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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8678743"><p>Well it is a two way street, OBS is also in business because small publishers and medium publishers are willing to work with them. If a viable alternative came around that might not be the case. Also OBS didn't always dominate the market and you had small and medium size publishers, but they acquired things like RPGnow, they came to dominate the market more and more, and so many companies find themselves now in the position of having to be on OBS. The issue is if you have one company that powerful and important, it can be a good thing, they could be helping to maintain smaller companies as you point out, but they also can end up having an outsized influence on what kind of art is getting made in the industry. That is where people need to consider things like the impact it has on free expression. Something like Amazon or Walmart can offer a lot of convince, good prices, etc. Things that are good, but their dominance can also lead to bad things (like record companies censoring content because they have to in order to get on walmarts shelves, and int he case of amazon, weird things like bootlegs driving out legitimate copies of movies: something that I saw happen with a lot of marital arts films on that site). I'm not saying we should ignore the positives of OBS. But your point about marginal companies (which I think is not a fair way to frame it because really we are talking about both small and midsized RPG publishers), demonstrates what I am talking about: without being on OBS these companies can't survive. That gives OBS's decisions about things like content guidelines a massive impact on content in the industry as a whole. Even larger companies don't want the headache of not being on OBS, so you could even see it impacting larger RPG companies too.</p></blockquote><p></p>

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