WotC probably doesn't care what you think about PDF sales

I got an email the other night that basically every card-carrying D&D geek got, that said "Wizards of the Coast is out of the PDF-selling business in t-minus 12 hours." There has been predictable and understandable Internet furor over that.

A WotC rep showed up at enworld.org and left a post of which I will quote the relevant bits for you so you don't have to follow the link:

...due to recent findings of illegal copying and online distribution (piracy) of our products, Wizards of the Coast has decided to cease the sales of online PDFs. We are exploring other options for digitial distribution of our content and as soon as we have any more information I'll get it to you.

Other on-the-ball PDF retailers have taken clever advantage of the free publicity to point out that they're still happy to sell you their PDFs, and now offering special ha-ha-WotC sale prices good for the next few days. (They don't call them that. I called them that.)

This all reminds me of a post I tried to write about six months ago, which got long and recursive, and I never finished thinking through. Now, it seems inevitable that Wizards would give me another opportunity to unlimber these ideas.

The applicable one here being that someone at Wizards of the Coast -- not the whole company by any means, but someone -- is working furiously to rebottle the Internet genie. Furiously. This person has no idea how to behave when the business of selling electrons turns out to have different, and largely uncharted difficulties compared to selling atoms. And no idea what to do when the customer becomes a participant in the product.

No one does. No corporation has a clear idea of how to make money shifting electrons if they are not fortunate enough to have a near-monopoly. Individuals can do it, but large companies, even large companies full of Internet-savvy employees like Amazon and Google, don't know how to do this.

Clever people like Cory Doctorow and Kevin Kelly have come up with some interesting ideas about it. But they're making best guesses. (Although I highly recommend Kelly's list of Eight Generatives Better Than Free, especially if you are a publisher considering ceasing PDF sales.)

I would like to be indignant, and come to a trenchant conclusion, but I don't have one. (At least not a good one.) I'm guessing that what Wizards is doing makes sense from a certain legally-defensible standpoint. It's hard to know which of the many, many threats a business faces will strike a crippling blow. You try to make your list, and prepare for the biggest ones, and get to as many as you can while you can.

And so, seemingly, lower on the list than they've gotten to is the threat of falling out of touch with customers.

Here's maybe the one original idea I've got on this topic: They believe they're in touch with the customers they want to be in touch with. And they believe those customers are not that into PDFs. And they might be right.

Hasbro, owner of Wizards of the Coast, is a toymaker. They are used to thinking that their entire customer base turns over every few years. Maintaining an audience is never on their radar, because by the time you are 5 years old, you do not care about Mr. Potato Head any more. They have to sell Mr. Potato Head to a brand new crop of 2-year-olds.

Therefore, I might need to conclude that the people in charge are not interested in selling games to me any more. They want to sell Dungeons & Dragons to 12-year-olds. This does not mean that D&D is not suitable for 37-year-olds. It is just that the company is more interested in 12-year-old dollars.

Even if I'm right, since I don't have a look at their numbers, I can't tell whether that's a good business strategy. I think selling D&D is a different beast than selling Mr. Potato Head, and therefore, the process and goals must be different. But I can't tell. I can tell that lately, they're not creating game products I'm very interested in, which anecdotally at least, supports my theory.

If I'm right though, the card-carrying D&D geeks on Slashdot and enworld complaining about WotC's behavior is the equivalent of the dog complaining that the cat food tastes bad.

You can eat it if you want, but it's not for you, silly dog.