WotC pres speaks on PDFs

Greg Leeds, president of WotC, started doing some PR work, giving an interview at EnWorld.org over the the PDF brouhaha. According to bios I found on the Web, he's worked at Hasbro since 2001 in a couple of capacities -- as General Manager of the boys toys group, and some time later head of Hasbro's international marketing -- and was general manager at Samsonite before that. Look it up if you care.

Leeds took over at Wizards a smidge over a year ago, and started by killing WotC's vaunted, but woefully-implemented social networking site, Gleemax. Then he laid a bunch of people off. As I understand, some of them had it coming, and some were simply expensive expendables. Cleaning house is not the worst way for a new, corporate-appointed CEO to start, especially when the house was in such disarray. But it tends not to endear one.

His background is in neither publishing, nor games. True, Hasbro and Wizards both produce "games", but think of that in the same sense that humans and lamprey eels are both in the same Phylum. It doesn't mean we have anything to say to each other at parties.

So Mr. Leeds appears to be an experienced, not-incompetent marketing manger, cast into an entirely new industry. He's been on the job for a year, which, in my experience, is enough time to understand what it is that you don't know about what you're doing now. So that's who we're dealing with.

The interview is a by-the-numbers kind of thing. "Piracy is a substantial concern... We need to have a strong retail base...." Very little here that you couldn't have said if you knew who you needed to protect and who you needed to placate.

Couple of points of interest:

We do not have any plans to resume the sale of PDFs, but are actively exploring other options for the digital distribution of our content....
Along with the rest of the publishing industry, Wizards is also looking into new means of digital distribution. For our novels, we have recently introduced titles to Kindle and to Sony’s E-Reader and will continue to add titles to those offerings over the coming months.

PDFs are effed, but Kindle is in. If I'm reading him right, Leeds seems to think that other peoples' bandwagons will prevent piracy the iTunes way. By locking books into certain partner hardware, maybe they can slow piracy. Of course, they're already offering their books through their own system.

Its EULA says:

You understand that Wizards or its representatives may monitor all communications made by or received by you while using the Feature. You consent to the extraction of hardware system profile data and any data related to operation of the Feature.

Which means they will try to trace piracy of users through their Feature. I dunno... I call snoopware a Bug.

Exerting control like this seems likely to reduce piracy. Somewhat. It will definitely reduce sales. The installed base of people who can read is much larger than the base of people who own Kindles. Is the market not niche enough for WotC yet? Did they need a way to cut it finer?

If this does work, Wizards is in for an ugly 3 to 5 years while their hoped-for customer base follows them through the necessary hoops to make piracy somewhat more difficult. Seems like that's asking a lot, though.

Another quote:

...we conservatively estimate the ratio of illicit downloads to legally purchased copies was 10:1.

Listen, I can unconservatively estimate that by halting PDF sales, you have moved that ratio to 10:0. Great work, fellas. It's Miller time.

This doesn't sound like anything that will kill D&D, which has way more hit points than anyone would have estimated in 1980. But it does sound like a hindrance to WotC's customers -- not a deal-breaker, just one more discouragement that Wizards can ill afford right now. I suppose they could make the argument that not doing this could kill the company just as fast. I doubt it, but since we're all making it up as we go, no one's got the data to prove it. It's just a matter of who's most convincing at the top of the organization.

I have wanted to avoid comparing the current ownership to TSR in the mid '90s. I still believe they're more professional and more competent. They might have their heads in the same sand though.