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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rasyr" data-source="post: 2634879" data-attributes="member: 2855">I think that it is important to note here that one of the principle reasons given for the OGL was that doing adventures just did not make adequate returns for the investments. It is also important to note that the printing costs per book for adventures, for large companies such as WotC is actually often less than it is for smaller publishers. This is because WotC can have many more copies printed at a time, and thus get bulk discounts that smaller publishers cannot.No real surprise here. Publishing adventures gives less returns overall than other types of source books.Actually, IMO, the glut of 3.0 products on the market at the time caused a downswing, which led to 3.5 (2 years earlier than originally planned), which led to another downswing (at least for the remainder of the year in which it was released). The problem here is two-fold (or maybe three-fold). First off, I think that many companies are fighting being turned into consumers as opposed to creators. They are already paying authors to write products, they don't want to support their competitors by purchasing their products just to be able to complete their own.Secondly, without a central repository for the developers/authors, there are no "incremental improvements". Notice that the only time that the SRD has been updated is when WotC released 3.5 and/or when they released information from other core products (notice that there are a LOT of WotC products that are not under the OGL, or had portions of their content released under the OGL). There is also no way for anybody else to update or add to the SRD. Without that ability, there is no way for "incremental improvements" to become "official". To add to this, many times several different companies would actually be doing paralell development on similar products. Finally, and this ties into the part about the central repository, open source is about shared development, and freely allowing changes/modifications to the users. In the computer industry, companies based upon open source make their profits through services surrounding the product, not the actual product itself. This is impossible to do within a publishing business model, and thus is a major issue of attempting any sort of comparison of a GPL business model with an OGL business model. I did a post not too long ago where I stated that I thought that the OGL had failed in a number of respects (not all, but at least some). The lack of adventures (one of the reasons given for the implementation of the OGL) was one. Well, it wasn't actually a failure of the OGL, just a failure of the reasoning of folks who seriously believed that any company using the OGL was going to concentrate on products that WotC didn't want to do themselves (yes, there are a few exceptions). A second big failure of the OGL was what I mentioned above about the lack of central repository.Umm.. you mean like Iron Heroes, the competing system that you wrote?First printing of 3.0 included a small section at the back that some monsters and stuff. The second printing reprinted a bunch of Q&A from Sage Advice.I believe that he was refering to the effect that 3.5 had upon the third party market. In short, it ended up hurting and outright killing a number of companies. To many players just stopped buying 3.0 products after 3.5 came out, and there was too much 3.0 material still left in the distribution channels.</blockquote>

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