Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
It's very possible that WotC didn't decide this; they're now owned by Hasbro, which has interests so far outside the gamer-geek market that they're oblivious to the niche industry market forces.
They were making *some* money off PDFs. They are now making *no* money off PDFs. The availability of PDFs has not changed, just the source sites and the quality level.
Gaming books have always been prone to "one sale per gaming group." Not all books are that way, but it's very common for only one player to have a complete set of books, especially for college-age and younger gamers. Players expect to loan and borrow books within their group--and they expect to make copies of commonly-used pages, like character sheets and combat charts. Even groups where everyone has a copy of the hardcover books will run off multiple copies of important combat charts so they don't have to keep flipping to that page in the middle of the game session.
Refusing to release a legitimate digital version just means more pirate copies. And it's a really solid shoot-self-in-foot move, because gaming books are one of the few market niches that *can* effectively sell physical and digital copies to the same people--they want the physical book because no ebook reader is good at reference work & flipping between multiple pages quickly, and they want a searchable digital version to check specific details easily.
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This is precisely what we used to do as students, waaay before digital copies even existed. The DM/referee and perhaps one other player had the full rule set, whilst the remainder of us had either photocopies of relevant information or whole rulebooks.
Later, as we started careers it was required to at least own the players manual (D&D) or the main players rulebooks for the game being played.
These days, everyone owns the full rulesets but but has PDF copies on tablets or net/notebooks for easy access. No one wants to see expensive hardcover books damaged during gameplay.
I see no reason apart from extreme shortsightedness and stupidity why WotC stopped selling PDF copies of the rulebooks for D&D