If Hasbro Pulls the Plug....

[The Little Raven]

Damn, my memory is messed up. I could have sworn 3E came out before Hasbro bought WotC, but reading up it looks like it was after. The first of the OGL products I see are Death in Freeport (Nov 2000) and Creature Collection (Oct 2000). From what I've been reading, Hasbro bought WotC in 1999.

As I recall, people didn't pay much attention to the Hasbro buyout until Peter Adkinson left in 2002.

 

[xechnao]

The OGL was enacted a year after Hasbro acquired TSR. Pretty sure they were aware of it before it went into effect and could have stopped if they so chose.

Don't be so sure about that. The OGL should rather depend on Wotc's CEO decisions and its legal team.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Can't we just reverse the polarity of the neutron flow and be done with it!

Or am I in the wrong genre?

But the moderaters keep slowing down the neutrons stopping the chain reaction. Reversing the flow won't help. they have to be decoupled.

Of course we could not decouple them all or we would loose containment. Nerds are very fissile.
We would probably have to change the packing structure of the dilithium crystals also.

 

[Dausuul]

Well, it doesn't look like D&D is getting its plug pulled just yet.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

A reprieve, at the very least. A nice big public playtest will definitely help.

No word on licensing yet, but if I were WotC I would make the terms of any OGL/GSL public even before the rules themselves are nailed down. Hopefully this is not a topic to be revisited two years from now.

The Auld Grump

 

[The Little Raven]

Don't be so sure about that. The OGL should rather depend on Wotc's CEO decisions and its legal team.

If it comes down to believing that a corporation (Hasbro) acquiring another one (Wizards) has information and legal power over said acquisition or believing one of xechnao's random conspiracy theories, I'll stick to the former.

Mod Note: Don't make it personal. Address the logic of the post, not the person of the poster, please. Thanks much. ~Umbran

 

[wingsandsword]

As I recall, people didn't pay much attention to the Hasbro buyout until Peter Adkinson left in 2002.

I went and pulled out my old 3.0 D&D books to check on something about all this.

My 3e PHB, from August 2000, makes no mention of Hasbro, anywhere. Nowhere in the credits, nowhere on the cover, nowhere in the copyright notices. Ditto for other early 3e books.

The OGL 1.0a stated it was from Wizards of the Coast, Inc., not Hasbro.

From what I can tell, WotC may have bought the company on paper circa 1999, but Peter Adkinson still ran the show, and there was nothing, or very little, in the public to say that WotC was a Hasbro subsidiary instead of an independent company. We don't know how much input Hasbro's corporate legal dept. had on the say of the release of the OGL, but superficially it looks like it might have been done entirely in-house to WotC.

It does appear at least that until Adkinson left WotC (to run Gen Con apparently) that WotC was more-or-less autonomous, it wasn't until we left that it looks like it started acting like a directly controlled arm of Hasbro.

 

[The Little Raven]

I went and pulled out my old 3.0 D&D books to check on something about all this.

My 3e PHB, from August 2000, makes no mention of Hasbro, anywhere. Nowhere in the credits, nowhere on the cover, nowhere in the copyright notices. Ditto for other early 3e books.

The OGL 1.0a stated it was from Wizards of the Coast, Inc., not Hasbro.

Subsequent versions of the OGL, the 4e books (from 2008 to present) and the GSL make no mention of Hasbro, either. I fail to see how that proves or disproves whether Hasbro did or did not know about the license in a company they acquired a year before the license was enacted. That kind of thing is part of the due diligence a company does when acquiring another, particularly when the license allows competitors to freely reference and use the company's materials.

 

[jbear]

What will folks do if Hasbro pulls the plug on D&D?

The Escapist article describes Hasbro 'marginalizing' properties that generate less than 50-100 million dollars.

If (and hopefully that is a big IF) D&D has fallen below whatever magic number Hasbro has chosen, what will folks do?

And how would it affect the industry?

What games are in the book trade, aside from Pathfinder, will work as a gateway?

I'm okay, I have Pathfinder, Spycraft, and other games. But....

No edition warring, no comments like 'I'll be dancing in the streets!' - a consideration of the impact that the loss of what has for a long time been the flagship and most common gateway to RPGs.

The Auld Grump

I would just keep on gaming. I have a lifetime's worth of material yet to explore properly.

 

[Desdichado]

What will folks do if Hasbro pulls the plug on D&D?

The Escapist article describes Hasbro 'marginalizing' properties that generate less than 50-100 million dollars.

I think it's important to remember that "the property" also includes computer games and other things licensed to hold the D&D name, as well as a fairly brisk business in novels. I suspect that D&D is in no danger, considering these additional sources of revenue that are somewhat ancillary to the game itself, but which are certainly directly related to ownership of the property.

As for what would happen if Hasbro pulled the plug anyway, for me personally, it wouldn't matter. I don't play (or more importantly, buy) anything from WotC today anyway.

But I think it's an interesting scenario for the industry. I see a lot of folks dropping out of the hobby, actually. Lots of folks buy whatever's current in D&D, and don't look at anything else. Lots of other folks will hit the used market; lots of others will migrate to existing games (although probably not in large numbers, since other games probably won't really scratch the D&D itch in the same way.) I'm actually more curious about what this does on the business side--what does this mean for game stores, distributors and whatnot? And I'm worried that the fallout of D&D going away has a ripple effect on them which is not good, which in turn has a ripple effect on smaller game publishers, which contracts the entire market.