Your comment about reprints is a good one. It's one I wrestle with often. I have trouble believing the reprints, as beautiful as they are, will sell very well. They are releasing material compatible for 3E, such as Encounters, but is that really going to do much for sales? Though I travel a lot, I have met only a very small number of gamers that play 3E over Pathfinder. Maybe WotC can pull a few from PF back to 3E with reprints... but I really can't see that being significant. I don't really understand the reprint strategy for the 3E material. (I do for older classic stuff, as that is generally harder to find for most gamers and has a 'classic' and collectible value for many).
I think the 3E reprints are all about DDN. They are a
mea culpa - an apology to 3E fans for the "crush the heretic edition" approach they took last time (and 3E fans got the rough end of).
And I think it's effective, to a degree. There are some folk who will never forgive, but there certainly seem to be some who have been mollified enough to give DDN a look, at least.
Okay, but keep in mind we're talking about what to do in the future. Wizards should learn from the problems of the OGL and either not create one or create a different type of OGL for D&D Next. They have a responsibility for their business, so the OGL should be re-examined carefully.
Could the OGL be sharpened to deal with a few (minor) issues not envisaged by its creators? Undoubtedly. But we were talking about market intelligence a little earlier; there is absolutely nothing like seeing how well an innovative product sells for market intelligence - even (especially?) if that product is produced by a competitor.
What business in general really needs to learn, in my opinion - and especially the games business, since they should understand game systems and processes better than anybody - is how to compete constructively. So many business folk see competition as a zero-sum game. The genius of the OGL was, in part, that it saw past that. If you can get 10% more share of the pie than the next guy that's swell - but if the pie is twice as big,
everybody gains! No one company can give the customers everything they want - so generate lots of companies to do it! Show all your competitors what you are doing (while keeping a tight hold on your
branding) and you can all learn off each other what the customer wants.
Good grief, I have seen so often unproductive, blinkered and paranoid "competition" - I have even known companies (plural) who got so blinded by beating their competitors with certain customers that they were
making a loss on their top-ranked clients!! The more they sold them, the more they lost - but they didn't even realise it and were too busy making sure they kept all that "premium" business to notice - it was insane. This was in the Chemical Industry, too, so you might even know some of the companies (I'm picking up that you are in Chemical Engineering - my first degree also - but that might be inaccurate).
They just need to wise up about ways they can compete that are constructive for the industry as a whole instead of destructive.
I don't think any of those are a valid model for DnD. Sure, DnD could be just a small game with a single edition and the WotC just writes different games, as Pelgrane does. Or maybe it just lives off of other games, the way Steve Jackson does with Munchkin.
Think more in terms of a GURPS model - rules modules with settings and such besides. And different systems too, maybe, that cater to specific different tastes/styles.
What WotC would have,
with the OGL in place, is the D&D brand. They can sell OGL material with the assurance of quality that the brand gives. Does that mean they have to be very careful to keep up brand quality and coherence? Yes!! That's exactly what I mean by "healthy for WotC"! Being incentivised to keep your brand quality high is absolutely healthy - it's the very essence of much of what I have been saying, in fact. There's a lot to be said for looking at brand value as brand quality times how well known the brand is. Marketing can do lots about the last part, but if the brand quality is crap (and you're not the only brand in town) it will all be for nought.
Back to the RPG, it still doesn't benefit from an OGL in either case. The OGL's benefits were supposed to be core book sales. No one has wanted to gut the RPG department down to just reselling the core books, thankfully. That initial vision would have been disastrous. Beyond that, the OGL creates competition, waters down your product line, creates product confusion, and hurts the industry by overly focusing on a single game rather than having third parties create their own innovations.
The "core books only" idea was, frankly, dumb from the get-go. It's the opposite of the case above, almost: keeping 30% of the market value is worth squat if the market shrivels away to nothing. And if you sold only core books, it would - the 3pps would create their own systems if there was no synergy to plug into, I reckon. And with no synergy for your core books, the line would die.
On innovations: there will always be innovation in the marketplace. Plenty of indie games started up during the 3.x era, and towards the end there were plenty of non-D&D d20 games coming along, too. Having a core system to noodle around and expand upon makes it easier for new companies to get an entry to the market - and that's helpful to innovation in the long term.
At the moment we're seeing a flowering of new games through Kickstarter which is great but really doesn't have any connection to the OGL one way or the other. Having a route for new ventures to raise capital, without the risk of bank loans, from people who actually know the product is fantastic. For too long large areas of innovation have been limited because the people with the money didn't know or care about the markets these ventures want to serve. But that can happen with or without an OGL or equivalent.
Plenty on the staff have d20 3rd party experience - that's not lacking. Similarly, they play different games all the time. Follow their Twitter feeds and see they have played L5R, FIASCO, Dungeon World, Numenera, FATE, 13th Age, etc. They are part of a vibrant community of gamers and they run and take turns in home games with various larger groups. They have a very healthy exposure to games these days.
"These days" that may well be true - but both managers and designers seemed to lack exposure in the past. Or maybe the limitations generated by the internal processes just made it seem that way? I dunno.
