Joshua Dyal said:
That's a bunch of baloney. And it's misdirection to boot -- we're talking about WotC, who isn't releasing open content, and why the average gamer should care about that. The correct answer: they don't. The issue that you falsely drag into it on misattributing OGC has nothing to do with whether or not an average gamer would prefer ToH to FF.
And guess what? The first guy who tries to pass off OGL recovery costs to the consumer simply loses customers. The market won't bear that kind of selective repricing: especially because of the OGL the average gamer (or even the discriminating gamer) has elastic demand. Don't like the repricing for some book due to OGL "fix" issues? Get someone else's book on the same topic. Retailers have even less power to reprice for these kinds of things: I don't like my retail price, I go to another retailer, or order from an online discount retailer. I've never ever heard of a distributor jacking up prices due to an issue like this.
Your theory is flawed, and to make things worse, you mess things up by mixing issues that are unrelated.
First, I wasn't addressing why people would like the ToH over the FF based on OGC - I didn't mention anything to that effect at any time. What I
was doing was addressing why gamers should
care about OGC, a tangent question that was asked in this thread. With regard to that tangent question, there is no flaw to my logic because it happens and is very real. There is, however, flaws in your logic.
For example, let's look at your solution to the issue of how costs having to be absorbed due to the destruction of non-compliancy. To quote you:
"Get someone else's book on the same topic." Well, what if the product doesn't have an equivalent? Say the next sourcebook for the Oathbound setting isn't compliant and has to be destroyed, where do I get my equivalent product? What about the upcoming setting book for Iron Kingdoms, how would I possibly get another Iron Kingdoms setting from someone else?
Also, your understanding of how retail works is flawed. First, if the publisher decides to recoup his cost in a price increase in his next published product, you won't know it because it will trickle down from him to the distributor to the retailer. If the distributor decides to recoup his losses it will trickle down to the retailer but won't affect the price he pays the publisher. If the retailer then decides to recoup the costs he had to pay his clerk, Bob, to come in an extra hour to repack all that falty product to ship it back to the distributor by upping the price on a Pokemon card from $50 to $60 dollars (or, say, raising the price on 10 pokemon cards by $1 each), you'd never know it, even if you were the guy who bought the card. Sure, you could shop around, but if he upped the price on a rare card that others weren't likely to be carrying, someone is still likely to buy that card and pay for his lost time.
You say it doesn't happen, well, I got news for you: it happens even when product isn't destroyed. Some FLGS, because they are so small and don't have a franchise to absorb losses, do things like this to make up for other losses, such as shoplifting.
You also miss the mark when you say
"The first guy who tries to pass off OGL recovery costs to the consumer simply loses customers." Guess what? You've already bought products for which this has happened. Whenever something goes wrong in the production phase of a product, such as, say, the proofs showing an error so serious as to call for corrections and another proof, that additional production cost is passed on to you. Whenever a layout is sent to the printer and the editor then notices something that he missed, such as forgetting to cite someone else's OGC or not properly crediting third-party OGC, that means that the current proof becomes useless and a new one has to be done. Again, that additional cost is passed on to you. You don't notice it, of course, because the publishers merely bump up the price on the back of the book by anywhere from a few cents to a buck or two, and when you purchase that product you assume you've got the originally intended cost. It happens all the time; one of the cardinal rules in publishing is to always make sure you've got more money for a project than you think you'll need because there are likely to be mistakes and mistakes cost money.
Just because you've never heard of such things happening doesn't mean they don't. It's not like retailers are exactly advertising where they have to jack up the prices to make up for uncompensated losses. That is, unless you are naive enough to believe that the retailer cares so much for its customers that it's willing to take a shot in the arm for you. Perhaps in a large franchise like Wallmart, but your average gaming store isn't exactly working with that kind of capital.
So, as should be obvious, whether or not a product is OGL compliant or not should be very important to the average gamer, even if he doesn't bother to learn, or even care, what in the product is OGC.
But now we'll look at your opinion that the OGC shouldn't influence the average gamer's choice between the FF and the ToM. Let's say that I write up a supermodule that uses a lot of the monsters that are seen in both the FF and ToM. I use the ToM monsters because they are OGC and the versions in the FF are not. Now, you, as a consumer, get word that this module is really cool and so you buy it. Throughout the module you see the stat capsules for all these monsters but want to see the fully fleshed out details - the stuff beyond the mere stats - so that you can fully understand how those monsters should be palyed.
Now, you've got yourself a copy of the FF and not the ToM because the FF was the better book, in your opinion. So now you are left with a book that has a monster that, while likely very similar, isn't identical to the one in the module. It is also possible to go so far as to say that the ToM version has an ability that the FF version doesn't, or maybe it's done differently. So now you, as an average gamer, have been directly affected by the OGC status of ToM, as well as the lack thereof in FF. Yet another reason why the average gamer should care about the OGL and OGC.
same goes for my abrian and bonespear (although my leomarh is still the "king" of the cats over at the CC). 
