And the pedantically correct but totally irrelevant response for this particular thread goes to .... wait for it .... Ruin Explorer!!!
Thank you!
Normally I'm handing out that prize so it's good to receive it for once! Now I'd like to thank my parents, Mr and Mrs Explorer, AO for creating the Forgotten Realm in which we dwell...
Did I say it was an "innocent error"? No. I said the decision was made by clueless management. Which ... yes ... probably includes multiple people.
I'm aware - that was directed more at other people in the thread.
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.
It doesn't really matter if the plan was to crush 3PP if the action they were suggesting would have crushed 3PP. It just illustrates ignorance/stupidity on the part of the people involved if there's a bunch of unintended fallout.
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.
There's no reason it can't be both incompetence
and some degree of desire to actively damage other businesses which might be characterized as malice. I've worked in corporate environments too and I've seen them go hand-in-hand a number of times. Indeed, malice I think can easily lead one into incompetent decision-making modes, rather than vice-versa.
Personally I think logic dictates that we keep an open mind on whether it was purely idiocy (which suggests a real level of recklessness that is arguably more dangerous than malice), purely malicious (unlikely in the the extreme - it does happen, but it's become rare in modern business), or some mixture of both. I'm certainly not making any specific claims as to the mix.
Actions speak louder than words, though, and they pulled back from the brink and in fact turned a 180 and moved in the opposite direction. I genuinely applaud them for that! But I remain, and I think
reasonably, concerned that they could ever have gotten into the position they did. Especially as Kyle was clear that something D&D Shorts said was true - that WotC had been planning this for a long time, this wasn't something cooked up just recently. That they were going for such a terrible idea even with many months or even years of planning is astonishing and speaks to a very odd culture, which has hopefully been laid to rest again for another 10-15 years. It last emerged, imho, with the idiocy around 4E and particularly the original, poison-pill GSL. I guess we should start being concerned again when D&D's 60th comes up!