Look, Fox didn't do shit; he's talking out of his ass. The manager for The Trove has said they're simply reorganizing it.
Now, for those of you playing at home saying that Fox is a hypocrite for complaining about piracy all the while he ripped off WHFRP... please use that same argument for Matt Finch, Stuart Marshall and the rest of us who engineered OSRIC. For extra points, also talk shit about LL, OSE, and whatever other OSR games are floating around because they freely "rip off" old TSR material.
Because they could.
Because it's legal.
Because there was a demand.
So, does piracy hurt or help sales? Everyone's got an opinion on that one. Grim Jim on YT seems to think it helps. I don't know... I don't keep track of anyone's sales. I do believe that if you create something and put it up for sale, in whatever form... dead tree, PDF... and you don't want it pirated, then you have every right to say something when someone does it... and the non-publishing armchair yuk-yuks can just run their mouths all they want because they don't matter.
Paying customers matter.
Agreed, that's why I try to buy physical/PDFs whenever I can. Hell, the only reason I've pirated something is just to give a look through to see if I like it because 9/10 times the DriveThru preview is just the Table of Contents (which idk if that's on the publisher or DriveThru). Hence why I own a few copies of DCC, OSRIC in physical, OSE, etc.
The big issue with Fox, at least to me, is that he has an "only I can do this but it's sleazy if someone else does" type of attitude that just rubs me the wrong way. Especially considering that Zweihander is a retroclone to a degree (once again, not super familiar with WFRP).
That looked really cool... until I scrolled down and saw the tag line.
Yeah, I honestly would've used the art and not thought anything of it if it didn't include that bottom bit. Feels like it's starting to become a big ask to just not put politics in RPG books