D&D 5E Hope for an open GSL?

[Jawsh]

The whole "moral" thing is my fault, I'm pretty sure I was the first to bring up the concept of morality. I was trying to make a different point, and I feel that some people latched onto the word and built a straw man around it. However, I should have known the term was loaded.

 

[Jawsh]

One place I suppose you could look though to see what effect things like the Hypertext SRD had an effect would be on the releases of the Epic Level Handbook and the Unearthed Arcana (3e).

IIRC (and I may not be recalling things correctly), the Epic Level Handbook was released as closed content for quite some time before the rules text from it was converted and uploaded as Open Game Content, so I doubt you could get a good reading of the effect of the hypertext SRD on its sales.

As for Unearthed Arcana, it was declared to be Open Content in the book, but it was not immediately uploaded to Wizards' site, and therefore it was a while before it too appeared in online versions of the SRD.

I agree that both cases would be interesting to look at, but remember that most users with sufficient knowledge of computers, if they had really wanted to get the contents of both those books without paying, could have done so without the OGL or the hypertext SRD.

 

[harpy]

One business element is simply competition. 5e has to compete with PF, OSRIC, along with a host of other RPGs out there. The OGL has established a market environment where there is plenty of free rules. Stepping into that market with a one-to-one correspondence between purchased product and consumer it's a bit of an uphill battle.

Not only are they competing with currently produced material, but they are also competing with older material that is also free, and a culture that has developed with an expectation where some of the material is for free. If they show up with 5e and say, "we made some new stuff, but you need to pay for all of it if you want to play it" then plenty of gamers will just shrug their shoulders, say "whatevs" and go about using existing material, or gravitate to something that will give them plenty of free stuff to entice them into a product range.

If they want to win back people that left D&D behind in some fashion then they have to create an "accretion zone" which will draw gamers in. A big part of that is through peer connections. If you have one person who's intrigued by 5e then the best way to draw six other people along is for them to be able to just send a hyperlink to an online SRD to get the other players interested. Otherwise it's a lot of negotiating, people hemming and hawing over cost, etc.

I've seen this at work with Pathfinder. I've roped a lot of people into Pathfinder through the Pathfinder SRD website. Some of my friends complained about "I don't want to have to buy another million books!" and I'd say, "you don't have to, Paizo makes all of their rules material OGL and free" at which point they started to consider it and eventually got hooked and started buying stuff.

It can't be stressed enough that a 20 year old business model where people have to buy every product produced by an RPG publisher just doesn't work anymore. The market has changed and there is so much competition for dollars, not simply within the tabletop market, but from every other media format also.

There is also the broader tabletop market. If they want to hit their big revenue targets then the RPG market as a whole needs to grow. That means they need to make playing the game as accessible as possible. People can play RPGs, which requires a lot of time, energy and scheduling with others to make it work, or they could just get Skyrim, or Battlefield 3 or whatever new MMO is out and have hundreds of hours of play. Sure there are trade offs, it isn't tabletop, but there is plenty of media out there now that is compelling and doesn't require the kinds of hurdles that tabletop play has.

So you need to strip away barriers for people to enter the tabletop market or keep them there, or draw a D&D player back who has a zillion other RPG options to choose from.

In terms of profit they have to draw them in with free stuff and then hook them into a DI experience that can't be found anywhere else. They roll out a strong virtual tabletop, they produce apps for iOS and android that lets people use tablets and phones at the table in robust ways, they give people access to a wealth of art, sound files, map making programs, etc. Make a really strong and integrated digital package and that accretion effect will start to kick in and people will begin to glom onto the game. WotC has the deep pockets to do this stuff which other people in the tabletop industry can't pull off.

For me I find it harder to imagine how they could possibly hope to surpass 4e's revenue if they took a dinosaur approach to the market, expecting everyone to pay for all of their products. It doesn't instill enthusiasm or loyalty, just consumption, and eventually people will have full tummys and wander off.

 

[Hussar]

Setting aside the success of 3.XE and multiple essays by Ryan Dancey on the matter. I'm fine with us agreeing to disagree but you seem to be coming at this with misinformation, a lack of understanding of the terminology, and an unwillingness to acknowledge sources of information that exist and are available to anyone who wishes to search for them or simply read what others have posted in this very thread. I won't even go into what I think of your subversion of this discussion based on claims that someone has put forth some moral issue. You have to realize that at some point folks are not going to keep indulging you when you repeat the same questions and make the same claims when they have been competently answered and/or refuted over and over.

