This is a prime example of the assumption of Ill intent. Because you assume they were "unnecessarily attempting to destroy..." therefore they were being malicious and betraying what was the social contract of the community.
Couple of problems. Your claim of intent has no basis in fact that we know of. Second, there is no social contract. D&D is not some crowd-sourced shared community, what community exists is there because WOTC decided to open up parts of their IP. I'll agree that it was stupid (or perhaps just poor wording in OGL 1.1, I don't know if the intent was ever clarified) that the OGL 1.0a was revoked for existing materials.
But I don't make any assumptions one way or another about the motivation or logic. I wasn't there and neither were you.
Ultimately though I just don't see the need for ongoing angst over this. They listened, they reversed course, put the core rules in CC. They exceeded the demands. That doesn't sound like something a "malicious" company would do. A large bureaucracy where the whole thing was handle clumsily but eventually fixed is more likely.
You don't need to make assumptions about motivation or logic there: I'm just stating
facts.
- They were taking an unnecessary action. No matter how you want to argue it, I think it's pretty obvious that anyone who has any sense of the community that these actions were utterly and completely unnecessary. This is, to me, inarguable. They were nonsensical at best, and deliberately harmful at worst. If you want to argue that they were necessary, then feel free: I'd love to see someone try.
- It was going to destroy the community built up around it. This is also inarguable, especially given what their intended changes were. Again, this has nothing to do with intent, but actual action. The road to Baator are paved with good intentions, after all, though I honestly fail discern anything resembling a "good intention" with this stuff.
Beyond that, I don't need to make too many assumptions because, at the very least, we can be reasonably sure that they were informed of what their actions would do. We know that Kyle Brink was at the table. There's no way they didn't know what their actions would do. Either they foolish thought the
very obvious wouldn't happen, or that they were okay with the fallout. Either way that doesn't paint a pretty picture. With corporations trying to make a lot of money, I typically default to the latter, but a combination of both is fully possible.
What
I don't see the need for is the defense of Wizards from the "Why do you 'trust' corporations' crowd. Every time I point out that it's a pretty direct line from pursuing profit to destroying the 3PP market, people say I'm judging intent without reason, but then they turn around and say "Obviously this was just ignorance and a mistake!", which is
also ascribing intent! These defenses want to forgive Wizards for pursuing profit, but also suddenly put in a bunch of benign intent into their actions: they're just trying to defend their brand, they just have a bunch of new people who didn't know what they were really doing, this is all them defending themselves against Disney and Meta, etc.
You can't tell me to not assume things and then suddenly default to the most innocent explanations despite the fact that, through the Kyle Brink interviews, we can
see the intent there. They didn't
need to make the royalties threshold as low as they did, but they managed to fight through pushback against those things. You don't need to remove the OGL unless you want to hurt 3PPs. Their design of 1.1, how they went about it (trying to pressure 3PPs over the holiday season when the fewest people would be paying attention), their VTT policy (Which multiple people have basically conceded already is designed to hurt other VTTs)... I'm not sure what else I can say to this. 1.1 and the VTT policy are just so thoroughly
not benign that it's hard to view them as anything other than deliberately harsh (for obvious reasons).
I might suggest that anyone in this discussion with strongly held beliefs consider why they are strongly held and why the are so reluctant to consider other views. If you didn't see it before, or if you didn't take the time to read it,
This is a comic about the backfire effect.
theoatmeal.com
I'm aware of the Backfire Effect (and just about all the facts they mentioned, which probably lessens the impact they were going for, but it's a good list). I've been a front-seat view of it over the last... god, almost decade now given where I live. As someone whose politics have evolved quite a bit in the last 10-15 years and continue to do so, I've had to confront a lot of my older views and reexamine them.
In this case, it's not that I haven't considered the other views, I just don't find them particularly convincing. In fact, I find a lot of the "Hahaha, how can you
naïvely trust corporations!" followed by "But why do you assume corporations were acting with knowledge that they'd hurt people? It could have simply been an innocent misunderstanding because they have so many new people!" to be inherently contradictory and very frustrating. Like, you can't laugh at me for having "trust" that a corporation won't do something grossly harmful and then turn around and say "How can you assume that they'd knowingly do something that would hurt people?"
Similarly, I've looked at my own view, examined it, and tried to keep it consistent. When I find stuff that doesn't fit it, I try to modify my view to fit the evidence. In this case, people aren't contradicting me, they are just saying "You don't have enough evidence for that" and I simply disagree. Which is fine for people like
@mamba , because I think they have a pretty consistent view of things. The "innocent mistake" stuff, much less so. I just find it very hard (especially after Kyle has basically repeated their story multiple times in interviews) that they didn't know what they were doing: at some point, they had to be told. That they kept going after that does not have any flattering explanation.
