies (I used to have a subscription). Basically I think most of the martial arts and wuxia that used to be at Netflix migrated to HI-Yah (at least that is how it looks to me). But I don't recall them having a lot of classic movies. Don't get me wrong, you can still see lots of good movies on prime, netflix, youtube, apple and other platforms or services like Hi-Yah. There just seem to be less classic Shaw Brothers at the moment, and it can be tricky to find key movies sometimes (there are a lot of hong kong films from the 90s I'd love to see but can't at the moment-----even schlocky stuff like Holy Virgin Vs. the Evil Dead with Donnie Yen).

In many ways things are much better now. I remember having to go to block buster and hope for movies like the Bride With White Hair to be there. You could sometimes order them, get them at photographic, in a catalog or in a bootleg store but it was often hit or miss, you were usually limited to just one version. It is kind of ashame that in the internet age these movies are not more readily available (some are, but it is very platform dependent). What I have been doing is buying movies I like to see when I catch them on prime, youtube or apple. I recently purchased Vengeful Beauty on prime even though I have it on DVD, and have done so with other films. For a while Celestial Pictures had a ton of Shaw Brothers up on prime and on other platforms. Many of their movies still are scattered about, but you have to look around. And some seem to not be so easy to get. For example I have found Black Magic on youtube, but to get Black Magic 2 you have to go to Apple I believe. But these are movies that are at least still being printed and made available. My major concern is for movies that aren't being made available and are in danger of fading away.
 
And people get upset when you tell them the preview is useless. IMO you need: A TOC: an Example of the character creation, an example of skill resolution/combat, and it's nice to have some sort of background fluff.
a page sum up of the background would be good so you get an idea of genre and setting.

heck, I have whole campaign briefs that are better previews than what is out there. It's a tool to sell the game
 
I'll just say that there are quite a few current RPGs that I would never have purchased had it not been for first downloading PDFs of them from The Trove.

I will also say that for old out of print RPGs based on licensed properties, The Trove was extremely useful.

Just because I grabbed a PDF off The Trove was not meaning that a sale was lost. Just because I grabbed a PDF off The Trove did not mean that there was ever a likely sale to begin with. It served the exact same function as taking an RPG off the shelf at the game store and flipping through it.

This is my sense of things. I am sure there are people who don't buy the book because they can get it free, but I've always felt I am probably not losing sales in the end because it seemed like plenty of people were using it as a way to try out different games. RPG fans are pretty good about supporting companies and writers they like. So I think something like the trove is not so bad for smaller companies, and more of a thorn for the larger ones.
 
On the preservation issue, I think Abandonia does a pretty good job of doing so properly and it's what I'd want to see from a RPG site doing the same.

Namely:

Nothing currently commercially available (they list the games but no download link)

If the copyright holder asks them to take it down they do so instantly (so creators in negotiations about republication aren't hampered)

They also won't host anything under the protection of the ESA etc, partially for site protection reasons.

That I think it a reasonable bar to ask any site that actually cares about preservation to meet.

Interestingly, they started as a warez site and shifted to abandonware later on.

(I still think their legality is a grey area, but I'd agree with people who say that's separate from the ethical discussion).
 
DTRPG tries to do that with their previews, and some do with the QuickStarts. I think that those are valid ways to do it and you can get the information you need from it - if it's done right. And that's the rub. I've been convinced by browsing more than one QS or preview to spring for the whole thing. But some are just useless. PWYW is another way of doing that, but most (a) don't value the PDFs at the same rate as the creator and (b) don't come back to buy.
I just love previews on DTRPG where it’s literally the first few pages of a book. A couple of blank pages and then the credits and then maybe a “why this book exists” prologue.

Chuckdee, I think you're going to have to share some of the games which have what you consider meaningful quickstarts, because I cannot think of any right now. From my POV, Endless Flight's characterization of previews is more on target.

I'm not questioning you. I'm just saying that my experience paints a picture where the kinds of meaningful previews are so vanishingly rare as to be unicorns. Nearly everything I ever look at is something like a table of contents, or some portion of a rambling introduction explaining that RPGs exist, or simply a picture of the cover. That's the previews that work. I'd say about half of the ones I click on have broken previews.
 
a page sum up of the background would be good so you get an idea of genre and setting.

heck, I have whole campaign briefs that are better previews than what is out there. It's a tool to sell the game
DTRPG's preview settings have very limited flexibility. You can determine where the preview starts, and how many concurrent pages, that's it. As TOCs are frequently requested as being in a preview, this is why you tend to get the very start of a book.

