which went electronic in a serious way much earlier than publishing in general, largely abandoned DRM at a very early stage in the process.
IIRC, most of the early adopters -- who did their own PDF distribution -- in the RPG industry never used DRM at all, the very little adoption DRM ever had was among second-wave electronic companies that were using third-party PDF distribution services that offered DRM as an option (IIRC, the default option, in some cases.)
This matches my experience--a friend and I were among those "early adopters" who published PDFs back in the D&D 3.0 days, and nobody was using DRM then; first, nobody wanted to pay the license fees to Adobe or whomever (most of us couldn't afford them in any case), and second, all it would have done was piss off our customers anyway. Later on (in the D&D 3.5 days), as you say, third-party PDF distribution services started offering DRM, but even then there wasn't a lot of uptake that I could see.
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IIRC, most of the early adopters -- who did their own PDF distribution -- in the RPG industry never used DRM at all, the very little adoption DRM ever had was among second-wave electronic companies that were using third-party PDF distribution services that offered DRM as an option (IIRC, the default option, in some cases.)
This matches my experience--a friend and I were among those "early adopters" who published PDFs back in the D&D 3.0 days, and nobody was using DRM then; first, nobody wanted to pay the license fees to Adobe or whomever (most of us couldn't afford them in any case), and second, all it would have done was piss off our customers anyway. Later on (in the D&D 3.5 days), as you say, third-party PDF distribution services started offering DRM, but even then there wasn't a lot of uptake that I could see.