Gygax's views on OGL

[tarchon]

High quality does NOT denote high resource expenditure, it denotes efficient results! I dont think your argument is true. Look at my example of autos earlier. Detroit abandoned the "low end", got squeezed into the medium/high end (trucks/suvs) and is presently in the process of losing that too. Toyota is the leader in both the high end (lexus) and in the low end (high volume). They have a superior SYSTEM of allocating resources. Striking closer to home, within the publishing industry there are vast differences in efficiency and financial performance among the various publicly held companies (I analyze companies for a living).

It's nice that you do that, but I prefer to judge your argument by its merit.
Efficiency is a measurement of how much of a resource is required to produce a desired result. It has no direct bearing on quality without some notion of resource expenditure. You can produce a great product with low efficiency and huge expenditure, or you can produce a crappy product with high efficiency and hardly any expenditure.

The higher the quality in a product, the more resources it requires to produce. It takes more time from more highly skilled editors, more highly skilled writers, more highly skilled artists, more highly skilled designers, even more expensive components (better paper, better processes), all of which are resources - they cost more money than would devoting smaller amounts of time and lower-skill workers to the project. In fact, competitive market forces compel higher quality to require more resources, since by nature any clear product improvement that requires no additional investment and the same or less expenditure of resources is adopted by any rational producer. Econ 101.

I agree that a more efficient company has an advantage in producing higher quality goods, since it requires less resources to produce the same quality of goods as a less efficient copmany, but we have no evidence that WotC is by nature more or less efficient than TSR or anyone else. Given equal or at least comparable efficiences, which is probably the case with the high degree of employee migration and the general openness of the RPG industry, my argument holds. And I might add that I've seen it echoed by many people in the RPG industry as well, along with most basic texts on economics. Quality costs money. Efficiency is only a measure of how much a given level of quality costs.

History correction: tsr went down in flames without gygax, it was extremely profitable relative to capital employed during his reign. wotc HAS done pretty well but they are now buried in a conglomerate that is not known for its financial savvy (pull up any set of annual reports for mattel and hasbro and they have amazing record of bungling fairly decent slow growing businesses over the past six or seven years).

Thank you for "correcting" a statement I never made and making another "correction" that mostly repeats what I said about WotC. I stand quasi-corrected, if you want look at it like that.

 

[Allensh]

The weird thing is that the original name, Dangerous Dimensions, was the one TSR had a problem with. TSR dropped the suit when they changed the name to Dangerous Journies, but GDW still canned it.

Incorrect. TSR continued to pursue the lawsuit after the name change, using the infamous "points of similarity" argument, including that Dangerous Journeys used polyhedral dice...I remember all this well because I was on the Traveller Mailing List when GDW went down and the lawsuit was part of what did it.

Allen

 

[marketingman]

Thank you for proving your utter ignorance of intellectual property law. If they had wanted legal protection for their "idea", they should have patented. Since they didn't have enough sense to patent, they had no legal leg to stand on.

Actually they had copyrights back in that time also. I may be ignorant of intellectual property law but not copyright and trademarks. At that time 1969 to 1988 they had only Copy righted law anfd did file copyright for all of thier properties.

After all TSR owned the Rights to the Nazi for when it had the Indiana Jones Game. And had more lawyers then Game designers.

I shall return to my ignorance now and you can go back to your trailer park.

 

[marketingman]

Also as a little side note the KKK was incorpated in Illinois in 1955 by a Jewish lawyer to keep that originazation from getting legal protection under the law and could not advertise in any form without his concent.

Also Micheal Jorden had to sue in court to get his name back from a defuct restuarant he sold it too.

I shall return to my ignorance now.

 

[trollwad]

Efficiency...has no direct bearing on quality without some notion of resource expenditure.

The higher the quality in a product, the more resources it requires to produce. It takes more time from more highly skilled editors, more highly skilled writers, more highly skilled artists, more highly skilled designers, even more expensive components (better paper, better processes), all of which are resources - they cost more money than would devoting smaller amounts of time and lower-skill workers to the project. In fact, competitive market forces compel higher quality to require more resources, since by nature any clear product improvement that requires no additional investment and the same or less expenditure of resources is adopted by any rational producer. Econ 101.

...we have no evidence that WotC is by nature more or less efficient than TSR or anyone else. Given equal or at least comparable efficiences, which is probably the case with the high degree of employee migration and the general openness of the RPG industry, my argument holds. And I might add that I've seen it echoed by many people in the RPG industry as well, along with most basic texts on economics. Quality costs money. Efficiency is only a measure of how much a given level of quality costs.

I disagree. (I guess you should have gone further than econ 101). Toyota's Lexus simultaneously has the lowest cost, highest quality (car and customer service) and the highest efficiency in terms of man hours to produce among luxury cars. Toyota also has some of the highest profit margins per lexus (recent bizweek and fortune). Even in the people-intensive publishing world, high quality often goes with low cost/high efficiency (look at the relative capital and labor efficiency differentials between the various newspapers). As I pointed out in other posts -- the 'efficiency' (profits per unit of capital/time required) of return to tomb of horrors or probably tsr's licensing deal to the guys who made the ToEE videogame appears to be huge (good volume plus reasonable outlay because you are building off a prior body of work rather than recreating the wheel).