We prefer to put together a separate preview, showing a range of things from across the book, or a complete chapter, and these seem to be quite popular. We reserve such previews for major releases though.
 
DTRPG's preview settings have very limited flexibility. You can determine where the preview starts, and how many concurrent pages, that's it. As TOCs are frequently requested as being in a preview, this is why you tend to get the very start of a book.

We prefer to put together a separate preview, showing a range of things from across the book, or a complete chapter, and these seem to be quite popular. We reserve such previews for major releases though.
For my Wilderlands stuff I set it up to link to a PDF. It not a excerpt from the product. More of a especially formatted short brochure previewing the product in enough detail to hopefully influence a purchase. It was less work than trying to what you mentioned above and in part reused material that was going into a website anyway.

Hope that helps.
 
DTRPG tries to do that with their previews, and some do with the QuickStarts. I think that those are valid ways to do it and you can get the information you need from it - if it's done right. And that's the rub. I've been convinced by browsing more than one QS or preview to spring for the whole thing. But some are just useless. PWYW is another way of doing that, but most (a) don't value the PDFs at the same rate as the creator and (b) don't come back to buy.
The DTRPG previews often aren't enough to show me whether I want the product or not. A quick start would go a long way for an RPG rule set because hopefully it highlights the best the system has to offer, but not always. Sometimes I really need to be able to skim through the whole book. When I was working on my Cold West Iron Marches, I was looking for sandbox products that had tables and information useful to me. In this case I did a mix of strategies, I have some things I purchased up front that in the end weren't worth it to me, I have other things where a borrowed copy convinced me to drop cash. I have a bunch of PWYW titles that I purchased for $0, some I purchased for $1, and the RQG Bestiary I purchased for $10 during the Australian Wildfires charity drive.
I love cut rate player's guides for this. I think more companies don't do it because of the additional cost, but it's a great idea when it can be done.
Yea, that would help, though with many of the systems I play, the GM-only content of the rule book is actually pretty slim.

Quick Starts and Players Guides don't help with adventures though... I REALLY would love to be able to shelf browse the RQG adventures, official and Johnstown Compendium. I'm sure there's some stuff useful to my RQ1 campaign, but there's also probably stuff that's useless. Honestly, the one product I bought so far because it promised some additional insight on Thanatar doesn't look too useful to me and hearing about books with very abbreviated stat blocks eliminates one of the major draws to an RQ module for me (never mind that even if they have full stat blocks, I'm going to have to make adjustments to make them work with RQ1).
 
DTRPG's preview settings have very limited flexibility. You can determine where the preview starts, and how many concurrent pages, that's it. As TOCs are frequently requested as being in a preview, this is why you tend to get the very start of a book.

We prefer to put together a separate preview, showing a range of things from across the book, or a complete chapter, and these seem to be quite popular. We reserve such previews for major releases though.
Yea, when the seller puts together a custom preview, those are the ones that most often sell me something. Well, that and the products that are so small that the preview is the whole thing with a big ass watermark or something...
 
With hard copy books, pretty sure not.

Also...if did the conversion correctly that is like 0.12 US Dollars. I'd like to think authors get a larger profit than that when they sell a book!
Keep hoping:thumbsup:!
 
I’d like to see a term of copyright set so that the last year of expected royalties had a net present value at the time of composition that was significantly more than negligible to the creator. Restricting people’s natural liberty to sing songs etc. seems to me justifiable only to they extend that the composer and lyricist are appreciably rewarded. That suggests to me that a copyright term about 28–35 years ought to be appropriate to the social purposes of copyright law.
If copyright lasted only 14 years we might have the ending to Game of Thrones by now.
 
I might theoretically be able to post a thread about Georgism sometime though - I think it wouldn't necessarily break the No Politics rule, as it's all about economics.

Some economics is intensely political. The tension between socialist and anarcho-capitalist ideals is one of the main axes of the political spectrum.
 
