Green Ronin not signing GSL (Forked Thread: Doing the GSL. Who?)

[Scribble]

I would bet that a lot of companies would sign a GSL that wasn't so one-sided and (frankly) potentially damaging to the company signing. It isn't WOtC that these companies are saying No to. It is the GSL as written.

It isn't in WoTC's best interest though to simply entice people to sign the GSL. They want people to support D&D.

If enough folks refused to buy into a non-OGL 4e, I'd bet beans that WotC would eventually say No to the GSL, too.

Probably. I doubt that will happen though.

In my own case? I like 4e. In my opinion it's fun, and it matches my play style. it doesn't matetr to me whether or not it' OGL or GSL or XYZ. I play lots of non-ogl games... well I used to, but I have less time now that I;m an old man with a job n stuff.

If other companies choose not to sign the GSL and choose not to support 4e, I bear tghem no ill will. I just pobably won';t buy products from them. Not because I'm mad or soemthing, but because right now my gaming dollars are going into 4e.

Thinking about this more, I am imagining that the reason WotC is so adamant about the product/line OGL thing is concern that portions of 4e will become OGC by this sort of admixture. And, if you wanted to kill off the OGL, I can see why this might be worrisome.

I agree. 4e is not OGL, and they don't want it to become OGL. I don't think there are any hidden motivations behind it though.

But I still believe that there has to be a more equitable GSL possible. Just like I think the Gleemax terms of usage are utterly craptacular.

Sure it's possible. Anything is. I doubt we'll see one. I get the feeling that the GSl was released as a "take it or leave it, but if you leave it, we don't care" thing.

I do, however, hope they manage to answer some of the questions out there though.

 

[Banshee16]

I didn't say a thing about this. I said the GSL is more restrictive, and as a result fewer companies are adopting it, and as a result of that there's less likely to be a glut of ill-conceived product.

And it will also mean that there will likely be less of a glut of well-conceived products....

Banshee

 

[The Little Raven]

And it will also mean that there will likely be less of a glut of well-conceived products....

...which is a good thing, because a glut (when a market is flooded, making supply exceed demand) is a bad thing.

 

[Banshee16]

Last 2 or 3 years, eh? I wonder how much of this is due too:
1) Aftershocks of the 3.5 transition.
2) Caution at buying new products amidst increasing rumors of 4e.

Among people I know (ie. my group of gamers) these were factors....

Many of my players were angry that 3.5 came out so soon after 3.0 and decided to boycott buying more products.

In more recent years, many of us curtailed buying products because of the rumours of 4E coming up. We thought that we might be moving on to the new edition, and putting more money into books would be foolish. Now, having seen 4E, I'm pretty confident I'm not changing, and many of my players have said the same thing. So we're enjoying all those big sales

Banshee

 

[dmccoy1693]

It does not include any of their other numerous d20 logo physical books, just as the pdf one does not apply to their other d20 logo pdfs and they do not say they are retiring anything besides the DCC OGL product line.

Unless they plan on removing all the d20 logos from all their other products, they're going to have to do the same to the rest.

 

[Turjan]

It isn't in WoTC's best interest though to simply entice people to sign the GSL. They want people to support D&D.

Honestly, I don't think that WoTC care one way or the other. The wording of the GSL is such as to discourage any company from steering to near to the production plans of core D&D itself and being able to kill any product off that does so. The only GSL product I know of so far illustrates this: the announced Mongoose book is pretty far removed from stuff you would expect to come from WotC, while at the same time working with the PHB.

Even if Charles Ryan repeated the story about the d20 glut that was bad for D&D and that the d20 companies didn't produce the right product to support D&D, I don't think this is true in the way he says this. Let's just look at the argument that the 3rd party companies didn't produce any adventures, as they were supposed to do. It's very easy to see that this argument doesn't hold any water. Even if we exclude the Dungeon magazine as official D&D product, we had at least two full lines of D&D aventures from Necromancer and Goodman Games at that time. The problem was not that nobody produced adventures, but that most WotC customers did not buy anything that didn't come from WotC at that point in the development.

Which means that the glut argument works somewhat indirectly. When WotC went back to publishing adventures themselves, the d20 market for direct D&D supplements had already mostly killed itself. At this point, only well-informed people bought quality 3rd party D&D supplements, and you cannot live on the dedicated internet crowd alone.

I can understand that some people at WotC think nowadays that any open gaming segment doesn't really contribute much to their bottom line, one way or the other. But, in the end, the GSL seems to indicate that WotC want to keep the major supplement train for themselves and leave only exotic topics to others.

 

[BryonD]

GR is doing one single 4e product. Their 4e character sheets. Put out under the OGL and not the GSL.

Heh, ok. You got me.
That makes things a small amount better for WotC.

NOW.... If GR were doing TWO products for 4E and M&M, that would make things a little more better for WotC than GR doing just one things and M&M.

 

[smetzger]

I have this sneaking suspicion that, although its the thing that random people on ENWorld complain about the most, the third party publishers aren't actually worried about the clause permitting WOTC to change the GSL. Most of them have probably seen that sort of clause before, or dealt with that sort of business scenario before. Its probably other stuff that bothers them.

Its in the d20 license. But that license gave you 30 days to comply. The GSL is an immediate revoke.

 

[Treebore]

Necro hasn't announced if they are or are not GSL compliant or not. Neither has Goodman. That's my basic point. They are "not announcing what they are doing." So from a strict, Go/No-Go standpoint of the License, we have confirmation of 1 being Go and 4 are either No-Go or unannounced.

Its been a month. There has been enough time for Mongoose to be apply and be approved. If Goodman and Necro were going to do so, they probably would have done so by now.

As for Goodman having a 50% sell off of the DCCs well, that could simply be a "trying to clear the warehouse before the clock runs out on the d20 license," or maybe trying to quickly generate additional revenue for large print runs.

Necromancer Games is going 4E, just Tome of Horrors will be 3.5E/Pathfinder if anything other than what it currently is.

 

[Dykstrav]

The worst glut, to me, was the Drow glut...

Thanks for giving me a reason to dig the GSL. I'm still basically neutral towards, it but I'm all in favor of something to keep umpteen-billion drow sourcebooks from coming out.