buzz said:
I would imagine that, as you see pretty often today, companies will be able to just prominently display "OGL" on their products and achieve the same goal.
Not exactly.
A publisher has two customers-- first, the retailers; then, the end consumer (the gamer).
For all that the d20 logo may have been poison to retailers, it was never so with the end consumer.
So for example, Goodman Games' Dungeon Crawl Classics (which by my reckoning has been in the Top 5 sellers for Impressions month in and month out for well over a year) continues using the d20 logo. The retailers already know that Dungeon Crawl Classics were a proven seller, and the d20 logo serves its purpose admirably for the end consumer.
In my opinion, the problem wasn't the logo, the problem was the retailers. Rather than inform themselves of the products they were buying, they poisoned themselves by just buying anything with the d20 logo, and quite naturally found themselves burned when they couldn't move the mountain of crap they'd purchased.
The
players learned to be discerning long before the retailers did.
The d20 logo was never a mark of quality, neither good nor bad. Not all products with the d20 logo are good, but equally true is that not all products with the d20 logo are bad. And the retailers still can't be bothered to tell the difference.
That really, really isn't the fault of the logo.
The end consumer DOES know what the d20 logo means: It is a mark of compatibility.
The d20 logo appears on WOTC products.
They
don't know what OGL means. WOTC doesn't use any kind of OGL logo on their products, and I doubt they ever will. So the end consumer has to be re-educated with some new mark of compatibility without benefit of seeing the same mark repeated on WOTC products.
No 3rd party "OGL" logo will ever be as useful as the d20 logo is.