It's inaccurate to keep talking about creators in relation to copyright, because that really is only a minor side-effect of a law intended to protect corporate buyers of said copyright. Most creators work for a fee or a salary and do not retain rights to their work. Now, the value publishers, studios, and the like set on creators' work obviously depends on their expected returns, so there is an indirect link, but in the vast majority of created works it is not the creator who loses out from copyright violation (if indeed anyone does). Now, hopefully that is changing as more people create and market their own work, but mostly that results in far less visibility so the risk of copyright violation is commensurately lower.
 
Copyright has been around since before commerce was dominated by corporations.
To be clear I refer to copyright law of the present, that being the relevant case in relation to the discussion of illegal downloads.
 
I did a little research Into my own products and how sharing and piracy has affected them. Keep in mind I’m a very small publisher.

Back In the early 2000s, I put out three products, two for D&D 3.5, and one for d20 Modern, all on DriveThruRPG and RPGNow (when they were still separate companies). Initial sales were okay but not amazing - I was selling a few every day. I paid for professional art and editing, and they were good products.

A guy I know would often pirate music and RPG PDFs when he could find them (it wasn‘t as easy as it is now). He would do a search for my books every couple of days for me, even though I never asked him to do it.

The first book showed up in his search about two weeks after it came out. The same week, sales fell off a cliff, from a couple per day to almost zero. The second book took more than three weeks to show up, and drop in sales matched it exactly. The third book showed up before the end of the first week, again, immediate drop in sales. Sure, correlation is not causation, but that’s a hell of a coincidence.

I eventually pulled them from sale when the d20 license expired, as I couldn’t be bothered to redo them to remove all the d20 references, especially when they weren’t really selling any copies anymore.

A couple of years ago, I redid the first adventure for Mythras. I had bought the art and figured I might as well support a game I really enjoy. Plus, I was hoping that I finally might at least break even on the money I had spent on the artwork.

This time, I visited the Trove every few days to see if it had been pirated. It took just over a week, and sales were not good.

I have one more book that I’m putting out - well, technically two as there will be both a Mythras version and a 5E version. I already had the artwork, so I figured I might as well put them out and hopefully make a few bucks. But I don’t feel like putting out any more after that, because I know that only a small handful will buy them, and then the rest will pirate them.

I was considering writing a large setting book for Mythras that is different than anything they’ve done so far, but I decided not to go ahead with pitching it to Loz, because I know that the only way I can guarantee some income before the pirates get hold of it is to Kickstart the project. But Kickstarting is a lot of work above and beyond putting the actual product together. So, it’s far more likely that I’ll never bother to do it.

So, maybe I’m a hack and all my stuff is shit. I’m not the person to make that judgement. But, even if that is true, how many other people with real talent might have had a great idea and said “fuck it” because they’d just like to be paid for their effort by people using their work?

Lastly, for those who say you only download a product and then buy it if it’s actually good, consider the fact that if you actually do that, you’re in the extreme minority. I put together a complete sector for Traveller-type games and put it up on DriveThru as PWYW. I had mostly done it for my blog, and figured I’d share it out there and see if people were willing to pay for it. I got 273 downloads fromDriveThru (which would make it an Electrum Best Seller), and got some quite nice online reviews (including one from some guy in Shanghai). How many people contributed anything when they downloaded it? 32 people, just over 10%. So it’s not an Electrum Best Seller, because about 90% of people don’t contribute anything so those don’t count as sales. And that’s from a product that people supposedly liked.

I don’t think I’m going to convince anyone, because we all have our justifications for our own behaviour. But I think about what products we might have seen if people felt like they could at least be paid for the stuff they create that others take without throwing any compensation back.
 
If copyright lasted only 14 years we might have the ending to Game of Thrones by now.
Which would probably be even worse than the one the TV show ended with.

The thing that characterizes hackery is its cheap shittyness.
 
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I did a little research Into my own products and how sharing and piracy has affected them. Keep in mind I’m a very small publisher.

Back In the early 2000s, I put out three products, two for D&D 3.5, and one for d20 Modern, all on DriveThruRPG and RPGNow (when they were still separate companies). Initial sales were okay but not amazing - I was selling a few every day. I paid for professional art and editing, and they were good products.

A guy I know would often pirate music and RPG PDFs when he could find them (it wasn‘t as easy as it is now). He would do a search for my books every couple of days for me, even though I never asked him to do it.

