OBS - Monopolies and their TOC. (Split off thread).

Best Selling RPGs - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com
This makes me feel like the entire process is arbitrary.


I was a huge fan of Loompanics back in the day! My book collection is not for squares or the easily offended.
The Loompanics catalog was the '80s equivalent of browsing the weird corners of the Internet.
OBS responds:


That's a well-stated letter.
 
all seems perfectly reasonable. I still have questions regarding Tommy being told what ratings to use for his reviews, but that's probably an entirely seperate issue
Yeah, that was at least two reviewer program heads ago (I don’t know who is over it now). The second guy who ran it while I was in the program denied any such policy so it could well have been either a policy that changed or an employee acting on their own (as they were known for having a very “big” personality and lots of friends in publishing, as they were a freelancer themselves).
 
To fisk the letter a bit:

POD Process and Print Proofs

I think everybody is fine with this bit and their explanation makes sense.

Treatment of Staff: This section should be pretty self-explanatory. If you are being abusive or making personal attacks against any employee of OneBookShelf, privately or publicly, we may not wish to continue doing business with you.

Entirely reasonable and good employer practice. Business relationships are two way.

Social Media Behavior: This one deserves a bit of explanation since it’s the one new section that has inspired the most questions and assumptions.

(...)

If you are making legitimate complaints about our site or tools or service, then we aren’t going to come looking for you. We’ll take it in stride and try to do better, although we’d rather hear it from you directly so we can do better and try to help you. But if you are maliciously using your platform or your social capital to excoriate us or your complaints are false, and you haven’t bothered to reach out to us so we can try to fix whatever is upsetting you, then that is a different story.

This goes a lot of the way to assuaging people's concerns I think, although it won't do for everybody.

Really though, if you have examples of them shutting down people for mere criticism (either previously or in the future) we can discuss those. Pedantically I would have used a different word than "excoriate" (demonise). But I think reasonable people understand the difference between what they're talking about here and legitimate criticism.

And "if you hate us so much we're not going to do business with you" is understandable.

The next bit is going to need the most examination I think.

Hostile Marketing: This one was added as a response to a small number of malefactors we have dealt with in recent years, who have consciously and maliciously manipulated our policies.

Dude, just say Venger. We all know this was put into place because of Venger. Venger knows it was put into place because of Venger and is fapping himself silly about it. (I'm not saying he was the only malefactor in question, but he's definitely the person who pushed them over the edge in the first place).

Let me call out this section of our Product Content Guidelines, which have also existed for as long as OneBookShelf (but which have also been amended a couple of times over the years):

Neither your Work, description, nor any promotional material, including blog posts or press releases, may contain racist, homophobic, discriminatory, or other repugnant views; overt political agendas or views; depictions or descriptions of criminal violence against children; rape or other acts of criminal perversion; or other obscene material without the express written permission of OneBookShelf.

Illegal and Infringing content is not allowed. It is the content creator’s responsibility to ensure that their content does not violate laws, or copyright, trademark, privacy, or other rights.

This is where I get critical of OBS.

Firstly, the fact they've been there from the start isn't really here nor there if they aren't applied literally.

More importantly, the complaint is primarily that they're unclear and not applied consistently.

Political agendas are allowed on Drivethru and always have been. I'm sure we could all find lots of examples. If they want to say "some political agendas are acceptable some aren't" say that outright. That would be fine as far as I'm concerned. If they want to say "no supporting political parties apart from the Monster Raving Loony Party", cool, their right. The problem at the moment is that it's vague and that applies to a lot of this.

The other main issue I have is that it doesn't address the concern some of us have that the big guys have near carte blanche in a way that the rest of don't. (I suspect the honest answer to this would be "LOL, of course we give Onyx Path privileges over you, because they buy us ferraris and you only just scrape enough together for a hamburger now shut up you dumb pleb".

