Online Roleplaying PDFs to Get More Expensive?
As some of you are aware of, I am a fairly avid role-player. I’ve been in the hobby since 1978 or so, with the old blue-book “Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set” 2nd printing release. I don’t play face to face much anymore, but instead spend time over at Role-Play Online, a great website for message-board based games. I tend to buy a lot of RPG books, however, even for games I don’t actively play, to mine them for ideas or just as entertainment for reading.
There are two main online stores where you can buy PDF versions of RPG books. One is RPGnow.com, which is a site that tends to cater more to the indie online-only publishers, and the other is DriveThruRPG.com, which was somehow connected with White Wolf, and has a lot of books from big name print publishers like White Wolf and Wizards of the Coast. Now recently there is news that these companies have merged and that there will be a new site called OneBookShelf.com which will sell not only role playing books but all kinds of online PDF books.
In fact, RPGnow and DTRPG have already merged their sites such that you can buy the same things on both their stores now, and if you buy something on RPGnow that was a DTRPG product, your download link will actually redirect you to download from DTRPG’s server, etc. Apparently there’s a few kinks in this system, because I had trouble with one book I recently tried to purchase and I’m still waiting on getting my PDF from them after two days of emails.
The latest news is that the company behind OneBookShelf.com is going to jack up the rates for PDF publishers, who will likely have no choice but to pass on that expense to us gamers. The whole merger is a really bad thing for RPG fans in general, since now there is very little in the way of competition. The most notable exception is e23, which is operated by Steve Jackson Games, but they mostly cater to GURPS fans and do not have a lot of the material previously available on DTRPG and RPGnow. There are also a few online vendors that have set up their own online shops. Someone has made an online petition to protest this rate hike and send a message to OBS that we as PDF buyers are not happy about this rate hike. If you feel strongly about this as I do, please take the time to sign the online petition. I believe it is in their best interests to keep the prices low, because otherwise people will just resort to illegal pirate copies of the books, which are fairly readily available online. They could be killing the golden goose by jacking up the prices to where consumers think it’s no longer worth it.