NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5790401" data-attributes="member: 22779">How?This is the question I keep asking and no one seems to be able to answer it.  How can you have a d20 OGL, and a DDI at the same time?  What's to stop someone from producing a character builder and a Hypertext SRD?  We already see this happening.  This isn't idle speculation, it's historical fact.Within months of the release of 4e, we had a site offering an online character builder with the functionality of the DDI character builder.  Within months of 3.5 being released, we had a fully functional d20 Hypertext SRD.  Again, this isn't something I'm pulling out of my vas deferens here, this happened.So, if they went OGL with 4e, what would have happened to the DDI?  We'd have more subscriptions because there are free versions available?  Really?  Because that's the argument you're making right now.  If 4e had been OGL, somehow, despite free versions being produced within months of release, we'd have twice as many subscriptions?Excuse me for being a teensy bit skeptical here.  We never had OGL online tools because no one could make any bloody money out of it.  Heck, the pay tools that we did have were minor, and the company that produced them, despite the popularity of d20, folded.  Think about that for a second - even at the height of the d20 boom, we didn't see one single successful pay offering of d20 tools.  Not one.  They all went belly up.But, somehow, magically, it'll all work out this time around?  What is the key element that I'm missing here?  Because, as far as I can see, there's no money to be made here.  We've had almost ten years for someone to make a d20 DDI toolset.  But, it's never materialized.  There has to be a reason.</blockquote>

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