WotC D&D Historian Ben Riggs says the OGL fiasco was Chris Cocks idea.

[Meech17]

Man.. I really liked Ben's book.. And I was really looking forward to a potential sequel. He kind of teased it at the end.

But everything I've read from the guy outside of the book as been a bit of a turn off.. Even if he's not wrong (In the case of the Gygax Sexism receipts), he's kind of just... Annoying.. Why does his con panel schedule read like one of those dumb tabloid magazines that just run sensational headlines:

"Guess what celebrity is secretly gay, and which politician is secretly a lizard person! We have the inside scoop!"

Disappointing.

 

[mamba]

Ben posted his GenCon panel schedule and as a hook dropped this bit of info. I bet he has receipts.

[...]

"Do you know whose idea it was to try to cancel the OGL?

It was Chris Cocks, who was at the time the CEO of Wizards, and is now the CEO of Hasbro."

I am not surprised it was Chris, he always was the most likely suspect to me. Will be interesting to see what light he can shed on this.

 

[mamba]

If you want to talk poor market practices let's start up a thread on TSR and how they tried to maintain a stranglehold.

given that TSR are no longer around, it does not really matter any more. What matters is WotC's behavior now, not TSR's 40 years ago

 

[mamba]

Honestly kind of impressive that Cocks was willing to kill and burn the corpse of his own initiative, since he was already the CEO of all Hasbro at that point.

you could argue that he already was CEO means he no longer needed this as a stepping stone, so it made letting go easier

 

[mamba]

I also agree that WotC, Kyle Brink, and others, including Chris Cocks should be given credit for rolling this back, and going the extra mile with the CCBY.

damage control... the amount of credit I give you for fixing the issue you caused in the first place is rather limited.

 

[Oofta]

given that TSR are no longer around, it does not really matter any more. What matters is WotC's behavior now, not TSR's 40 years ago

I agree. What matters is what is done now, not what happened in the past.

Given the course of events over the past year and a half, I don't think it's much more relevant than things that happened three decades ago.

 

[KYRON45]

Not this old chestnut again.

 

[Mannahnin]

More interesting to me, and somewhat befuddling, is Riggs "End of the Golden Age of RPGs" thesis. I don't even think we've seen the end of the "Golden Age" for D&D, but TTRPGs as a whole are doing great.

Yeah, I seem to recall a lot of us pushing back on Riggs for his somewhat bizarre and IMO unsupported conflation of D&D World Dominance with The Golden Age of TTRPGs. If the games are still selling after detaching themselves from the OGL, that's potentially bad for WotC's market share, but not at all bad for TTRPGs!

Man.. I really liked Ben's book.. And I was really looking forward to a potential sequel. He kind of teased it at the end.

But everything I've read from the guy outside of the book as been a bit of a turn off.. Even if he's not wrong (In the case of the Gygax Sexism receipts), he's kind of just... Annoying.. Why does his con panel schedule read like one of those dumb tabloid magazines that just run sensational headlines:

I've gotten through one or two episodes of his podcast, but I'd definitely have done more, based on the subject matter, if the content was better.

 

[Parmandur]

you could argue that he already was CEO means he no longer needed this as a stepping stone, so it made letting go easier

I have worked under two types of executives: those with the emotional and intellectual ability to change their minds and reverse direction when presented with evidence, and those who do not have that capacity.

Now, for hobbyists it may seem gobsmacked that things got as far as they did...but I think Kyle Brink wqa giving a pretty honest report on what the internal perception was at the time.

Mistakes are made: how they are addressed matters most.

 

[TwoSix]

So that is in fact important, I would say. If this was a run-of-the-mill middle-management decision, like I said, I don't think it would be worth too much though (also it would probably never have got as far as it did). But when the CEO of Hasbro is coming up with terrible and quite granular ideas he is having WotC implement (seemingly with some resistance from WotC, but they couldn't stop it), that's pretty interestingly weird and worth noting and remembering, especially if we see any more bizarre nonsense coming down the line.

It's certainly worth noting that before he became CEO of Hasbro, he was President of WotC; he got his position as CEO because WotC had become the main growth driver of the entire company. The growth of M:tG and D&D during his tenure is a central component of his official company biography.

Getting rid of the OGL wasn't a lark, or done by a faceless corporate bean counter. This is a guy who was well acquainted with the framework of the TTRPG business and chose a path he thought would generate revenue, almost certainly knowing it would invite pushback. I just think the combination of massive online vitriol and (assumedly) pushback from the rank-and-file made them feel it necessary to do a sudden reversal.