[Jazzepi]

Tim, thank you for responding to the points presented in a meaningful, accurate way. I have two points.

1. I think you overstate the manual as a form of DRM. People get help on the forums all the time. There's a path boosting guide there as well. In game there is a description for every spell that is mostly accurate, every unit's stats can be gotten simply by looking at them. That is to say that not having the manual makes the game more difficult to play, but for someone pirating the game there are plenty of other resources that supplement, replace, and otherwise correct the manual that are readily available on these forums and the dom3 wiki, that you really don't even need the manual.

Actually, your best form of DRM is banning cd-keys from playing online by releasing updates. DOM3 single player leaves a lot to be desired from the AI.

2. You said that the cost of producing the manuals would go up if you starting making PDFs because the size of your manual runs would go down since people would switch over to digital distributions and this would negate any savings from not having to press + print + mail the physical media. Maybe I'm being simple here, but it seems like to me all you would have to do is keep the print run at the same size, the trade off being that you'd have a higher inventory for a longer period of time.

Jazzepi