That Chris Cocks, CEO of Hasbro, and Cynthia William, CEO of Wizards of the Coast, each write and sign individual formal apologies to all the publishers impacted by their overreach and inept handling of the situation such as Paizo, Kobold Press, Troll Lord Games, Green Ronin, Gaming Ballistic, Frog God Games, and many others.
You gotta know this is not remotely on the table. Like, this pretty much never happens, and it would be unprofessional to force them to do this.
You fire people if you have to, but you
never throw them under the bus in the public eye. The apology comes from above that person if possible, from their replacement if necessary, and if you just cannot swing one of those and it has to come from the person themselves you have them write it specifically as a representative of the company, not as an individual. It's "we are sorry, we messed up in this way, here is what we are doing and going to do to make things right."
Reprimand in private, praise in public, is the standard, and for good reason.
After those conditions are met, Wizards is free to release OneD&D content under any license they want. Although their creative and legal choices may continue to be criticized. The community is also free to pursue their creative ideas without Wizard's interference.
I mean, this is all true regardless of what they do.
Your definition of "haven't budged" is strange to me. They went from OGL 1.0a is dead and nothing more can be done under it(original leak) to OGL 1.0a is going to die, but if you have something in the works you have 6 more months to okay, okay, if you're produced something under 1.0a you can keep using it forever. That's a hell of a lot of budging.
They aren't as rock solid on this as you are making them out to be.
Yeah, and honestly if they made the following changes, I think they'd have a good chance of "winning" this whole debacle in the end, for better or worse. Not guaranteed by any means, but a chance.
- explicit language that you can continue to make content for existing products licensed under the OGL1.0a, but not make fully new products using that license (ie works that do not reference or derive from works made before [date])
- A review process for flagged works under the morality clause, and wotc must provide very specific reason for flagging a work, and provide at least 30 days to remedy or pull the work, before flagging it. Flagged works are then reviewed by a third party
- fixed language for vtt, with that text being part of the OGL not a separate policy. I think a good way to make a clear line between video games and vtts is the animation of characters, and the automation of NPCs and enviroments.
However, I think they'd be better off providing a
really good platform that any publisher can join (with wotc review, it's their platform), and on which users can sell eachother stuff, running it similarly to DMsGuild, where you can use actual protected IP as long as you follow the rules, and wotc gets a cut. The key thing would be to give publishers the ability to create their own "nexus" on the platform, so that a user can just view that publisher's stuff and use the platform as if it were just that publisher's platform. So, a publisher could set up their digital tools (with easy to use creator tools built in), compendiums, and marketplace, etc.
It might take a while for 3pp to get onboard, after this debacle, but it would happen eventually. The deal would be too good to not get on board.
But they won't, so probably our best hope at this point is to ditch them until such time as leadership changes and they put the whole SRD in CC as part of an attempt to pull people back to them, similar to the beginning of 5e.
Hopefully they go through with the CC plan, and we don't have to worry about wotsr sueing people for making fair use content.