The first book showed up in his search about two weeks after it came out. The same week, sales fell off a cliff, from a couple per day to almost zero. The second book took more than three weeks to show up, and drop in sales matched it exactly. The third book showed up before the end of the first week, again, immediate drop in sales. Sure, correlation is not causation, but that’s a hell of a coincidence.

I eventually pulled them from sale when the d20 license expired, as I couldn’t be bothered to redo them to remove all the d20 references, especially when they weren’t really selling any copies anymore.

A couple of years ago, I redid the first adventure for Mythras. I had bought the art and figured I might as well support a game I really enjoy. Plus, I was hoping that I finally might at least break even on the money I had spent on the artwork.

This time, I visited the Trove every few days to see if it had been pirated. It took just over a week, and sales were not good.

I have one more book that I’m putting out - well, technically two as there will be both a Mythras version and a 5E version. I already had the artwork, so I figured I might as well put them out and hopefully make a few bucks. But I don’t feel like putting out any more after that, because I know that only a small handful will buy them, and then the rest will pirate them.

I was considering writing a large setting book for Mythras that is different than anything they’ve done so far, but I decided not to go ahead with pitching it to Loz, because I know that the only way I can guarantee some income before the pirates get hold of it is to Kickstart the project. But Kickstarting is a lot of work above and beyond putting the actual product together. So, it’s far more likely that I’ll never bother to do it.

So, maybe I’m a hack and all my stuff is shit. I’m not the person to make that judgement. But, even if that is true, how many other people with real talent might have had a great idea and said “fuck it” because they’d just like to be paid for their effort by people using their work?

Lastly, for those who say you only download a product and then buy it if it’s actually good, consider the fact that if you actually do that, you’re in the extreme minority. I put together a complete sector for Traveller-type games and put it up on DriveThru as PWYW. I had mostly done it for my blog, and figured I’d share it out there and see if people were willing to pay for it. I got 273 downloads fromDriveThru (which would make it an Electrum Best Seller), and got some quite nice online reviews (including one from some guy in Shanghai). How many people contributed anything when they downloaded it? 32 people, just over 10%. So it’s not an Electrum Best Seller, because about 90% of people don’t contribute anything so those don’t count as sales. And that’s from a product that people supposedly liked.

I don’t think I’m going to convince anyone, because we all have our justifications for our own behaviour. But I think about what products we might have seen if people felt like they could at least be paid for the stuff they create that others take without throwing any compensation back.
That's probably the best evidence based response Ive seen so thank you for that.
 
I did a little research Into my own products and how sharing and piracy has affected them. Keep in mind I’m a very small publisher.

Back In the early 2000s, I put out three products, two for D&D 3.5, and one for d20 Modern, all on DriveThruRPG and RPGNow (when they were still separate companies). Initial sales were okay but not amazing - I was selling a few every day. I paid for professional art and editing, and they were good products.

A guy I know would often pirate music and RPG PDFs when he could find them (it wasn‘t as easy as it is now). He would do a search for my books every couple of days for me, even though I never asked him to do it.

The first book showed up in his search about two weeks after it came out. The same week, sales fell off a cliff, from a couple per day to almost zero. The second book took more than three weeks to show up, and drop in sales matched it exactly. The third book showed up before the end of the first week, again, immediate drop in sales. Sure, correlation is not causation, but that’s a hell of a coincidence.

I eventually pulled them from sale when the d20 license expired, as I couldn’t be bothered to redo them to remove all the d20 references, especially when they weren’t really selling any copies anymore.

A couple of years ago, I redid the first adventure for Mythras. I had bought the art and figured I might as well support a game I really enjoy. Plus, I was hoping that I finally might at least break even on the money I had spent on the artwork.

This time, I visited the Trove every few days to see if it had been pirated. It took just over a week, and sales were not good.

I have one more book that I’m putting out - well, technically two as there will be both a Mythras version and a 5E version. I already had the artwork, so I figured I might as well put them out and hopefully make a few bucks. But I don’t feel like putting out any more after that, because I know that only a small handful will buy them, and then the rest will pirate them.

