D&D 5E Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition OGL?

[Ahnehnois]

If i was a wizard EWxec my question how does this make money for Wizards?

Money saved is money earned. There is an asset here-the passion of the fans. Give them access to the rules and the opportunity to produce game material, and they will take it and run with it, effectively creating promotional material and doing your advertising for free. Even to this day, I think a lot more money is spent promoting 4e than PF, but look at the business success Paizo is having.

If I were talking to a WotC person, my case would be: this model demonstrably works, so copy it.

 

[Halivar]

Give them access to the rules and the opportunity to produce game material, and they will take it and run with it

This has meaning beyond what you intended, I think, and not in ways that would make WotC amenable to going back to OGL.

 

[xechnao]

If pre-orders are a measure of anything, they're a measure of success of the previous edition of a game. Because people haven't seen the new edition yet, they don't know whether it's good or bad - but if the previous edition was successfull, they will buy the next edition, in hopes of continued quality.

And that's what happened with 4E. Guess what did not happen - it did not hold the market share.

This is true. But it is not true that 3.xe was a success because it was under the OGL. After all, as many people suggest, Wotc did not support the OGL beyond the core books and arcana unearthed.

A very prominent reason for that was GSL - undeniable fall of the number of 3PP materials meant far less material, meant far less players holding on to the game.

No. This is your suggestion but it does not follow from any facts that it might also be true. After all, many 4e fans complain of rules and product bloat and if it were not for the DDI utilities they would have had a very difficult time to follow new products. Some third party publishers tried to publish for 4e but they stopped since their sales were very low. They believe that 4e fans did not want third party material because it were not compatible with the DDI online tools.

Also, the GSL directly caused Pathfinder - as repeated numerous times in this thread, Paizo was ready to work for 4E, but GSL shut them so much, they profited more from their own retro clone. And how!

Maybe, maybe not. As noted above, a number of publishers tried to support 4e with the GSL but they did not have any luck in the market. OTOH, the OSR is experiencing significant growth. The OSR would never support 4e, even if it were OGL, yet it is doing better than 4e third party publishers.

 

[Ahnehnois]

This has meaning beyond what you intended, I think, and not in ways that would make WotC amenable to going back to OGL.

I meant it. There isn't really any danger that fans will make a product will directly compete with a WotC product, and there isn't really any danger of saturating the market. If those things were the case, an OGL might be a much worse business decision.

An example of "taking it and running with it" would be Wayfinder, a periodical of fan-produced PF material which Paizo offers through their site. I think that's good for business. By the same token, fan fiction is generally good for the property it's attached to, not bad (although the fiction itself may not be so good).

 

[El Mahdi]

I believe that 3rd party support and fan created material create a synergistic effect with D&D, rather than subtracting from D&D's pie.

Synergy: the sums are greater than the whole...

 

[Reynard]

I believe that 3rd party support and fan created material create a synergistic effect with D&D, rather than subtracting from D&D's pie.

Synergy: the sums are greater than the whole...

Plus, the genie is out of the bottle. OGL and 3rd party stuff exists and has an impact on even D&D. When Necromancer, for example, was excited to bring "1st Edition Feel" to 4E, I was willing to go along, even though at that point I already didn't like what I was seeing. When Necromancer bowed out of 4E, so did I.

I hardly doubt I am the only one who was a fence sitter, waiting on the companies I did trust and like to determine whether 4E would get my money.

 

[Halivar]

I meant it. There isn't really any danger that fans will make a product will directly compete with a WotC product, and there isn't really any danger of saturating the market. If those things were the case, an OGL might be a much worse business decision.

Except Paizo did exactly that, using the OGL.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Except Paizo did exactly that, using the OGL.

But not while WotC was still using the OGL. So I'm telling the execs "when we closed our license, we lot market share, so open it up again".

The fan-made projects and 3rd party products that existed while 3.X was being supported were not competitive with WotC in the way that PF now is.

 

[Mark CMG]

Except Paizo did exactly that, using the OGL.

I'd imagine if there was a 5E OGL D&D it would garner enough attention that Paizo would also make 5E OGL D&D products, if not convert over entirely. All 3PP would go where the money is and, in doing so, drive more money in that direction. WotC could roll back the changes they made that were made primarily for recapturing IP, like the naming conventions they tacked on, but also keep the better innovations that came with 4E. There'd need to be some smoothing of ruffled feathers, I'd imagine, but if D&D walked back some of their missteps of the past four years I think folks were prefer a united community.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Money saved is money earned. There is an asset here-the passion of the fans. Give them access to the rules and the opportunity to produce game material, and they will take it and run with it, effectively creating promotional material and doing your advertising for free. Even to this day, I think a lot more money is spent promoting 4e than PF, but look at the business success Paizo is having.

If I were talking to a WotC person, my case would be: this model demonstrably works, so copy it.

Continuing the pretense: Note the Wizards exec does not believe the Ryan Dancy arguments, he vetoed the OGL for 4e. "So what is this demonstrably works?"

Also much of the third party stuff produced during the 3.x era that rose to some prominence were games that used the D20 mechanics but came with their own players handbook and stood alone from WoTC product. So how does this stuff promote WoTC material?

There were other words i wanted to put in the mouth of this imaginary exec but my train of though was derailed by hte folks at home.


On a more personal note, in my opinion Paizo's success is due to Dragon and Dungeon. They made a name from themselves there and started a business in producing periodic material of such quality to successfully generate a stable subscription revenue.

They might have managed the latter without the former but their rise would have been alot slower. They might also have managed it without the OGL but I really doubt it.