NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnRTroy" data-source="post: 4317098" data-attributes="member: 2732">First of all, "harm" is relative.  It could be that WoTC have decided that letting people that an open system will eventually lead to attrition--maybe they are using long-term thinking.  If you have a strong brand, you enforce the brand.  I think the OGL lead to weakening of the brand, honestly, and I think this is Wizards attempt to correct it.  Ironically, Ryan was wrong about the fans of the game ending up rebelling and forcing D&D to remain the same--this radical rule change ended up with high sales.Part of D&D 4e success seems to be re-establishing the brand indentity.  D&D is D&D.  No "OGL", "d20", or other attributions.  As soon as Wizards announced 4e, sales of other d20 product fell.  You call that "putting the Genie back in the bottle"...but people seem very willing to replace their free Genie with the bottled Efreet.Your opinion which you say is "objective fact" has a few flaws.  I don't believe you can prove that people who play games like M&M and Spycraft are "kept in the D&D space".  Those games were rather different.  Also, the fact more people jumped on the d20 bandwagon lead to less competing games that were more different.  I see no empirical evidence the D&D game line was increased by the existence of d20 games.  Saying 4e's closed nature will lead to attrition doesn't make much sense.  If sales are higher on 4e, why would they go down because the game isn't open?  Apparently more people care about the regular D&D brand than the OGL games, so I think the more restrictive GSL, which by no means is a "closed game", will not affect things that much.  (And if 4e sales do go down, I believe it will be more because the game actually changed, rather than a lower number of third-party publishers).I mean I don't really like 4e, and I would like to see an OGL game get a lot of popularity--but that doesn't change that your logic seems a little flawed.I actually think the GSL has some advantages.  Making the "viral" part optional rather than mandatory is more appealing to publishers--let them have the control.  Using the D&D logo is a big plus.  And the fact that the GSL is more restrictive will force some publishers to work on more unique unlicensed products, which will help gaming overall and prevent a D&D monoculture.I'm not blind to the GSL being restrictive.  But I don't see how the use of it will hurt D&D in the long run or that it's a "bad" license.</blockquote>

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