Actually, we have a lot of anecdotal evidence that WOTC has at least some bloat relative to the revenue generation capability of current inhouse creative staff. The mere fact that module production for them isnt profitable is some evidence of such. In addition, many people on Enworld have identified Sean Reynolds, Monte Cook and Gygax as some of the best module creators. All no longer work for WOTC. Together, the three of those, with apparently skeleton crew help, have/are producing damn near as much product as WOTC over the past couple of years (take a look at Monte's website for the sheer volume of what he is involved in, its pretty crazy and in my opinion pretty creative; meanwhile gygax has at least four major projects in the hopper right now before his stroke). Now go to the WOTC website and your 3.5 books and simply add up the names of all of the people who are listed and appear to be creative or managerial employees of the company. Now, pick your favorite prolific OGL producer (Troll Lords?, Necromancer?, Green Ronin?) and look at their website and forums. I've done this for Troll Lords and they seem to produce a good bit of hi quality product IMHO with about three or four major guys and a few minions. Look at Steve Jackson games for another apparent small, lean high efficiency (capital/effort) outfit. A fairly small and fairly mature industry with volatile cash flows (like RPGs) should be run as leanly as possible because growth is unlikely to bail you out.

My tentative contentions (they are tentative because Im not a WOTC insider) are (1) the OGL contributes to an exodus of talented creative types from WOTC because a guy like Monte can simply take his WOTC-honed skills and go and use them for his own benefit on a royalty-free basis -- thus pick your best three creative types (maybe Monte Cook?, Sean Reynolds?, Gygax?) and count out how many do not work for WOTC; (2) WOTC's biz model seems to be to avoid low margin but steady cash flow products like modules which are not profitable for the company due to WOTC's overhead whereas they are modestly profitable for apparently leaner Troll Lords, Malhavoc etc; as a consequence, wont WOTC be pressured to juice revenues by coming up with version 4.0 of the core rule books (prematurely) unless Eberron is a big hit? Actually, even Eberron is interesting because WOTC evidently didnt have enough internal creativity to come up with a new setting, so they picked up steve baker from the outside. Wouldnt it be better for WOTC to try a lower cost means of releasing modules (pdfs, to get around printing costs? with verisign certification and approval to prevent illegal copying) to have a steady source of cash flow rather than abandon the fray alltogether?

Thus the analogy to Toyota, which tried to figure out more efficient ways to produce low end product rather than abandon the market altogether like detroit did as competition intensified.

 

[marketingman]

Good Points Trollwad,

But WotC is Hasbro which has had an 11% increase in profit over 20o2 at 3.139 billion in revenue ranked 510 in Fortune magazine the stock is also well entrench with institional accounts. The OGL allow them to have a thinner R&D.

Actually they can just buy anyone that they feel is an up and comer while allowing others to leave as they wish to start thier own endvores not diluting company profits in support of system that are not profitable.

even if Eberon is a total failure WotC lights will still be on payroll will still be meet and it will be support for at least a cyle while they develop more product. Monte he takes a bigger risk but trusts in his ability to pick his ponies.

Something simaler happened in 1960 when the gang of eight rebelled against the owner of the patented of the semiconducter, All of them wer engineers who had the patent owner. The gang of eight became Intel. What inside. Kind of ironic.

Ok back to my ignorance.

 

[Henry]

In the perfect world inside MY head, Peter and Ryan again run WotC and 3E, and Gary (or his hand-picked successor) are returned full rights to the original D&D and AD&D game systems, to do with as they see fit.

 

[marketingman]

In the perfect world inside MY head, Peter and Ryan again run WotC and 3E, and Gary (or his hand-picked successor) are returned full rights to the original D&D and AD&D game systems, to do with as they see fit.

Leave it to the mod to find the best of all world, Bravo Henry Bravo.

 

[dead]

Ok back to my ignorance.

I think your points are very enlightening.

On to other things . . .

No, I wouldn't give Gary D&D back. I've played AD&D since 1E but I like the way it has evolved into 3E. I'm not sure if Gary would have taken it this direction. Who knows? Maybe he could have done as good a job as the 3E team? I have no idea about his new endeavor, Lejundary Adventure. I should really give it a look one of these days. I hope it's doing well. I can say, however, that I wasn't a fan of Dangerous Journeys. Perhaps one can't give fair judgement of DJ, however, because it was never fully realised.

One thing I would give Gary back, however, is Greyhawk! I'm not sure if he'd be very interested in picking it up, though. But I've always been intrigued to know what Greyhawk would have turned out like if Gary had kept on contributing to it. I especially would have liked to have seen a Greyhawk City supplement by him.

 

[Maggan]

Did I miss again?

note: this is not an argument against sean and monte. they are not violating any duties in leaving to capture their own creative revenue streams when the OGL is free. this is an argument about the economics of the OGL from the perspective of WOTC.

It seems you missed the link to this discussion:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=118888&perpage=30&pagenumber=1

It concerns the economics of the OGL from the perspective of WotC, and Ryan Dancey contirbutes to it.

Some points from the discussion:

The real important number to keep in your head is 1.5 million. That's the number of people (conservatively) who play D&D every single month in the US. That is the real target of the D&D business at WotC. When you hear about OGL/D20 publishers selling a few thousand units of their books, remember that they're only managing to sell a few thousand to a potential audience of one and a half million active players.

WotC knows those players are out there. It also knows that the way to convert those players to purchasers is to figure out how to maximize the total value of each book they offer those players for sale. And it knows that a very, very large part of the value of an RPG book is external to the book itself - the value is in the player network.

Making the player network bigger, stronger, more interconnected, etc. adds value to the Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook. The more value added, the more likely one of those players-but-not-consumers will switch over and buy the book. The same equation holds for each book WotC releases - the more value added, the more likely the purchase.

The OGL/D20 project adds tremendous value to being a D20 player. That value means that D&D is increasingly worth more and more and more to the players. And those players drive sales of WotC RPG products at levels 10 or 20 times the size of its competition.

I recommend reading the whole discussion. I found it very interesting.

Cheers!

Maggan