Ginny Di interviews WotC's Kyle Brink

Continuing the D&D executive producer's interview tour, gaming influencer Ginny Di asks a WotC's Kyle Brink about the OGL and other things.

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[ctorus]

Anyone who believes WotC's concern was genuinely about 'toxic OGL content', now or in the future, there's several bridges I'd like to interest you in.

 

[Myrdin Potter]

D&D is tiny? When WOTC is literally half of Hasbro profit I don’t think D&D is tiny.

The profit and revenue mainly comes from MtG. Top end estimate is that D&D made $150M of more than $1B of revenue and that is very recent.

WoTC (and Hasbro) has been carried along by MyG for a while. D&D only recently started getting mentioned in earnings calls.

 

[mamba]

They may have the big name, but they want to assure complete dominance, and that is absolutely not assured given their monetization plans.

Rather, nuking the VTT market so that people don't have other places to go for their product makes their release far safer, especially if (like most big tech projects) they run into technical hurdles initially. This way people have to use their system because there simply aren't other options.

they can do that without nuking the OGL too. Do not license 1DD to the existing VTTs and let the 5e licenses expire, done.

Without the subclasses (not in the SRD) and official adventures, the other VTTs are effectively removed from the D&D market.

They do not use the SRD today, so changes to the OGL for this are not helpful / needed.

 

[Iosue]

they can do that without nuking the OGL too. Do not license 1DD to the existing VTTs and let the 5e licenses expire, done.

Without the subclasses (not in the SRD) and official adventures, the other VTTs are effectively removed from the D&D market.

They do not use the SRD today, so changes to the OGL for this are not helpful / needed.

This is a very good point, and IMO somewhat lends credence to the idea that they were worried more about implementations in future technology than specifically trying to cripple the current major VTTs. (With the caveat that there were almost certainly people within WotC that would have been happy with the effect a new OGL and VTT policy would have on those as well.)

I tend to think for people to miss the forest for Brink’s extemporaneous example trees. I doubt internal discussion at WotC revolved around such concrete examples. Rather, they more likely revolved around the economic and technological changes in the 23 years since the OGL came out, and what the future might hold. Advances in VR and AI, ubiquitousness of smartphones, emergence of monopolistic mega-conglomerates, the huge increase in the D&D market, and its increased value as a brand beyond the RPG itself.

I used to think that this whole thing was a strategic plan to conquer the VTT market that led to corporate overreach. Now I’m thinking that this was a corporation getting scared about having so much of their mechanical IP out there and open in a world much different from 2000, and a bunch of different stakeholders in the company went down their own particular rabbit holes, with no one realizing how the big picture looked.

 

[bedir than]

Kyle is not really from the publishing industry and D&D is tiny in Hasbro. So I have doubts that they have publishing centric lawyers and that he knows what is “usual”.

I marked that down as a probable lie.

Cannot be proven, of course. But rings false.

Brinks has over 25 years in the games publishing industry. As you continually beat on him for lying you aren't doing basic fact checking of yourself.

He must likely does know the way publishing works, in video games, which may be different than books, but that doesn't make one a liar

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Anyone who believes WotC's concern was genuinely about 'toxic OGL content', now or in the future, there's several bridges I'd like to interest you in.

Hmmh...I recently bought the Eiffel Tower... so...

I genuinely have a problem with the idea that it is just corporate greed. I guess there were a whole lot of reasons why some people at WotC thought it might be a good idea. The core was certainly to protect their recent and future investment...
... and then they did everything wrong.

 

[Umbran]

Anyone who believes WotC's concern was genuinely about 'toxic OGL content', now or in the future, there's several bridges I'd like to interest you in.

Mod Note:

Folks,

It is time for you all to remember that you are speaking with real people, and that suggesting they are stupid (or have other personal flaws) for not agreeing with you makes you the bad guy.

Don't be the bad guy.

 

[Umbran]

Sure, but should we really believe that?

Please demonstrate to me where WotC was acting with such intelligence that this is an implausible scenario.

The idea of Meta suddenly making a D&D VTT clone when they can barely make office call software comes off more as a deflection against a company nobody likes

For one thing, WotC hasn't exactly demonstrated that they really understand technology.

For another thing, there's no reason to think that this was about fear of sudden changes.

 

[Velderan]

Minor gripe with the video format: the editing at some points made it hard to tell if Kyle's answer was actually in response to her question. I'm not accusing her of anything, but an example of it was when she asked what they're doing to rebuild trust with the community and his response where he went on about creating content standards for their own material felt like he was answering a different question due to how the video was edited. Again, not accusing her of anything. It just seemed awkward to watch.

A couple things from this video:
- Kyle is clearly sticking to the Meta boogeyman for why they felt they needed to change things, but at best it just continues to make WotC look more and more out of touch with the community if they can't understand a $50k income reporting requirement with $750k was going way overboard in preventing potential rivals with deep pockets from coming in. At worst, it makes Kyle look like a liar since he keeps insisting it was about future abuse while their own post in December clearly stated it would impact around 20 current publishers. If your stated goal of preventing Meta from coming in was your actual goal, it should have affected 0 current publishers and it wouldn't have been too hard to work with the other publishers to craft language to prevent this boogeyman from coming in. Paizo, Kobold Press, and EN Publishing all have a similar interest in preventing a bigger company coming in and taking their market away, I'm sure they'd be open to working on a way to keep the playing field level that benefits everyone.

- I feel like a lot of people on both sides of the argument need to watch this video from 21:15 on. 100% spot on accurate assessment of the situation IMO. They're a company folks, they're not good or evil. They're motivated by profits like most businesses. Every single choice is made to increase those profits.

 

[Myrdin Potter]

Brinks has over 25 years in the games publishing industry. As you continually beat on him for lying you aren't doing basic fact checking of yourself.

He must likely does know the way publishing works, in video games, which may be different than books, but that doesn't make one a liar

Computer game publishing is not D&D. D&D is book publishing. All of the 3rd party companies they were talking to are also book publishers.

There are some similarities between the two, but sometimes I think that is where WoTC is tripping up because they have recently hired a bunch of computer game people into senior positions.

I don’t see the two publishing as the same, but I do see your point as well. It does make me less sure of my stronger conclusion there.