An Important Notice Regarding Wizards of the Coast PDFs

[admin]

I received this from Paizo:

An Important Notice Regarding Wizards of the Coast PDFs
Dear admin,

Wizards of the Coast has notified us that we may no longer sell or distribute their PDF products. Accordingly, after April 6 at 11:59 PM Pacific time, Wizards of the Coast PDFs will no longer be available for purchase on paizo.com; after noon on April 7, you will no longer be able to download Wizards of the Coast PDFs that you have already purchased, so please make sure you have downloaded all purchased PDFs <http://paizo.com/paizo/account/assets> by that time.

We thank you for your patronage of paizo.com. Please check out our other downloads at paizo.com/store/downloads <http://paizo.com/store/downloads>.

Sincerely yours,
The Paizo Customer Service Team

I wonder what is happening...

admin

[Curben]

I wonder if RPG Now has the same issue?

I believe they sold PDFs of WotC

Perhaps they are trying to empty the market of 3.5 to support 4.0?

[Nargath]

It could be WotC finally reacting to Paizo benefitting from the 3.5 OGL. They might see Paizo as double-dipping, profitting from both WotC PDFs, and their own Pathfinder PDFs.

[larenee]

They've pulled ALL pdf sales, including otherwise out-of-print material. rpgnow has the same notice on their site. WotC gave less than two-day's notice.

Here is the main thread over at Wizards:
http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=1172698

[Curben]

I have some impolite opinions about WotC to say about that.

[Nargath]

If they have pulled all the pdfs from everywhere, then maybe WotC is going to start offering the pdfs for sale on their own virtual store?

[Curben]

maybe, but if not then whats the point?

[Nargath]

Reading through that thread, there was a Wiz post stating that the takedowns was in response to the "recent findings" in piracy of their products, and that they are looking at ways to prevent it from happening.

What is interesting is if they will be offering reimbursements to those people that bought a WotC book but never downloaded it, as now they bought something and have nothing to show for it. Not to mention leaving a chunk of their userbase out in the cold. (The people that only use pdf's/DDI).

[larenee]

maybe, but if not then whats the point?

Exactly. At this point, WotC doesn't even know what they are going to do about pdfs! They just yanked it ALL! This has just become typical of them. Make some major change, with little or no notice; let the fanbase stew over it for weeks; finally release a lame explanation that satifies no one and makes little sense.

I can understand, to some degree (as in a very small level of potential understanding of how an otherwise bad conclusion can be made if some one is rather ignorant), if they're concerned about piracy, not selling pdfs of their current/new products. This won't stop, or even dent, piracy, by the way. I am, however, completely lost as to how halting sales of pdfs of out-of-print products does anything but encourage more piracy. I can no longer legally get material for my favorite setting (classic D&D Known World / Mystara). I could go to ebay, I suppose, but most of that is way overpriced, and doesn't send any money to WotC anyway. At least the pdfs, from rpgnow or paizo, actually directed a little money to them.

I am finally done with WotC.