I haven't checked with other online sites but it wouldn't surprise me if Wizards is also doing this to other companies who publish TSR's old material in *.PDF form. This isn't the first time that Wizards of the Coast has cut of Paizo either. Do remember that Paizo used to print both the Dragon and Dungeon Magazines for Wizards way back when. I hurried over there and redownloaded what I had through them. I'm sure I have the material on a hard drive or DVD somewhere but just in case I had missed something. (We all know I have a horrible history of sites crapping out on me.)Dear Mike,
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 by that time.
We thank you for your patronage of paizo.com. Please check out our other downloads at paizo.com/store/downloads.
Sincerely yours,
The Paizo Customer Service Team
It's kind of sad to see this occur. The only real place, outside of torrents or download sites, to get this material is via an online auction site like ebay. Pretty soon even those sources will start drying up or the paper material will begin to fall apart. It's hard enough to find mint condition material now. Think how hard it is when the book are 30 years old or more. (And many of them already are that old.)
It's not only Paizo. It's nearly EVERY online store that sold the PDFs. Including DriveThru. It's pathetic, and it's only encouraging MORE piracy at their expense.
The best part of this entire thing is that White Wolf made the 2nd Edition core rule book for Exhalted free for download for a period of time.
And Paizo is now offering all their Pathfinder goodies for 35% off.
Complaining about piracy when you overprice games and totally create products that make people nervous is kinda hypocritical of Wizards, if you ask me.
McClaud | April 10, 2009 6:09 AM | Reply to this comment
Thanks for the comment and the confirmation. I didn't get a chance to go visit other sites so I was wondering if it was only Paizo. I guess they are doing it to everybody. Kind of surprising though that Paizo was the only company to send me an email about it though.
I agree that this move will encourage more piracy. Many of these old modules, the only way to get them is in *.pdf form. If they ever show up on places like eBay, they go for many times over cover price. And, considering how old these paper works are, they're probably not going to last much longer.
Another issue is the scan quality of these "store bought" *.pdfs. The few I have purchased or had purchased for me, all of them had pieces or pages missing and I had to follow up with the stores to get the complete work. And then I turn around and look at the James Bond RPG scans and see that someone took the serious amount of time that was needed, made beautiful scans and made sure every single prop, map and table was included. The stuff from Wizards seems like it was thrown on top of the scan bed and done as quickly as possible.
I got lucky. I had a dot com that I work with go out and buy me the complete run as *.pdfs a couple of years ago. SInce then, I've gone through and compared what I had against what was out on the net, replacing the store bought with the net copy when it was better. I'm happy with what I have now.