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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Super Pony" data-source="post: 5520130" data-attributes="member: 6669292">Hasbro will hang on to the license until doomsday comes and trumpets sound. They have remained a competitive toy corporation for decades and part of that is how they cycle their toy production instead of riding licenses completely into the ground and then selling them off to avoid financial woes (RIP TSR). Simply apply that logic to D&D, which to Hasbro is another game/toy/resource. They took Transformers & GI Joe off the market when sales slumped (because my generation got older, people lost interest and only the collectors really remained). Then years later when people were feeling nostalgic and having new little kids...shocker...Hasbro re-released everything Transformer and GI Joe. During the years these brands were off the market they made money off the licenses through clothing, and other subtle items that were designed to just keep the name circulating around until the market was ripe for a reinvention of figurines of Destro and Optimus Prime. They'll do the same thing to D&D which will be interesting to see how it affects folks like Paizo, and the RPG industry in general if there is a "Dark Age" so to speak. In that time we'll still see "official" D&D stuff but it will be more typical of what the parent toy company is good at. Namely board games, figurines and other brickabrack that they will slap a D&D logo on.  Leasing rights for comics, videogames, tv/movies etc would make a lot of sense as well. As far as letting someone else publish D&D as an RPG (either through selling the license or leasing it)? I wouldn't hold your breath on that one simply because it is in their best interest to see D&D-like fantasy rpg's flounder and fade away after they cease production of D&D to a future point where a rerelease of the game as a table top RPG (with no new GSL or OGL) would be snapped up by nostalgic fans (or even their kids/grandkids). The next time you'll see D&D up for grabs for anyone but Hasbro or their subsidiaries is when someone buys Hasbro or if the corp simply goes supernova and vomits licenses all over the place...and Donald Trump (who is a golden robot with a human brain and a bad come-over at this point) buys D&D... Corporate politics and strategy rarely consider sentiment and the intrinsic worth of things as precious as table top rpgs and story telling in general. PS...I am terribly sorry if anything I have written seems like baiting for an edition war or comes off as slanderous towards anyone's hobby. Certainly wasn't the intent. I just have spent a lot of time pondering the future of RPG's in my moon base.</blockquote>

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