Every time a title is reported on our site that might be breaking these rules, our policy is to pull that title down for an internal review by our staff, which normally takes up to two weeks. This is invariably a difficult part of our job. We abhor censorship, and we will always lean toward allowing rather than banning titles.

I would get some comfort from this because I do believe that they lean towards allowing titles.

But that comfort is negated by the much more startling relevation that they take down any title automatically after a single report. Wait, what? How is that not obviously an abuse prone bad idea? I'm really hoping this is just bad wording. I also hope there's some kind of ramifications for malicious reporters.

Sometimes, though, publishers deliberately push this boundary, knowing full well that their title will be reported and deactivated for review and that it will reflect badly on DriveThruRPG when that happens. This behavior in itself is malicious, but it is compounded when the publisher also builds this launch-report-deactivation pattern into their marketing plans, since stirring up controversy brings them attention and thus, they presume, more sales.

This marketing ploy depletes time and resources, both professional and emotional, from both our customer service and publisher relations teams each time it happens, invariably far out of proportion to any benefit we see from selling such titles.

In short, we are not interested in being the scapegoat for any publisher who wishes to repeatedly market titles via attempting to generate outrage towards us.

I know some disagree, but I think that is entirely fair.

It comes down to "if you not only use outrage marketing but target it at us you're more trouble than you're worth". It would simply be a bad business decision to let that fly. If a publisher is behaving in a way that makes them a liability than I'm not sure you can reasonably expect Drivethru to keep them on as some kind of charitable donation.

Links: Publishers can’t include links to external sites, with a few exceptions, on their title description pages. They can, however, include those links in their purchase notes, i.e., the note customers receive by email when they purchase that title.

Again, this rule comes down to a handful of bad actors who have abused our site by posting links for their customers to buy their titles from other third-party sellers. We don’t think it’s unreasonable for us to ask publishers not to direct customers toward our competitors when they are shopping here.

I understand their reasoning here but if they can pull for content I don't see why they can't review stuff actually in the blurb. (I'm not saying publishers should be able to point them elsewhere for purchases. I'm saying that the existence of free material for a RPG on a website is relevant purchasing information. And letting customers know that benefits everyone including Drivethru.

Front-Page Flooding:


All seems very sensible.

Pricing: Our directive regarding similar pricing across sites does not include the common practice of “community copies” — where for every n copies purchased, the publisher makes a copy available for free download to someone in need who therefore does not have to purchase it at full price. We understand that community copies provide value and solidarity within the TTRPG community and support publishers who wish to let everyone play.

Good to know that they aren't cracking down on community copies and are making them easier to put on the main site. I don't think this addresses the main concern though which is that their market dominance allows them to charge more for their distribution than people feel is fair. I don't really expect them to address that though; they aren't going to take a smaller cut unless the market changes and there's not really a PR friendly way of telling people that.

Reviews: Publishers and contributors cannot review titles on our site. This rule has been in place since 2012, when we discovered that a surprising number of bad actors had been abusing the review system to downvote competitors’ titles and upvote their own. That is a bad thing, and I don’t think there’s much more to explain here.

In 2018, we found that a number of publishers were still engaging in this kind of behavior, in a few cases despite repeated warnings, so we banned one publisher, temporarily banned a couple of others, and coded our site so that publisher accounts cannot review titles (except Publisher Resource titles such as stock art).

Another one where I understand the reasoning and still disagree. They should be punishing the bad actors specifically; this has too many ramifications for small publishers and has lead to a situation where reviews are increasingly rare if you're not a top seller.
 
OBS responds:


Is it just me that doesn't see anything?


Also, this thread didn't prevent me from buying another PDF from them...:shade:

BTW, A Fiery Flying Roll Black Leaf it is well-known that they pull titles on the basis of one report. It was even discussed, with much glee, on a forum I'm not going to name, but is usually referred to by its colour palette...:tongue:
 
Um, also, just dug back in the blog. I think this might be the banned ACAB game?

