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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6210453" data-attributes="member: 27160">It's most certainly debatable, in the sense that it can be debated and the core reasons to feel it's "good" or "bad" are primarily philosophical, but I think it's the right thing for WotC to go with, and I'll try to explain why.This seems to me very much like the argument for tariff barriers and import/export controls, and for cartels and trusts and all the other anti-competitive artifacts that businesses and governments have cooked up over the years, and I think it's wrong for the same reason.Sure, having a monopoly or cartel, or having import tariffs to "protect local industry" looks beneficial for the "insider" businesses at first blush. I'm sure it's many a CEO's wet dream to have a totally dominant market position. But it's bad for business - not just for the customer and the market (although it's more obviously bad for them, to be sure). It's bad for business because it teaches the "protected" businesses to be sloppy and lazy and abusive of their customers. It's bad because it causes "protected" businesses to rest on their laurels and fail to innovate to better serve their customers - and I actually think early TSR fell afoul of this precise issue.Having standards and shared technologies makes for a better marketplace. If something works well, instead of ring-fencing it we should be taking it as a standard and innovating beyond it. The alternative is, as seen in some parts of the car industry, one manufacturer keeping the obvious best method to themselves while others create wierd "works just like" cludges to avoid litigation - and the customer gets to choose some good features and a few cludges in any configuration she chooses, but no "all round good car".From an economic point of view, "trade" means doing what you do best and sharing the results; the freer trade is, the more this can happen and the better for everybody in the market. The only really cogent wrinkle found in this has been the need to make sure the originators of really good ideas get due reward - but that can and should happen through licensing, not exclusivity.Given all this, I think the OGL was one of the best things to happen to gaming in general, but I also think it's thoroughly good for WotC. A truly strong company with a truly strong system will thrive on competition - including competition with its own previous products. The real error WotC made concerning the OGL, in my view, was not creating it - it was abandoning it (and, in the process, ceding control on the most popular of their own previous creations, 3E). 4E was, indeed, a sound system - it's my favourite form of D&D by far - but it had considerable opprobrium heaped on it by customers for the licensing arrangements set for it and I think it suffered as a result in the marketplace.If WotC had kept with OGL for 4E I think you might have seen two important things happen which may well have made their current position better:1) 4E would not have suffered the attacks and deprecation that were aimed at WotC because of the abandonment of the OGL. That's not to say some would still not have liked the new departures - no edition will be universally beloved - but it would not have attracted the hate from jilted customers and 3pps who saw something they valued in WotC's de-facto business offering being rescinded from them.2) It would have been far more obvious that ceasing support for 3.5 was a bad move - that retaining some level of control over a competing product was the only sensible thing to do. Keeping the core books in print and offering PDFs of supplements - maybe with conversions for current adventures (although, er, hmmm...) - would have sufficed.Holding a product range with two competing products, 4E and Pathfinder, is undoubtedly less than the management at WotC dreamed of when they formulated their strategy for 4E, but it's a lot more than they ended up with.</blockquote>

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