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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Maggan" data-source="post: 9235446" data-attributes="member: 6616">Disclaimer: I am a freelancer for Free League.I think non-OGL/CC games have a good chance of doing well, but maybe not Paizo levels of well. But a smaller company is nothing to sneeze at. Free League has been mentioned, both in the OP and in follow-ups. They are a good example of a company that thrives without the OGL as the primary driver of sales.Free League had a turnover of 11 million dollars in 2022 (public information) and this is spread out over several product lines and only two of those are OGL (Ruins of Symbaroum and The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying). This might seem small in the grand scheme of things, but my belief is that this is phenomenal. Not every rpg company has to be WotC or Paizo to be profitable or to reach an audience.The OGL is one part of Free League's success with The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying but certainly not their primary strategy to achieve profitability. I see it as a supplemental strategy, a way of genereating revenue from their other work that is already done for their other systems. So them moving to the OGL is a bit of a misnomer, since they haven't abandoned any other lines in liue of the OGL.Instead they have built their success on Year Zero, a robust rules set that powers games such as Alien, Blade Runner, Mutant Year Zero, Forbidden Lands, Tales from the Loop, Vaesen, and Twilight 2000. Some of these were million dollar Kickstarters. In addition to these games they publish Coriolis and Dragonbane (with seperate rules systems) that are fairly successful even though they don't generate 5E numbers.Free League also act as publishers for Mörk Borg, CY_BORG, Pirate Borg, Death in Space and Into the ODD. None of these are OGL (at least as far as I know).There is a good business in creating and distributing games that are not OGL, and Free League is an example of this. As I said, they are not WotC or Paizo level but they are building a solid publishing business on the backs of games of their own creation, not on the back of the OGL.There will always be demand for "something else" role-playing games. Not as big as for Dungeons & Dragons or deratives, but big enough for it being worthwhile to publish those games.</blockquote>

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