The work in question was arguably satirical, its author perhaps attempting to make a statement against police corruption; however, our initial review determined that the work warranted a more considered review. A game that has players take the role of police oppressing minorities simply warranted more than a quick look. So, as is our policy in such a situation, we suspended the title from public sale until all of our staff could return from PAX and we could then review the work more carefully. In the interim, we notified the publisher that the title was being temporarily suspended for internal review.

Over the weekend during the PAX show, the publisher then undertook a number of questionable actions, including deactivating their other titles and then using DriveThruRPG tools to email prior customers messages falsely blaming DriveThruRPG for having removed those titles.

The publisher also made use of a tool that allows publishers to customize the appearance of their storefront page on DriveThruRPG; with this tool, the publisher created a false version of events, making it seem as though DriveThruRPG had banned the publisher, and then posted a screenclip of that falsified message in several places online. The clear intent of the publisher was to create outrage against DriveThruRPG. It is difficult to see this series of actions as anything but slander.



Um, yeah, this puts a very different perspective on what actually happened there.
 
To fisk the letter a bit:



I think everybody is fine with this bit and their explanation makes sense.



Entirely reasonable and good employer practice. Business relationships are two way.



This goes a lot of the way to assuaging people's concerns I think, although it won't do for everybody.

Really though, if you have examples of them shutting down people for mere criticism (either previously or in the future) we can discuss those. Pedantically I would have used a different word than "excoriate" (demonise). But I think reasonable people understand the difference between what they're talking about here and legitimate criticism.

And "if you hate us so much we're not going to do business with you" is understandable.

The next bit is going to need the most examination I think.



Dude, just say Venger. We all know this was put into place because of Venger. Venger knows it was put into place because of Venger and is fapping himself silly about it. (I'm not saying he was the only malefactor in question, but he's definitely the person who pushed them over the edge in the first place).



This is where I get critical of OBS.

Firstly, the fact they've been there from the start isn't really here nor there if they aren't applied literally.

More importantly, the complaint is primarily that they're unclear and not applied consistently.

Political agendas are allowed on Drivethru and always have been. I'm sure we could all find lots of examples. If they want to say "some political agendas are acceptable some aren't" say that outright. That would be fine as far as I'm concerned. If they want to say "no supporting political parties apart from the Monster Raving Loony Party", cool, their right. The problem at the moment is that it's vague and that applies to a lot of this.

The other main issue I have is that it doesn't address the concern some of us have that the big guys have near carte blanche in a way that the rest of don't. (I suspect the honest answer to this would be "LOL, of course we give Onyx Path privileges over you, because they buy us ferraris and you only just scrape enough together for a hamburger now shut up you dumb pleb".



I would get some comfort from this because I do believe that they lean towards allowing titles.

But that comfort is negated by the much more startling relevation that they take down any title automatically after a single report. Wait, what? How is that not obviously an abuse prone bad idea? I'm really hoping this is just bad wording. I also hope there's some kind of ramifications for malicious reporters.



I know some disagree, but I think that is entirely fair.

It comes down to "if you not only use outrage marketing but target it at us you're more trouble than you're worth". It would simply be a bad business decision to let that fly. If a publisher is behaving in a way that makes them a liability than I'm not sure you can reasonably expect Drivethru to keep them on as some kind of charitable donation.



I understand their reasoning here but if they can pull for content I don't see why they can't review stuff actually in the blurb. (I'm not saying publishers should be able to point them elsewhere for purchases. I'm saying that the existence of free material for a RPG on a website is relevant purchasing information. And letting customers know that benefits everyone including Drivethru.



All seems very sensible.



Good to know that they aren't cracking down on community copies and are making them easier to put on the main site. I don't think this addresses the main concern though which is that their market dominance allows them to charge more for their distribution than people feel is fair. I don't really expect them to address that though; they aren't going to take a smaller cut unless the market changes and there's not really a PR friendly way of telling people that.



