That's right - customer service. Being for gamers, for the hobby. Something that Paizo gets so very right, while WOTC continues to flounder around in their myopic, greedy, stagnant, hardcover-bound business model. All of the Pathfinder books are available on PDF on the site, quickly, cheaply, legally. That includes modules if youre in a hurry to get a game prepped for the night. They have products from all kinds of different authors, companies, etc on their site as well. Theyre inventive, w/ an impressive line of game aids and stuff to spice your game up. Hell, you dont need to buy a thing - just read the published rules online!

Pathfinder just destroyed WOTC and their half-baked "online components" that they laughably limped out the door w/ 4E. I subscribed for 6 months and was sorely disappointed. WOTC has been transformed by their steady siphoning of allowance money via Magic:The Gathering from an RPG creator to a trading card company.

I'm not quite sure what the author wants to tell us.

- Dev makes game for publisher. There's a contract about royalties, etc.
- Dev goes out of business. But the rights in the contract don't simply disappear.
- Somebody else buys these rights. Now he gets the royalties. Often the publisher is the one who buys the rights. He's the only one with precise numbers after all.
- Then the royalties are still being paid. From the publisher to the publisher.

Sounds unfair to me.

Edit : Great if the Publisher decides just to stop to pay out the royalties (and perhaps other money they are contracted to pay) and with this manages to drive the dev studio into bancruptcy … and then buy back the rights from them … This is the perfect scam !

Great question, by the way :



Stockholm Syndrome ??? Devs with Publishers ???

In a nutshell: DRM's sole purpose is to maximize revenues by minimizing your rights and selling them back to you.

And this is the Grand Scheme behind things like ACTA : To export a Licensing Model (you don't "own" the product, but instead you have merely "licensed" it !) into other countries, so, that the jurisdiction of licensing from the U.S. gets exported and installed as a form of "jurisdictal imperialism".

It would be most effectively increasing the revenues for Hollywood if the U.S. copyright philosophy/thought-models/laws were actually installed ALL OVER THE WORLD.

Because then, in the WHOLE WORLD the U.S. law philosophy would be in effect, that IP can be owned and sold - and of course licensed. And that customers can never "own" any work ( = a product like a CD, or a DVD or software) based on an IP.