Continuing the D&D executive producer's interview tour, gaming influencer Ginny Di asks a WotC's Kyle Brink about the OGL and other things.
The profit and revenue mainly comes from MtG. Top end estimate is that D&D made $150M of more than $1B of revenue and that is very recent.D&D is tiny? When WOTC is literally half of Hasbro profit I don’t think D&D is tiny.
they can do that without nuking the OGL too. Do not license 1DD to the existing VTTs and let the 5e licenses expire, done.They may have the big name, but they want to assure complete dominance, and that is absolutely not assured given their monetization plans.
Rather, nuking the VTT market so that people don't have other places to go for their product makes their release far safer, especially if (like most big tech projects) they run into technical hurdles initially. This way people have to use their system because there simply aren't other options.
This is a very good point, and IMO somewhat lends credence to the idea that they were worried more about implementations in future technology than specifically trying to cripple the current major VTTs. (With the caveat that there were almost certainly people within WotC that would have been happy with the effect a new OGL and VTT policy would have on those as well.)they can do that without nuking the OGL too. Do not license 1DD to the existing VTTs and let the 5e licenses expire, done.
Without the subclasses (not in the SRD) and official adventures, the other VTTs are effectively removed from the D&D market.
They do not use the SRD today, so changes to the OGL for this are not helpful / needed.
Brinks has over 25 years in the games publishing industry. As you continually beat on him for lying you aren't doing basic fact checking of yourself.Kyle is not really from the publishing industry and D&D is tiny in Hasbro. So I have doubts that they have publishing centric lawyers and that he knows what is “usual”.
I marked that down as a probable lie.
Cannot be proven, of course. But rings false.
Anyone who believes WotC's concern was genuinely about 'toxic OGL content', now or in the future, there's several bridges I'd like to interest you in.
Anyone who believes WotC's concern was genuinely about 'toxic OGL content', now or in the future, there's several bridges I'd like to interest you in.
Sure, but should we really believe that?
The idea of Meta suddenly making a D&D VTT clone when they can barely make office call software comes off more as a deflection against a company nobody likes
Computer game publishing is not D&D. D&D is book publishing. All of the 3rd party companies they were talking to are also book publishers.Brinks has over 25 years in the games publishing industry. As you continually beat on him for lying you aren't doing basic fact checking of yourself.
He must likely does know the way publishing works, in video games, which may be different than books, but that doesn't make one a liar