Sunday, April 19, 2009

Wizards is not who we think they are

This is something that's come to mind with the continuing brouhaha (technical term) of WOTC no longer selling PDFs.

I've said this before, maybe not here, but probably here and definitely around various fora I inhabit:

Comparing Wizards of the Coast to any other RPG company is not informative and more often than not leads one to a very bad set of conclusions.

It's like comparing the following businesses:

1. A small New England family farm that sells organic produce in season to a family-owned restaurant.

2. An enormous corporate-owned agro-business that sells direct to the largest supermarket chains in the nation.

They might *technically* be in the same business but at such a different scale that the best practices of one tell you nothing about best practices of the other.

1 comment:

mikelaff said...

Yeah, agreed.

It's funny that it even needs saying really.

That might be why WOTC can blow off pdf sales (if that is indeed what they're doing) temporarily (or permanently, as it sounds like they might be doing something other than pdfs based on the recent WOTC executive interview at ENworld).

They're likely selling more pdfs then everyone else in the industry by a wide margin, but it's still _very_ small potatoes (maybe even trivial) to an operation of their size.

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