Bits and Mortar initiative

Evil Hat Productions just announced the formation of Bits & Mortar, and Engine Publishing just applied to join the initiative.

Although our first product, Eureka, won’t be in retail stores until later this year, we’ve already fulfilled our PDF guarantee — which was inspired directly by Evil Hat’s guarantee — for GenCon customers: If you bought Eureka new at GenCon, send us proof of purchase and we’ll email you the PDF version for free. When Eureka hits retail stores, we’ll be doing the same thing for retail customers: buy it new, get the PDF at no charge.

Bits & Mortar takes this to the next level: Retailers get copies of participating publishers’ PDFs, and then they hand CD copies of those PDFs to customers who buy the print editions. It’s an awesome idea, and one I wholeheartedly support — it’s the kind of collaboration that recognizes that publishers, retailers, and gamers are all in this together.

New publishers can get on their radar now, but likely won’t be implemented until January 2011. I can’t wait!