I was considering writing a large setting book for Mythras that is different than anything they’ve done so far, but I decided not to go ahead with pitching it to Loz, because I know that the only way I can guarantee some income before the pirates get hold of it is to Kickstart the project. But Kickstarting is a lot of work above and beyond putting the actual product together. So, it’s far more likely that I’ll never bother to do it.

So, maybe I’m a hack and all my stuff is shit. I’m not the person to make that judgement. But, even if that is true, how many other people with real talent might have had a great idea and said “fuck it” because they’d just like to be paid for their effort by people using their work?

Lastly, for those who say you only download a product and then buy it if it’s actually good, consider the fact that if you actually do that, you’re in the extreme minority. I put together a complete sector for Traveller-type games and put it up on DriveThru as PWYW. I had mostly done it for my blog, and figured I’d share it out there and see if people were willing to pay for it. I got 273 downloads fromDriveThru (which would make it an Electrum Best Seller), and got some quite nice online reviews (including one from some guy in Shanghai). How many people contributed anything when they downloaded it? 32 people, just over 10%. So it’s not an Electrum Best Seller, because about 90% of people don’t contribute anything so those don’t count as sales. And that’s from a product that people supposedly liked.

I don’t think I’m going to convince anyone, because we all have our justifications for our own behaviour. But I think about what products we might have seen if people felt like they could at least be paid for the stuff they create that others take without throwing any compensation back.
It would be interesting to see if sales would have also fallen off a cliff if it had never appeared on the Trove (or elsewhere). It would also be interesting to see if certain systems or types of products are more susceptible to this than others.
 
Oh, I get that. I'm not arguing against his being banned on therpgshite.

As for the rest, I can only fault a guy so much for cutting ties with people to protect his brand. It's a bit mercenary, sure, but he's put a lot of work in. Not saying I always agree, but I can at least understand where he's coming from.
It makes me suspicious of pretty much anything else he ever does as a result, though. Even if some of his current publishing standards - for example, the drive towards accessibility - are things I approve of, I hate how nakedly transparent it is and how quickly he'd shift if he thought it would save him a few pounds. His rapid shift in ideologies is something I'd consider a part of that; he certainly used to be happy to run with some of the folks he now vocally opposes, and if not agree with them at least be implicitly willing to support them if it would get him a few extra eyeballs, and if anything changed I have no doubt he'd be trying to get back into their good graces.

I don't begrudge him making money, growing as a person, or treating the business of games publishing like a business. I've never had a bad dealing or even a cross word with him. But his only allegiance is to the dollar, there's nothing else sincere about him.
 
It would be interesting to see if sales would have also fallen off a cliff if it had never appeared on the Trove (or elsewhere). It would also be interesting to see if certain systems or types of products are more susceptible to this than others.
Yeah, that’s the hard part. I’m fully aware that it COULD be entirely coincidence.

But with a lack of further evidence either way, I’m going to go with the safer route for my own effort/money.
 
Chuckdee, I think you're going to have to share some of the games which have what you consider meaningful quickstarts, because I cannot think of any right now. From my POV, Endless Flight's characterization of previews is more on target.

I'm not questioning you. I'm just saying that my experience paints a picture where the kinds of meaningful previews are so vanishingly rare as to be unicorns. Nearly everything I ever look at is something like a table of contents, or some portion of a rambling introduction explaining that RPGs exist, or simply a picture of the cover. That's the previews that work. I'd say about half of the ones I click on have broken previews.

Offhand, I know Troubleshooters, Broken Compass, Avatar Legends, Arc:grin:oom, Mazes, and several other Kickstarters. On DriveThru, Eclipse Phase- though I actually bought into it in a Kickstarter project, Cepheus, Stars without Number (which got me hooked into all of Sine Nomine's products)- I can't remember others offhand, but there are others.
 
Yeah, that’s the hard part. I’m fully aware that it COULD be entirely coincidence.

But with a lack of further evidence either way, I’m going to go with the safer route for my own effort/money.
My gaming material is the same as my software- I do it because I want to, and any money is just bonus. But I know everyone doesn't have the luxury of that position, and it's sad that people don't value that. Though I must also say, I personally have a limit as to how far that goes...
 
But is it a lost sale? Part of the problem with the piracy issue is that not every download is by somebody who intended to buy the product. Of course hard to say what the exact percentage is but it looks to be high.
That's only a question with regard to damages I believe (in the U.S) not illegality, it would then be on the infringer (again I believe) to prove that not all downloads are lost sales in the damages phase. There are also statuary fines I believe, let alone countries where loser pays legal fees.

