If the royalty is Gross, and not net, that's going to cut a lot of people out. Let's look at a recent KS I did: Twilight Fables. The KS was $55,000. KS took $5K of that. If I had to pay an additional $13,700 to WoTC, I would have been in the red (by that amount, since I pretty much broke even at $55K).
I factored that in my calculation. The company currently made 475k from two Kickstarters. My calculations were based on the hypothetical that they made two more kickstarters that netted the same returns, putting them at 950k. Since the royalties start from the first cent after the 750k, they'd have ~200k USD of earnings that are subject to WotC royalty demands. A fifth of that (which is the more generous estimate compared to the 25%) nets us 40k USD of royalties owed to WotC, which gets me to the 88 Turkish minimum wages worth of royalties I arrived at.
D&D's entire senior leadership team has been replaced in the past six months with people who have no relevant experience with, or connection to, D&D's history and place within the TRPG industry. Anyone who might raise a concern is either invested in the success of this new approach or focused on having their name on a new edition of the game.
That's a fair point. We need to see the actual text to know, but Gizmodo's article suggests that it's based off the yearly revenue out of all content made with OGL. So it's not even profits, it's revenue. Even if you're in the red, if you got 800k in revenue from your Kickstarter, you owe royalties out of the last 50k.
Not a product I would buy, but I would fight for its right to exist.
Wasn't the Book of Erotic Fantasy a large source of kerfuffle back in the 3.5 days? Though I do remember WotC managing to get that product stopped in distribution for some reason.
You know how they'll enforce it though, they'll ignore stuff that you or I would consider "blatantly racist", but then crack down hard on something LGBTQ+ because it was too "sexualized" or whatever.
www.enworld.org
