D&D historian Ben Riggs recently conducted an interview with Mike Mearls, who worked at Wizards of the Coast from 2005 to until he was laid off in 2023. Part of the interview touched on the OGL crisis back in 2022, with Mearls indicating that WotC was caught by surprise by the backlash when they revealed that they intended to rescind the Open Gaming License. They also talk about how WotC felt 'stabbed in the face' (Ben's words, not Mike's) when the draft OGL 2.0 was leaked by a partner who had been sent the document in confidence.
Ben Riggs: What was the atmosphere within the company during the whole OGL fiasco, like what was it like within the walls of Wizards?
Mike Mearls: Oh, people took it very, very seriously. You know, I don’t know if anyone at Wizards has ever publicly said anything or talked about it, but I think it was genuinely surprising to people.
And I’m going to be in the weird position of like, "Oh, this company laid me off, but I’m going to kind of defend them now." One of the things I do feel bad about is that people who got caught up in it—who aren’t Wizards—probably thought, hey, we’re doing exactly what the community would want us to do. We have some ideas for how we want to change it.
I am sure at this stage—remember, it’s 2020—the business is blowing up, there’s a lot of potential for licensing, and it’s going to be hard to negotiate a license with someone if they’re like, "oh, we don’t actually need to work with you. We can get everything you have by just going and using this Open Game License." And if you look back, you know, the things they were looking at were, "If you're making X dollars or more, you have to give us royalties," etc. That, to me, feels like those terms were coming from a place of, we don’t want, like, Lucasfilm showing up and doing a Star Wars D&D game and just selling a bajillion copies because they could have licensed it but just decided not to, because the system's free.
Now, there's a lot of reasons why I think they misread the situation, but I think the one thing people have to give a little maybe consideration is that they were sending out the license to people with this idea of getting feedback. Now, you could argue that no one took them seriously, thought, "No, this is just you sending this to me, and you're going to ignore my feedback." But that to me doesn’t make sense. Because if I was in that position of, like, "Hey, people are going to hate this so much, and I’m going to do it anyway", why would I show it to people early? Because then the story is just going to be, "Hey, this thing is so bad, we hate it. By the way, they showed it to us and ignored us." That makes it even worse.
Ben: I will say, though, that the sources I’ve had within Wizards seem sincere when they say, yeah, we sent it out for feedback, and then someone stabbed us in the face. Because again, from within Wizards, that is their point of view, right? You just sent this thing out for feedback, and now it’s all over the internet, and everyone is angry. One of the people that you trusted to look at this and negotiate with you has stabbed you in the face. Again, I can understand that point of view.
Mike: But I will say, though, there is something to be said for the one thing they didn’t quite account for. Because this would have been 2022 when they were sending this stuff out. Had they announced the new edition yet? I think 5.5 had been announced.
Ben: Yeah, they announced it—I want to say around August—and then in December, they sent out OGL--I think it's 1.0a--for feedback. And then, within a week of the new year, Lin Codega was writing articles about it.
Mike: And I think that was their miscalculation. You know, a lot of people like me, who worked on 4th Edition, you may have heard this being talked about, hey why did 4th Edition have so much trouble where it ultimately almost wrecked the business? It just tried to change too much at once. It was a new world, a new game mechanic. Forgotten Realms got radically changed. The novel line was really pared down. Digital tools, right? There was just so much change. It’s like, How am I supposed to make this journey from where I was to where I am to where we’re going? And I think that was their big miscalculation was, I think it’s almost the same root cause maybe—like, "Oh, we don’t really understand how people will look at this". So, we're gonna show it to them, but not knowing people are going to be very on edge about this, very like "no, this is a direct threat" even though you're trying to be as nice as possible.
To put it in context, that maybe Wizards didn’t see, they had just announced a new edition. So people were immediately going back to 4th Edition and the GSL. And they're immediately going back to that space of "You are trying to do a new version of D&D that can cut us out." So this didn’t feel like "Hey, can you give us feedback?" It felt more like, "This is the deal. Take it or not."
Ben: For the audience that doesn’t know—what was the GSL?