As a societal and policy question, how many sales are really lost is important.

One approach may be to do what I understand they do in India on patents, if you do not work the technology after a point you could be subject to compulsory licenses. Don't think India is alone in this. It basically recognizes that your monopoly (for a limited time) is predicated on you bringing it to the world (after all that is how you get rewarded) and not squatting on it.

Squatting on it is counter to "the Progress of Science and useful Arts," which is the whole rationale for copyright in the U.S.

I fell like should be having a beer here as we solve all the world's intellectual property problems in one thread. :smile:
 
My gaming material is the same as my software- I do it because I want to, and any money is just bonus. But I know everyone doesn't have the luxury of that position, and it's sad that people don't value that. Though I must also say, I personally have a limit as to how far that goes...
To be honest, that’s why I focus mostly on writing and publishing novels. I get more out of it, personally, than I do writing a gaming book. I write stories because I love it and I’m compelled to do it. So even if I can’t make any real money at it (and still have the piracy issue), I’ll still keep doing it until I die.
 
To be honest, that’s why I focus mostly on writing and publishing novels. I get more out of it, personally, than I do writing a gaming book. I write stories because I love it and I’m compelled to do it. So even if I can’t make any real money at it (and still have the piracy issue), I’ll still keep doing it until I die.
If it is any compensation, I did spend $4.06 AUS on one of your books on drivethrurpg. This Vision of Darkness.
 
There’s a stereotype out there that gamers are cheap. I’ve read some comments on other sites about the Trove being yanked offline and I get a certain sense of entitlement from a fairly large section of gamers. I do think piracy hurts sales more than helps in the long run. I would tend to believe Andrew J. Luther Andrew J. Luther ‘s assertion.
 
I did a little research Into my own products and how sharing and piracy has affected them. Keep in mind I’m a very small publisher.

Back In the early 2000s, I put out three products, two for D&D 3.5, and one for d20 Modern, all on DriveThruRPG and RPGNow (when they were still separate companies). Initial sales were okay but not amazing - I was selling a few every day. I paid for professional art and editing, and they were good products.

A guy I know would often pirate music and RPG PDFs when he could find them (it wasn‘t as easy as it is now). He would do a search for my books every couple of days for me, even though I never asked him to do it.

The first book showed up in his search about two weeks after it came out. The same week, sales fell off a cliff, from a couple per day to almost zero. The second book took more than three weeks to show up, and drop in sales matched it exactly. The third book showed up before the end of the first week, again, immediate drop in sales. Sure, correlation is not causation, but that’s a hell of a coincidence.

I eventually pulled them from sale when the d20 license expired, as I couldn’t be bothered to redo them to remove all the d20 references, especially when they weren’t really selling any copies anymore.

A couple of years ago, I redid the first adventure for Mythras. I had bought the art and figured I might as well support a game I really enjoy. Plus, I was hoping that I finally might at least break even on the money I had spent on the artwork.

This time, I visited the Trove every few days to see if it had been pirated. It took just over a week, and sales were not good.

I have one more book that I’m putting out - well, technically two as there will be both a Mythras version and a 5E version. I already had the artwork, so I figured I might as well put them out and hopefully make a few bucks. But I don’t feel like putting out any more after that, because I know that only a small handful will buy them, and then the rest will pirate them.

I was considering writing a large setting book for Mythras that is different than anything they’ve done so far, but I decided not to go ahead with pitching it to Loz, because I know that the only way I can guarantee some income before the pirates get hold of it is to Kickstart the project. But Kickstarting is a lot of work above and beyond putting the actual product together. So, it’s far more likely that I’ll never bother to do it.

So, maybe I’m a hack and all my stuff is shit. I’m not the person to make that judgement. But, even if that is true, how many other people with real talent might have had a great idea and said “fuck it” because they’d just like to be paid for their effort by people using their work?

