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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1495234" data-attributes="member: 812">What I don't see is how 4E closedness worsens the situation. All of these situations exist if 4E is open right? They can either continue to produce 3E, use whatever license is available for 4E or dual-stat.Whether or not they have to pay for the 4E license is beside the point.If I felt like the only thing I had to contribute was something that people wouldn't bother paying for, I'd be very cautious about my ability to succeed in any market.Of course I would rather people give me money, even for that which I offer for free. Sure I would. I'd rather you paid me to post on ENWorld. But I'm not going to manage a business on the hope that you will.There's two possible things you might be arguing with this approach, and I'm not sure what you're trying to say.On the one hand, publishers will make more money if people don't release competing products. I agree.On the other hand, it's not healthy for the industry for peole to release OGC created by others. I don't agree.Here's a reason -- how do we measure "health of the industry"? Perhaps Health could be measured by "publishers putting out exceptional books of very high editorial and production quality". Note that neither of those qualities have much to do with OGC -- editorial quality affects all the content of the book, not just the OGC, and production quality has nothing to do with OGC at all. So one possible effect of OGC redistribution is that publishers focus on producing beautiful books full of great writing, rather than coming up with half-a-dozen crummy prestige classes to fill their pages. I call that healthy. Maybe redistribution of OGC will lead product differentiation by these qualities rather than game rules.There's lots of way to define Healthy. Just because some publishers are currently operating with unviable business models does not mean that they are pointing the way the industry will go.</blockquote>

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