Is piracy just a marketing gimmick?

We see more and more companies blaming piracy for why they are moving their products online.  The latest I’ve run into is Wizards of the Coast with their Dungeons & Dragons line of products.  They released a new version of D&D about 3 years ago that really changed the game.  Most people feel that it was for the better and a few others are still dragging their feet to give it a go.  The new edition involves a lot of math based on how you build your character and what powers you choose.  While in years past you could just use a piece of paper and add as you progress, the new system basically asks that you recalculate everything as you progress and change out equipment.  This edition was released with a decent piece of software for doing this by WotC.  They updated it monthly but you had to pay a subscription fee to be able to get those updates.  It runs about $75 a year and grants you access to everything they publish, including the updates that you download and install.  You were limited to only 5 downloads a month, so you would need to either share a computer or have multiple accounts if you had more then 5 players in your group.

Now why I give this background is because this system has worked well in the past.  But it hasn’t made them a lot of money.  Players who didn’t need to have the latest updates each and every month would only pay for a monthly subscription once a year and update the software, then cancel the subscription as they didn’t need all the online content as most already owned the physical copies of the online content.  Two years later WotC is saying that they need to move the software to a web base version to combat people illegally sharing the software and updates without paying.  That is a hard point to argue against until you look at the tactics they have employed in the past when it comes to their software.  Features are promised and never delivered, for example their “Adventure Tools” software when you load it up has 5 circles for tools that you can use.  Only 1 is available after 3 years and hasn’t been updated in over a year.  Software is released and can’t even update itself due to update errors, not once, twice, but at least 3 times in the last year alone. 

Fast forward to today, November 16th, they release the online version and remove all links to the old one.  A change that was announced exactly two weeks prior to the removal of the old offline version.  Missing features include the inability to export the characters outside of the account that created them, any user customizable content such as custom character pictures, DM created worlds, House Rules, etc.  It doesn’t even support the products that they released less then a year ago.  Now all these features were available in the offline version but are missing from the online one.  WotC says that they are “coming” like the tools for their other program.  But now instead of the 3 accounts that my group pays for, WotC is demanding that we have 8.  One for each and every player at $75 a year (or $10 a month).  We now have a program with reduced functionality that costs more then it did at the start.  All this because people were “pirating” their program?  It sounds to me more like they found the most useful program for players and wanted to gouge them for as much as they could.  The downside to all this is that their target audience is the geek techie crowd that the more barriers you throw in their way will go the easier route and begin to use other software or find hacked updated versions of the old offline software.

It may sound like I’m complaining, I’m not.  I liked the software as it was very useful, and the new software appears to have a lot of potential.  But I feel like they are treating their legit customers as sacks of money and punishing those who enjoy playing the game.  The downside is this change lost them 2 subscriptions in my group.  As we can’t share characters between accounts, I have all my players use my account to edit and create their characters.  As I need to see the changes they make to make sure they conform to the rules and the game I’m running, I can’t be without that feature.  And why pay $150 extra a year when we are already sharing all the online content.  I think the true issue they are seeing is the death of Print Media and are struggling to find a way to retain revenue, not pirates.