ALCHEMY’S STANCE ON PDFs

Our team spends weeks hand-entering the complete contents from every book we convert into an Alchemy Universe. It’s our hope that a Universe can provide an even better way to access the contents of a book when using a digital device.

However, we strongly believe that our customers should be able to download a digital hard copy of everything they buy on Alchemy for two main reasons:

First, we are passionate about addressing what we think is a broken buy model in TTRPGs today, where consumers are forced to purchase a title multiple times in the format they wish to enjoy that content. Whether that’s a physical book, PDF, or VTT module. This is not a simple problem to solve, as books have material costs associated with them and VTT assets have many hours of development time invested by third-parties, like us. Being passionate about this issue, we’ve freely offered hundreds of thousands of Alchemy modules to creators to fulfill on crowdfunding campaigns and to offer alongside the purchase of their physical books. It’s been our hope to create arrangements with all of our Creator Partners, making this a standard for our platform and the VTT space holistically.

Second, we understand that cloud-based services like Alchemy, Roll 20, Demiplane, etc. aren’t guaranteed to exist forever. If the servers behind these services shut down, the investments you’ve made in content for those services inevitably go with them. Offering PDF downloads is one way we can provide an immutable value for your investment that can never be taken away from you.

These are sentiments that many of our Creator Partners also share, but every business is different, has external partnerships and obligations they must consider, and revenue models that take time to evolve.

Alchemy will continue to be led by innovation in the development of our platform and services, remain focused on modernizing the buy model in TTRPGs, and strive to be the best place to buy, build, stream, and play role-playing games online. We apologize for this sudden change and sincerely thank you for supporting our journey.

If you have any questions or need help getting your PDFs, please don’t hesitate to email us directly at [email protected].