[dmccoy1693]

Originally Posted by Corjay

True20 is not a D20 product. It was created in response to what they didn't like about D20.

I know, but True20 and Pathfinder are two popular examples of "abuse" cited by 3rd party companies. Hense my citing them now.

Originally Posted by Corjay

Dancey said that the OGL was about screwing the licenser? No, his plan was that companies would be able to use the licenser's product to the benefit of all parties. The OGL provides NO benefit to the licenser.
...
I don't have the diagram in front of me, but I believe Dancey's diagram put the licenser at the center of the network, but the OGL in practice puts the licenser on parallel footing in the market to the licensee, meaning they get no greater market share than the licensee, meaning also that they create a competitor to take market share away from the licenser with little to no return. That's losing profit, not gaining profit.

You're referring to this. link

Originally Posted by Dancey

We've got a theory that says that D&D is the most popular roleplaying game because it is the game more people know how to play than any other game. (For those of you interested researching the theory, this concept is called "The Theory of Network Externalities.")
[ Note: This is a very painful concept for a lot of people to embrace, including a lot of our own staff, and including myself for many years. The idea that D&D is somehow "better" than the competition is a powerful and entrenched concept. The idea that D&D can be "beaten" by a game that is "better" than D&D is at the heart of every business plan from every company that goes into marketplace battle with D&D game. If you accept the Theory of Network Externalities, you have to admit that the battle is lost before it begins, because the value doesn't reside in the game itself, but in the network of people who know how to play it.]
If you accept (as I have finally come to do) that the theory is valid, then the logical conclusion is that the larger the number of people who play D&D, the harder it is for competitive games to succeed, and the longer people will stay active gamers, and the more value the network of D&D players will have to Wizards of the Coast.
In fact, we believe that there may be a secondary market force we jokingly call "The Skaff Effect," after our own [game designer] Skaff Elias. Skaff is one of the smartest guys in the company, and after looking at lots of trends and thinking about our business over a long period of time, he enunciated his theory thusly:
"All marketing and sales activity in a hobby gaming genre eventually contributes to the overall success of the market share leader in that genre."
In other words, the more money other companies spend on their games, the more D&D sales are eventually made. Now, there are clearly issues of efficiency -- not every dollar input to the market results in a dollar output in D&D sales; and there is a substantial time lag between input and output; and a certain amount of people are diverted from D&D to other games never to return. However, we believe very strongly that the net effect of the competition in the RPG genre is positive for D&D.
The downside here is that I believe that one of the reasons that the RPG as a category has declined so much from the early 90s relates to the proliferation of systems. Every one of those different game systems creates a "bubble" of market inefficiency; the cumulative effect of all those bubbles has proven to be a massive downsizing of the marketplace. I have to note, highlight, and reiterate: The problem is not competitive >product<, the problem is competitive >systems<. I am very much for competition and for a lot of interesting and cool products.
So much for the dry theory and background. Here's the logical conclusions we've drawn:
We make more revenue and more profit from our core rulebooks than any other part of our product lines. In a sense, every other RPG product we sell other than the core rulebooks is a giant, self-financing marketing program to drive sales of those core books. At an extreme view, you could say that the core >book< of the PHB is the focus of all this activity, and in fact, the PHB is the #1 best selling, and most profitable RPG product Wizards of the Coast makes year in and year out.

The Basic idea of the OGL is to drive up sales of the PHB. And it has. It was their best selling book. Anyone that wanted to play freeport adventures or City of Brass had to have a PHB. That is the benefit provided by the OGL/D20 combo and made it perfect. The OGL itself was the "guarantee" to publishers that they can't be screwed over. The d20 license provided the restrictions on publishers.

Having both in a single license, either means either the restrictions are going to be short changed or the "guarantee" is going to get short changed. I don't see any changes to the GSL that will bring the "guarantee" back.