Mike: So, the GSL was—so we had the OGL for 3rd Edition, but the company did not want to do the OGL for 4th Edition. And again, this is another example of "of all the paths, this was the worst." And I think businesses do this all the time, and it drives me bananas. They didn’t want to do the OGL for 4th Edition for reasons, right? It’s competition, blah blah blah. But rather than just saying, "Hey, there’s no gaming license", which I think would have been a much better approach—people would have been upset, but they'd have said "OK, I'm upset but that's it"—they had the GSL. And the GSL was basically like—imagine if you took the OGL and said, "What are all the things we could put in this to make it so that no one would ever use it because it’s so obviously a bad deal?" And then, like, double that. That was the GSL. It was so obviously like "No, why would anyone do this? This feels like you're actively stabbing us in the face."
So, I think it had a similar thing—like, oh, they clearly didn't want any competition for their products, so they didn't actually want anyone to make stuff for it. So they offered such a horrible deal that no one would take them up on it. And I think very few people did. You had to register your company with Wizards. They could revoke it at any time. You had to send in all your... it was just super fiddly. It would have been much cleaner to just say, "No, there’s no OGL." And this is the kind of thing where you need to be in touch with your audience to know like "we’re doing this, people are going to be really upset that we don't have the OGL, but we don't want to do the OGL." So, as soon as you’re having that conversation, you need to step back and "Why are we getting rid of the OGL again?" or whatever the decision is. If we’re gonna jump through all these hoops to make it look like we’re not doing the thing we’re doing—like just do the thing or just don’t do the thing. That’s actually an even better answer: Just don’t.
Ben: Yeah.
Mike: So yeah the long and short of it is I feel bad for people who got stuck in that situation. Because I just think they didn’t have the right context to understand the reaction. And it’s the worst outcome. Like, you think you’re being reasonable, so then when people react, you think maybe, "Are they being unreasonable? Are the children wrong?" And this is a case where—no, the children were not wrong. And to Wizards' credit, they released the game under [Creative Commons], which is like OK, now they have no control over it. And then 5.5 came out and sort of changed things, I think you could just make stuff for it using the current 5E thing, so it makes the decision to crack down even more like, OK I don't know why, I think it was purely from a licensing standpoint. I think if you just look at it from that point it makes total sense.
Ben: The story I’ve heard is that there was a French video game called Solasta: Crown of the Magister—or I might even be saying it wrong—that was a real turning point for Chris Cocks. Because, for those of you who don’t know, and I didn't know unti I was told about it, it was a French video game that used 5th Edition as its engine. And it was D&D. And the press was all like, "This is the best D&D video game ever made!" And it's not D&D.
Mike Mearls: Oh, people took it very, very seriously. You know, I don’t know if anyone at Wizards has ever publicly said anything or talked about it, but I think it was genuinely surprising to people.
And I’m going to be in the weird position of like, "Oh, this company laid me off, but I’m going to kind of defend them now." One of the things I do feel bad about is that people who got caught up in it—who aren’t Wizards—probably thought, hey, we’re doing exactly what the community would want us to do. We have some ideas for how we want to change it.
I am sure at this stage—remember, it’s 2020—the business is blowing up, there’s a lot of potential for licensing, and it’s going to be hard to negotiate a license with someone if they’re like, "oh, we don’t actually need to work with you. We can get everything you have by just going and using this Open Game License." And if you look back, you know, the things they were looking at were, "If you're making X dollars or more, you have to give us royalties," etc. That, to me, feels like those terms were coming from a place of, we don’t want, like, Lucasfilm showing up and doing a Star Wars D&D game and just selling a bajillion copies because they could have licensed it but just decided not to, because the system's free.
Now, there's a lot of reasons why I think they misread the situation, but I think the one thing people have to give a little maybe consideration is that they were sending out the license to people with this idea of getting feedback. Now, you could argue that no one took them seriously, thought, "No, this is just you sending this to me, and you're going to ignore my feedback." But that to me doesn’t make sense. Because if I was in that position of, like, "Hey, people are going to hate this so much, and I’m going to do it anyway", why would I show it to people early? Because then the story is just going to be, "Hey, this thing is so bad, we hate it. By the way, they showed it to us and ignored us." That makes it even worse.
Ben: I will say, though, that the sources I’ve had within Wizards seem sincere when they say, yeah, we sent it out for feedback, and then someone stabbed us in the face. Because again, from within Wizards, that is their point of view, right? You just sent this thing out for feedback, and now it’s all over the internet, and everyone is angry. One of the people that you trusted to look at this and negotiate with you has stabbed you in the face. Again, I can understand that point of view.
