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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6290443" data-attributes="member: 22424">That's because, quite frankly, we're not the important people in this discussion. 5e will be open, or not, based on the decision of WotC. They will take that decision, ultimately, on pragmatic grounds: will opening the game give them more sales than it will lose?To that end, the question of whether the OGL helped or harmed WotC is the key one. (Although, actually, even that's not quite right - the question should really be: do WotC believe that the OGL helped them or harmed them?)FWIW, I'll be very surprised if 5e doesn't have any license at all, and I'll equally be very surprised if it is noticably more generous than the GSL.Indeed. But...Back when 3e was in development, extensive analysis was done that established that it was core rulebook sales that made the overwhelming majority of the money for an edition. Thus, the purpose of everything else was to push those core rulebooks (and, specifically, the PHB). And so the d20 license made a lot of sense - all those additional products that required the PHB for use were undeniably a good thing. (And note that that's the d20 license, not the OGL since the latter allowed stand-alone games. In any case...)However, I'm not sure the old analysis still holds today. I'm reasonably sure that for 4e the key was DDI subscriptions, and that for Pathfinder it is Adventure Path subscriptions that drives the business. If that is the case, then the calculation changes - it makes sense for Paizo to embrace OGL fully since any add-on helps drive people to buy their (closed) adventure content; it makes sense for WotC to seek a tighter (adventure-specific?) license since they don't gain anything from people producing additional rules material that isn't integrated into the DDI tools.And having said that... I'm far from convinced there will be a 5e equivalent of the DDI tools - if they were doing such a thing, I'm sure we'd have heard about them recruiting the required people by now. And if they're not doing 5e tools, that changes the calculus again. So, we'll just need to see.</blockquote>

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