Another one where I understand the reasoning and still disagree. They should be punishing the bad actors specifically; this has too many ramifications for small publishers and has lead to a situation where reviews are increasingly rare if you're not a top seller.
On your last point. It takes a surprisingly small number of bad actors to waste a large amount of company time. I kinda get why they do this as a small company.
 
Um, also, just dug back in the blog. I think this might be the banned ACAB game?





Um, yeah, this puts a very different perspective on what actually happened there.



That name, Transfelinism, sounds very familiar but I'm not placing it at the moment
 
That name, Transfelinism, sounds very familiar but I'm not placing it at the moment
Honestly, that whole incident makes me think one valid criticism is that they should actually be a lot more public about that kind of malicious fuckwittery. I believed the whole "they took it down because of Tenkar" story before seeing that and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
 
I see only an empty field, both in the post and in the quotes.
Oh, wait, their latest post is titled "We hate Asen and have blocked him from our blog"...

:tongue:

Direct link - https ://medium.com/oneblogshelf/onebookshelfs-recently-amended-conduct-guidelines-dfc073f9c954
 
I've always been hesitant to post my stuff on drivethrurpg probably relating more to their close association with rpg.net.

There has been some discussion on therpgsite about creating a new alternative. Probably just hot air or something political I decided against saying. But who knows?
 
If they do I wish them all the best. I suspect it will be edgelord central, but there's a customer base for that. (It'll be interesting to see if Pundit puts his games on there. He doesn't really do edge in his RPGs, just trad).
 
I've always been hesitant to post my stuff on drivethrurpg probably relating more to their close association with rpg.net.

There has been some discussion on therpgsite about creating a new alternative. Probably just hot air or something political I decided against saying. But who knows?
They have been talking about that since Consultantgate happened around time of 5E's release, if not even before. I wouldn't hold my breath. Given that the Site now has its own Index of Forbidden Games, I think the culture there has moved on.
 
Honestly, that whole incident makes me think one valid criticism is that they should actually be a lot more public about that kind of malicious fuckwittery. I believed the whole "they took it down because of Tenkar" story before seeing that and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

I am not familiar with this particular case, but generally a good idea on the internet to always go to the source and find out what happened. I've found even people I consider informed and reliable to transmit distorted or faulty information about stuff that has happened in the industry (not because they are deliberately distorting the truth but because they are operating on a distortion they head from someone else). Social media is often one big game of telephone
 
Close relationship with rpg.net?
Yeah I don't think they have a close relationship at all. They recognize it as a major site. They have responded to product complaints from users of both OBS and RPG.net. But I think they in general are far more free speech than RPG.Net would
 
Oh, wait, their latest post is titled "We hate Asen and have blocked him from our blog"...

:tongue:

Direct link - https ://medium.com/oneblogshelf/onebookshelfs-recently-amended-conduct-guidelines-dfc073f9c954
I knew it! They only liked my money and once that stopped coming in a regular flow, I was in the outgroup:shade:!
 
Close relationship with rpg.net?
The only connection I can come up with is tenuous at best. Steve Wieck is a founder of White Wolf. Years after he left his position at WW, the company began licensing some titles to Onyx Press. Onyx Press had a lot of rpg.net mods working for them for a while, but I think even the OP/rpg.net connection had faded at this point.
 
If I'm an author and I go around saying 'Fuck Chapters' on social media should I be surprised if they don't stock my book?
This reminds me of a few years ago when I was working for a company that provided accounting services for a broadcaster who had been sued by a legacy artist over royalty payments that blew up into a class action and multimillion dollar settlement. About a year later I got a call from that artist’s business manager asking about their royalties from that service - that they were getting statements and checks for their other clients but not this one, which was strange because this artist had several big hits and had previously seen a lot of activity from that service. I dutifully passed the inquiry along to my contact there who laughed out loud and assured me there had been no mistake and that artist was definitely NEVER going to be played on that service again so they had better make that settlement payout last.
 
