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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9234128" data-attributes="member: 8461">I think that it's important to keep in mind that what Ben's talking about isn't so much the expected upswing in creativity regarding the development of non-D&D RPGs, but rather the financial viability of companies which do so.Between the loss of confidence in the OGL after what happened last year, and the perception that WotC isn't interested in making this year's revision of D&D available via an open license (and despite public confidence that the 5.1 SRD can be used, either through the OGL or CC, to create compatible materials with OneD&D, I'm less certain), a lot of publishers aren't going to want to put their chips down on D&D anymore. The result is a bunch of new RPGs with game engines that will range from 5E-esque to being wildly dissimilar.That's good for hobbyists looking to try something different, but it's hard to see that being good for those companies. While the largest ones will hopefully be able to cultivate enough of an audience to keep going for at least a little while, and the people making (usually PDF-only) products as a hobby rather than a business won't be too affected either (since it's not about the money for them), it's everyone else that I'm worried about.That's because there's a not-inconsiderable number of companies which will be in for some hard times, since their non-D&D projects simply don't seem likely to earn enough sales for them to maintain viability. The history of our hobby is littered with games which have come and gone, getting periodic reprints as they change hands but never turning into "the next big thing." You can find diehard fans of Earthdawn, Bunnies & Burrows, Skyrealms of Jorune, and numerous others online, but aside from the aforementioned reprints as companies shutter their doors and sell their IP rights to other companies, these games haven't kept their creators in profitability, which is necessary for them to keep those games "alive" (i.e. in print and making more for their systems/settings).It's nice that there's (probably) going to be a renaissance of non-D&D games coming down the pipeline in the next year or two. It's less nice for the publishers who'll spend more money creating those games than they'll earn selling them.</blockquote>

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