My point is that this wasn't a plan to squash 3PP. It could have easily been based on poor judgment, dismissing people who knew better.
I mean, it could also be based in poor judgement but simply driven by greed and high profit expectations. I don't see why you are so dismissive of that idea and have to create a benign explanation for it.
Various aspects of the 1.1 sounded like the grab-bag of ideas you'd get out of a committee. But I find it humorous that some of the same people claim that WOTC wanted to steal every idea from 3PP while simultaneously shutting down all 3PP. Like ... if you shut everyone down, who are you going to steal ideas from? I see no reason to believe there was ever a plan to shut down every 3PP, there's no business incentive to do so. There's no reason to believe that it was anything other than a bureaucratic attempt to stop a major competitor ala Pathfinder and protect the brand.
I don't understand this defense. If you shut down 3PPs, you don't
need to steal from anyone anymore because there's no one working in the same space that people can compare your product with.
Also it weakens your defense to say "It wasn't meant to destroy 3PPs" and then go around and say "Actually it was probably an attempt to stop
this 3PP and also 'protect the brand'". Like, there's no reason to believe it had to be that specific given how low Wizards
specifically set the bar on the royalties (and we know this because Brink has basically said as such in interviews).
Also also, "protecting the brand" is not some sort of magical defense against criticism and could be done just as maliciously as anything else. In fact, it doesn't preclude greed coming into the picture: if you want to hit high profit targets (like sextupling your profits), you might see competitors as being impediments and hurting your brand in the long run.
Unless of course you were in the actual meetings when these decisions were made? The problem I see is people claiming that WOTC is lying because they aren't affirming a narrative based on supposition and unfounded hearsay. Was it stupid? Yes. If they had gone forward with it would it have been bad? Yes. Are they outright lying (and, let's face it everybody stretches the truth now and then)? Not necessarily. There's no motivation for them to shut down every 3PP. The VTT was a little different, but again that could have been in large part ignorance.
I mean, there's really no reason to assume it's
not an attempt to maximize profits given what we know about Wizards and how they view D&D right now. They need to go from $150M to $1B, so acting like these decisions aren't being taken in an effort to clear the field and make it as easy as possible to farm big profits seems to be
way more biased than anything.
Honestly, there is plenty of motivation for them to control as much of what they view as their space as possible, and that can involve shutting down 3PPs or bringing them to heel under an agreement that is more beneficial to Wizards.
At this point, it would be more biased to simply ascribe this entirely to ignorance than simply them making a move to dominate what they view as their own market. There's no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt in the matter and all the reason in the world to think that they wanted to seize a whole lot of market so that they can become the $1B they told their investors they could be. This action was meant to be future-proofing for that target.
Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they were cackling like a villain in a bad movie, plotting how they're going to somehow crush every other TTRPG in existence. But given Occam's Razor between that and corporate incompetence? I'd bet on incompetence.
You don't need to be cartoonish to be malicious, nor does incompetence remove maliciousness from the equation.
And you can't really bring in Occam's Razor when you are simply removing profit motive entirely from the reasons as to why they would do these things (and you
are). The simplest explanation is that they did this because they wanted to maximize their hold on the market, and that is really reflected in OGL 1.1, OGL 1.2, and their VTT policy.