RPG companies, with a couple of exceptions (ahem: Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, Games Workshop), are tiny. Which means there's a single desk labelled "the buck stops here".
Whereas at a big corporation with billion dollar revenues at stake, nobody wants to make a decision that triggers a shareholder lawsuit -- especially if it's one that's devilishly hard to prove either way. (If you've got DRM on ebooks, then remove it, activist shareholders can in principle try to sue you either for losing revenue to piracy by dropping DRM, or for having lost revenue in the past due to embracing DRM. So it's much safer not to do anything at all ...)
It is no accident that the first of the Big Five English-language conglomerates to break step on DRM was Macmillan. Macmillan is the English-language subsidiary of Holtzbrinck, which is privately owned.
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Two words: "fewer lawsuits".
RPG companies, with a couple of exceptions (ahem: Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, Games Workshop), are tiny. Which means there's a single desk labelled "the buck stops here".
Whereas at a big corporation with billion dollar revenues at stake, nobody wants to make a decision that triggers a shareholder lawsuit -- especially if it's one that's devilishly hard to prove either way. (If you've got DRM on ebooks, then remove it, activist shareholders can in principle try to sue you either for losing revenue to piracy by dropping DRM, or for having lost revenue in the past due to embracing DRM. So it's much safer not to do anything at all ...)
It is no accident that the first of the Big Five English-language conglomerates to break step on DRM was Macmillan. Macmillan is the English-language subsidiary of Holtzbrinck, which is privately owned.
Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast now, btw. Abandon hope all ye etc.
Avalon Hill too, of course (or what's left of it).
Even GW is selling DRM-free epub now.
Shareholder lawsuits are vanishingly rare, though.