Nice.

Points that have been brought up and counter pointed are now absolute truth and cannot be questioned.

Essays by Ryan Dancey, hardly an unbiased viewer, must be taken as gospel.

A minor typo about the name of the license means that my points can safely be ignored.

Questions that are inconvenient are simply ignored and swept under the carpet.

Yeah, and you wonder why this issue never seems to make any headway? Oh, that's right, it's entirely me. I'm the one who is being utterly unreasonable here when, in dozens of pages of the thread, not one single, solitary example of how this benefits WOTC has been offered.

Yeah. I'm done here. Keep up the evangelizing. After all, it's not like you're not in a position to directly benefit from an open game are you MarkCMG? You're just interested in what's best for the game. The fact that a closed game means less money in your pocket has absolutely nothing to do with your point of view.

But, yes, I'm being totally unreasonable. I should simply line up with the rest, and ignore all the giant, glaring inconsistencies in the position that the OGL=Profit for WOTC. Because, after all, my questions have apparently been answered to your satisfaction.

 

[Mark CMG]

I'm the one who is being utterly unreasonable here (. . .)

Apology accepted. [/Colberrt]

 

[Nylanfs]

Just to make sure I haven't missed anything, nothing has officially been talked about for the license right?

 

[Mark CMG]

Just to make sure I haven't missed anything, nothing has officially been talked about for the license right?

Nothing other than it being discussed. I've started a thread on what OGC from 3PP that people might want to see in the new game here -

http://www.enworld.org/forum/new-horizons-upcoming-edition-d-d/317646-ogc-5e.html

 

[Kalontas]

From my point of view, it looks like this:

Step 1. Make 5e OGL
Step 2. _________
Step 3. PROFIT!!

I'd like to fill that missing step(s) for you.

1. Make 5E OGL.
2. Wizards immediately get approval of a bunch of people who disliked them on principle of GSL. Small amount of people, but still a good corporate image.
3. 3PP benefit off the OGL, raising in importancy and producing more books.
4. More 3PP books cause more people who didn't buy into D&D to actually get interested in it, by covering stuff Wizards could not or did not want to cover.
5. More people buy Wizards' official books.
6. PROFIT!

It might produce another Mutants & Masterminds on the way, but the creation of M&M was not the fault of OGL - it was the fault of the official producer slacking with covering certain market, thus a 3PP taking over that branch of the market. Blaming M&M on OGL only is like a fisherman who sold only halibuts blamed the fact that someone made fortune on cods on the fact that everybody can fish in the ocean. Use your opportunities, and you will succeed. If you're not going to use those particular opportunities, don't blame people for using them.

 

[Kynn]

I'd like to fill that missing step(s) for you.

1. Make 5E OGL.
2. Wizards immediately get approval of a bunch of people who disliked them on principle of GSL. Small amount of people, but still a good corporate image.
3. 3PP benefit off the OGL, raising in importancy and producing more books.
4. More 3PP books cause more people who didn't buy into D&D to actually get interested in it, by covering stuff Wizards could not or did not want to cover.
5. More people buy Wizards' official books.
6. PROFIT!

Your point #2, I don't necessarily see as bringing back much of anything to the company. People who are strongly invested in buying non-WotC D&D Next books are not necessarily a big audience or an audience which will buy a lot of D&D Next books.

Point #3, yes, more "books" produced -- but those 3PP books are being sold by non-WotC companies, and thus competing with official D&D Next products.

Your point #4 seems like wishful thinking rather than anything else, in that it also doesn't contribute to more sales for WotC, but rather fewer.

And your point #5 is unrelated to any of the previous statements. It's just, out of the blue, a restatement of #6.

There's possibly an argument to be made for OGL leading to "PROFIT!" but this wasn't it. All this was is an argument to be made for profits for 3PP, which wouldn't be persuasive to WotC.

What business mechanic do you see as making OGL a profit source, rather than a profit loser, for WotC?

 

[TheAuldGrump]

A quick comparison on the above - 3.X has OGL, sells very well.
4e has GSL, sales poor enough that WotC began talking internally about 5e in 2010....

So, yes, the OGL does make a difference.

The Auld Grump