Mike: But I will say, though, there is something to be said for the one thing they didn’t quite account for. Because this would have been 2022 when they were sending this stuff out. Had they announced the new edition yet? I think 5.5 had been announced.
Ben: Yeah, they announced it—I want to say around August—and then in December, they sent out OGL--I think it's 1.0a--for feedback. And then, within a week of the new year, Lin Codega was writing articles about it.
Mike: And I think that was their miscalculation. You know, a lot of people like me, who worked on 4th Edition, you may have heard this being talked about, hey why did 4th Edition have so much trouble where it ultimately almost wrecked the business? It just tried to change too much at once. It was a new world, a new game mechanic. Forgotten Realms got radically changed. The novel line was really pared down. Digital tools, right? There was just so much change. It’s like, How am I supposed to make this journey from where I was to where I am to where we’re going? And I think that was their big miscalculation was, I think it’s almost the same root cause maybe—like, "Oh, we don’t really understand how people will look at this". So, we're gonna show it to them, but not knowing people are going to be very on edge about this, very like "no, this is a direct threat" even though you're trying to be as nice as possible.
To put it in context, that maybe Wizards didn’t see, they had just announced a new edition. So people were immediately going back to 4th Edition and the GSL. And they're immediately going back to that space of "You are trying to do a new version of D&D that can cut us out." So this didn’t feel like "Hey, can you give us feedback?" It felt more like, "This is the deal. Take it or not."
Ben: For the audience that doesn’t know—what was the GSL?
Mike: So, the GSL was—so we had the OGL for 3rd Edition, but the company did not want to do the OGL for 4th Edition. And again, this is another example of "of all the paths, this was the worst." And I think businesses do this all the time, and it drives me bananas. They didn’t want to do the OGL for 4th Edition for reasons, right? It’s competition, blah blah blah. But rather than just saying, "Hey, there’s no gaming license", which I think would have been a much better approach—people would have been upset, but they'd have said "OK, I'm upset but that's it"—they had the GSL. And the GSL was basically like—imagine if you took the OGL and said, "What are all the things we could put in this to make it so that no one would ever use it because it’s so obviously a bad deal?" And then, like, double that. That was the GSL. It was so obviously like "No, why would anyone do this? This feels like you're actively stabbing us in the face."
So, I think it had a similar thing—like, oh, they clearly didn't want any competition for their products, so they didn't actually want anyone to make stuff for it. So they offered such a horrible deal that no one would take them up on it. And I think very few people did. You had to register your company with Wizards. They could revoke it at any time. You had to send in all your... it was just super fiddly. It would have been much cleaner to just say, "No, there’s no OGL." And this is the kind of thing where you need to be in touch with your audience to know like "we’re doing this, people are going to be really upset that we don't have the OGL, but we don't want to do the OGL." So, as soon as you’re having that conversation, you need to step back and "Why are we getting rid of the OGL again?" or whatever the decision is. If we’re gonna jump through all these hoops to make it look like we’re not doing the thing we’re doing—like just do the thing or just don’t do the thing. That’s actually an even better answer: Just don’t.
Ben: Yeah.
Mike: So yeah the long and short of it is I feel bad for people who got stuck in that situation. Because I just think they didn’t have the right context to understand the reaction. And it’s the worst outcome. Like, you think you’re being reasonable, so then when people react, you think maybe, "Are they being unreasonable? Are the children wrong?" And this is a case where—no, the children were not wrong. And to Wizards' credit, they released the game under [Creative Commons], which is like OK, now they have no control over it. And then 5.5 came out and sort of changed things, I think you could just make stuff for it using the current 5E thing, so it makes the decision to crack down even more like, OK I don't know why, I think it was purely from a licensing standpoint. I think if you just look at it from that point it makes total sense.
Ben: The story I’ve heard is that there was a French video game called Solasta: Crown of the Magister—or I might even be saying it wrong—that was a real turning point for Chris Cocks. Because, for those of you who don’t know, and I didn't know unti I was told about it, it was a French video game that used 5th Edition as its engine. And it was D&D. And the press was all like, "This is the best D&D video game ever made!" And it's not D&D.