I still post there myself on occasion, usually in video game threads. I have an rpg.net tab open at the moment, in fact.
Never took you for a goddamn traitor.

Nah, I browse the threads as a guest sometimes, especially for games I might want to know about that don’t get traction here. I just have no interest in logging back in and engaging. The Pub alone gets that short straw.
 
Never took you for a goddamn traitor.

Nah, I browse the threads as a guest sometimes, especially for games I might want to know about that don’t get traction here. I just have no interest in logging back in and engaging. The Pub alone gets that short straw.
 
I still post once in a blue moon over there. Usually to answer a question with a fairly definitive answer.
 
I'm the same, I look at their threads and occasionally post. There's still a lot of good content there in between the... well, whatever it is.
Also, it's one of the few RPG forums I can still get to on my iPad, which I read in bed at night.
 
I browse sometimes, but I never post. Too cut throat over there.
 
so yeah, I thought Transfelinism sounded familiar, turns out it's one of the monikers (along with "Disgruntled Catgirl") of former TBP poster "Wormonda", who, after getting a permanent ban, repeatedly vandalized the RPGnet wiki. Just spent a bit re-reading their old blog on the wayback machine, the rantings of a crazy person I remember now from back during the height of a certain videogame controversy. So yeah, the Drive-Thru Bullshit makes perfect sense.
 
Now that you mention it I can't recall a single Kickstarter RPG where I got the final PDF via something other than DriveThru.

I've gotten several - Google Drive, Dropbox, WeShare... Each time I ask if there's a possibility of getting a DTRPG link. In every case I was shot down (various reasons, some of which I understand completely), which has made me choose not to do business with them again. I've had my OneDrive blown out before (my fault), and when I went back to click those links in the Kickstarter messages, the files were gone. Messaging the creators did nothing for me in most cases. The one case where I don't get as annoyed is when I'm given an Itch.io code, because at least then there is an easily searchable library for me to recover my PDF(s) should that happen again (it won't, I have failsafes now).

The ones that really get me are when I'm given a copy of the PDF through a means other than DTRPG, then the book is put up on DTRPG for sale and the publisher asks for reviews while refusing to provide a code. It would mean that I have to purchase the book a second time in order to leave a review on the largest platform we have. Fuck that.

Anyway, I'm one of the people who is very reluctant to buy PDFs from sites other than DTRPG. It has absolutely ended up in lost sales for a publisher when the product isn't available there. :sad:
 
We're getting into line dancing here, but I don't believe it applies to foreign nationals the US considers hostile powers. In Iraq, say.
If the individual has the right to live here or to do business here then the first amendment applies. If they do not have the right to live here or are able to do business here then the point is moot.
 
I've gotten several - Google Drive, Dropbox, WeShare... Each time I ask if there's a possibility of getting a DTRPG link. In every case I was shot down (various reasons, some of which I understand completely), which has made me choose not to do business with them again. I've had my OneDrive blown out before (my fault), and when I went back to click those links in the Kickstarter messages, the files were gone. Messaging the creators did nothing for me in most cases. The one case where I don't get as annoyed is when I'm given an Itch.io code, because at least then there is an easily searchable library for me to recover my PDF(s) should that happen again (it won't, I have failsafes now).

The ones that really get me are when I'm given a copy of the PDF through a means other than DTRPG, then the book is put up on DTRPG for sale and the publisher asks for reviews while refusing to provide a code. It would mean that I have to purchase the book a second time in order to leave a review on the largest platform we have. Fuck that.

Anyway, I'm one of the people who is very reluctant to buy PDFs from sites other than DTRPG. It has absolutely ended up in lost sales for a publisher when the product isn't available there. :sad:
I don't mind buying from other places, but I scoff at times. Like the new Critical Role setting book - not published by WotC - was available in PDF on the publisher's site...and you could download it three times.

Three times? In 2022?

Fuuuuuuuuck that. Hard pass. Didn't need it that bad.
 
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