Lastly, for those who say you only download a product and then buy it if it’s actually good, consider the fact that if you actually do that, you’re in the extreme minority. I put together a complete sector for Traveller-type games and put it up on DriveThru as PWYW. I had mostly done it for my blog, and figured I’d share it out there and see if people were willing to pay for it. I got 273 downloads fromDriveThru (which would make it an Electrum Best Seller), and got some quite nice online reviews (including one from some guy in Shanghai). How many people contributed anything when they downloaded it? 32 people, just over 10%. So it’s not an Electrum Best Seller, because about 90% of people don’t contribute anything so those don’t count as sales. And that’s from a product that people supposedly liked.

I don’t think I’m going to convince anyone, because we all have our justifications for our own behaviour. But I think about what products we might have seen if people felt like they could at least be paid for the stuff they create that others take without throwing any compensation back.


I'm sorry to hear about that. I really don't like it when these sites abuse the freedom like that to hurt indy creators, especially in this industry.
 
There’s a stereotype out there that gamers are cheap. I’ve read some comments on other sites about the Trove being yanked offline and I get a certain sense of entitlement from a fairly large section of gamers. I do think piracy hurts sales more than helps in the long run. I would tend to believe Andrew J. Luther Andrew J. Luther ‘s assertion.
Thing is, you might not agree with his assertion and he might be wrong. Maybe having pirated copies doesn’t affect his sales or maybe they even promote it.

However, if it is his creation I still think he should be the one who gets to decide what happens with it, not other third parties who don’t have a stake or anything to lose.
 
I was a big silent horror movie fan when I was a kid and knowing movies like London at Midnight [edit: London After Midnight] were lost (in that case due to a fire) is one of the reasons I think it is important to preserve as many films, music, etc as we can.
Famously the movie Nosferatu was ordered to be entirely destroyed as a copyright infringement of the novel Dracula.
 
I have given away copies of my game to people who've approached me without funds in the past. I get it--I'm there myself a lot of the time. Once, I went looking to buy a game, couldn't find it anywhere legitimate but did find it for download. The game mentioned some people associated with the author, someone who I knew and I approached them about if they were in contact with the author and how I could get a legitimate copy for purchase.

Turns out it wasn't available anywhere because people had hounded the author off any public sphere (Note: I don't know the reasons, but I seem to recall it had to do with them being trans in some way the game was out in 2013-144 or so.) They told me the author replied it was alright I had a copy and to enjoy it, but I wanted to legitimately give them money.

Now as a creator that's not typical for me, most PDF's I own were free or in bundles, with a few being backups for games I own that never had legitimate PDF's (they were before that era), and the books I own were HEAVILY used until they fell into pieces but I own them. (the fact that they're in tatters suggests other people used them in my groups at some point as I still have a copy of Red Box books for D&D still in worn but decent enough shape. Yes, I've owned it since 84 or so.) Now, as I understood it an archival copy is allowed--has that changed? If so, well, I'll deal with the loss.

I hunt eBay, Amazon, and Noble Knight for legitimate copies of things all the time, and will buy them if I can. I don't ordinarily seek out game PDFs unless free.
 
Some economics is intensely political. The tension between socialist and anarcho-capitalist ideals is one of the main axes of the political spectrum.

Yes, which is why I wouldn't start a thread on capitalist or communist economies. But since Georgism is kinda it's own thing with bi-partisan support from Nobel prize winning economists on the Right and the Left, it might be OK, but I'd probably run it by the other Mods to get their take before doing so.
 
My understanding, based on a short radio clip by an economist, is that all you really have to do is multiply the basic income allowance value by the population and compare it to the total cost of social programs, invariably it's an order of magnitude higher. While that's a simple take and there are many factors I also wonder why land is being taxed but not other assets. In general we tax income rather than assets. I'm not sure the basis but my guess is that setting the value of things becomes difficult and expensive. But what about savings? Investments? Airplane tickets that haven't been used yet?

The very short answer is because land is an asset that effects everyone communally. And by "Land" understand I also mean natural resources.
 
The very short answer is because land is an asset that effects everyone communally. And by "Land" understand I also mean natural resources.
But you're basically penalizing investment in land against other investments. Oh well, it's all hypothetical until somebody runs their nation into the ground or saves it by applying the principles. I wouldn't claim to know what would work or not. I do think the market is the only way to really determine the value of "art" or "ideas" I mean if they want to give me the job and $900000/a to do it I'll be the judge but I don't respect the opinion of anyone else on the matter so nobody else is qualified.
 
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