It's wild to me that something like the OGL has people more upset than WotC's announcement to their shareholders that D&D was under monetized and their intentions to create a "recurrent spending environment" using very similar language to what video companies have been using these last few years. To my ears, that sounded an awful lot like, "we intend to treat our customers like the garbage they are," but most people here seemed to take it in stride saying I was overreacting. But, there you go, we all have our limits and care about different things.
The reality is that people care more about what has happened, or is happening, than what
might happen, for better or worse.
(Usually worse, c.f. climate change etc.)
Saying that D&D is "under-monetized" is a vague statement. Is it threatening? Yes. Is it also the sort of thing corporate types often say, but can have a thousand different meanings? Yes.
It's once it starts manifesting that people are actually going to get upset. And
@Charlaquin is 100% right. The whole OGL debacle is a
manifestation of "D&D is under-monetized". WotC can squeak and squirm and PR-bollocks as much as they like about protecting us from bigots who have mysteriously never created a problem previously*, but it's clear that the real goal was to lock down the entire D&D-material-related industry, and force every company but WotC to become unprofitable above a tiny size, with any profits they might have made going to WotC instead. Also I'm going to be real, and say I don't believe for one second the wild legal overreach in the perpetual grant of
everything to WotC was purely IP protection - indeed that WotC is willing to back down
proves that, no matter how many people say "tinfoil" or whatever. It served that purpose, but also gave WotC leverage if any company in future was uncooperative.
Anyway, point is, actions are what people care about. Every big corporate games company makes vaguely threatening-sounding statements pretty often. Some of them turn out to be nothing but wind (most, even), others have terrible consequences, there's no way to tell.
Personally I took the comments more as referring to D&D Beyond and the 3D VTT than to D&D itself, let alone the 3PP market. That didn't even make sense to me. The 3PP market is laughably tiny next to WotC, and clearly not a place any sane person would think to monetize. Unfortunately WotC has proven its current leadership are bone-headed idiots at best. We can no longer expect sane or rational decisions from a company that tried to ask people for 15-25% of their revenue, and total everlasting control of everything they published. That they backed down on both completely doesn't speak well of WotC - on the direct contrary, it shows they're willing to make outrageous demands that clearly mean nothing to them. It shows they don't have an understanding of the market, they don't clear goals, and that the demands they're making are not made in good faith.
Making products thst I do not want to buy is a hard line for buying products, yes. The OGL is just business...and it ain't my business.
That doesn't really answer Charlaquin's point, though.
The issue she is pointing out is that, if say, 6E turned into something far more 4E-like, or 7E, or whatever, the existence of the OGL 1.0a means people could continue to make products that you did want to buy. Like, what did you do in the 4E era? Honest question. Did you just keep playing 3.5E, and bought nothing new? Did you go over to Pathfinder? Did you stop playing? Change to another RPG? These are all valid options, but the point is, the OGL 1.0a added to those options.
Also, you like 5E, right? Do you think 5E, in any form like this, would have existed if Pathfinder didn't cause such a problem for 4E? Because I do not. And without the OGL, people wouldn't have had the legal certainty to create Pathfinder.
Now, I will say I think a case can be made that maybe we're past that, but we'll only know once someone tries, and WotC starts suing people, or not.
Which was exactly why it didn't happen previously.
* = For pretty obvious reasons. Kickstarter doesn't allow openly bigoted projects (they publicly committed to BLM and so on), and fans don't support them anyway. When something slips through, fans tend to spot it and raise a ruckus, like some dogwhistle white-nationalist imagery in a fishing card game (!!!), which immediately got removed and apologised for. DM's Guild obviously would immediately remove any product which was bigoted unless it was old TSR/WotC material with a health warning on it. Similarly for Drivethru.
