Licensing, OGL and Getting D&D Compatible Publishers Involved

[billd91]

That, of course, presumes that they consider the OGL to be a good thing. They may have learned that every single time they license out the product, they get screwed, so, I can't really blame them for being gun shy. Whether it's movie rights, digital media rights or OGL rights, they've gotten bitten in the ass every single time.

They bit themselves in the ass with the GSL. They couldn't get their together in time for their own deadlines and burned their most enthusiastic third party supporters.

 

[Hussar]

They bit themselves in the ass with the GSL. They couldn't get their together in time for their own deadlines and burned their most enthusiastic third party supporters.

Fair enough. But, the OGL allowed another company to take the millions of dollars they spent on creating and marketing a game and use that investment to build a competing company that has become a major competitor. The OGL was never intended for that I'm thinking.

 

[darjr]

Fair enough. But, the OGL allowed another company to take the millions of dollars they spent on creating and marketing a game and use that investment to build a competing company that has become a major competitor. The OGL was never intended for that I'm thinking.

Actually I think that yes it was.

It was part of the bargain the OGL makes with customers. Customers could buy an OGL game knowing that if support dried up from the primary company somebody could step in.

If the primary first party company jumped the shark then players could keep playing the game they've invested so much in, secure in the knowledge that somebody could come along and build support products for them. Customers could buy an OGL product knowing that they had a safe haven for producing things for their friends and customers on a large or, as is often the case, very small scale.

It was a bargain intended to keep the primary company either keeping on keeping on with the game, or a largely compatable game or allow someone to step into that spot if they no longer wanted to support it.

As far as I know it was part of the sales pitch and marketing.

 

[Wicht]

Fair enough. But, the OGL allowed another company to take the millions of dollars they spent on creating and marketing a game and use that investment to build a competing company that has become a major competitor. The OGL was never intended for that I'm thinking.

As I recall, the creative minds behind the OGL explicitly said it was part of the purpose: allowing a competitor to pick up the pieces if WotC should ever drop the ball. I suspect they might have thought that date a bit further in the future than it was, but yeah, it was very much a reason for the license being what it was.

 

[Hussar]

Umm, no. The point was that if WOTC ever went out of business, then someone else could pick up and keep going. They didn't want another situation like when TSR went out of business and then no one could publish anything D&D because of copyright issues.

I highly, highly doubt that the point of the OGL was to create primary competition for WOTC.

 

[Mistwell]

Umm, no. The point was that if WOTC ever went out of business, then someone else could pick up and keep going. They didn't want another situation like when TSR went out of business and then no one could publish anything D&D because of copyright issues.

I highly, highly doubt that the point of the OGL was to create primary competition for WOTC.

Yeah I agree with Hussar. It was not intended to create a strong competitor for WOTC, it was intended as a firewall against WOTC stopping publishing D&D. It backfired, for a variety of reasons, but it did backfire.

 

[billd91]

Umm, no. The point was that if WOTC ever went out of business, then someone else could pick up and keep going. They didn't want another situation like when TSR went out of business and then no one could publish anything D&D because of copyright issues.

I highly, highly doubt that the point of the OGL was to create primary competition for WOTC.

Perhaps not, but I also think the initial plan was to not retreat from the OGL like WotC did with 4e and the GSL (and most of 3.5's splatbooks, for that matter). Had they really made 3e a progressive game with an OGL-fueled update every so often, incorporating ideas from 3rd party users of the OGL and evolving the game rather than clamping down on their own content, creating a follow-up game as a substantial departure, and licensing it under a regime hardly any self-respecting 3rd party company would follow, I doubt we'd be playing Pathfinder now. WotC wasn't burned by the OGL, Paizo, and the other 3rd party companies who use the license - they burned themselves with it by failing to support it and then moving away from it.

 

[Hussar]

Just as a point of history, virtually no WOTC content made it into the OGL, 3.5 or 3e.

As another point, the OGL was not a means by which WOTC should start giving free advertising to 3pp by including 3pp material in their products. I mean, WOTC spent millions more dollars on D&D than any single 3pp ever did. What possible advantage is there for WOTC to include 3pp material in their books?

Look, the presumption here is that 3pp material was hugely popular and made a big difference for gamers. I don't believe that it did. When the biggest selling 3pp material sold maybe 10-15000 copies, it just wasn't big enough for WOTC, where WOTC sells tens of thousands of copies of almost every book it publishes.

The only people who would benefit from WOTC putting out OGL material is the 3pp, not WOTC itself. The 3pp just didn't reach enough people to even consider it. Never minding the huge mess that 3pp made of OGL material for years all by themselves - books with broken OGL for example were hardly a rare find.

I bought OGL material. I did. I bought more than I bought WOTC material. But, I'm under no illusions as to the fact that I'm a very small minority here.

But, this isn't going to go anywhere. I look at Pathfinder and see the primary reason to not have an OGL. WOTC is spending tens of millions of dollars developing 5e. There is no benefit to allowing 3pp to piggyback on that. There just isn't, IMO. 3pp will never generate enough revenue for WOTC to justify allowing them access the way the OGL did.

There are just too many examples of licensing burning them in the end.

 

[I'm A Banana]

If we're going to talk about what the point was intended to be, we may as well quote the mastermind himself:

The logical conclusion says that reducing the "cost" to other people to publishing and supporting the core D&D game to zero should eventually drive support for all other game systems to the lowest level possible in the market, create customer resistance to the introduction of new systems, and the result of all that "support" redirected to the D&D game will be to steadily increase the number of people who play D&D, thus driving sales of the core books. This is a feedback cycle -- the more effective the support is, the more people play D&D. The more people play D&D, the more effective the support is.

So this is kind of how he sold it to the internal stakeholders: get as many people in the RPG hobby as possible playing D&D, and then expand the RPG hobby, and D&D wins.

By that logic, WotC shot itself in the foot by moving away from the OGL. If Dancey's idea of network externalities being a tremendous force on the sales of D&D are correct, then it was even self-evident: D&D will make less money if it's not open, because less people will bother to buy the core books, because the game won't be as appealing to them, because WotC isn't publishing what they need, because it's just not reasonable for WotC to publish everything everyone needs.

....and then there's this bit:

The purpose of the OGL was to act as a force for change. In that sense I think it is an unquaified success.

And there's this bit, the bit I think [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] 's talking about:

I also had the goal that the release of the SRD would ensure that D&D in a format that I felt was true to its legacy could never be removed from the market by capricious decisions by its owners. I know just how close that came to happening. In 1997, TSR had pledged most of the copyright interests in D&D as collateral for loans it could not repay, and had Wizards of the Coast not rescued it I'm certain that it would have all gone into a lenghty bankruptcy struggle with a very real chance that D&D couldn't be published until the suits, appeals, countersuits, etc. had all been settled (i.e. maybe never). The OGL enabled that as a positive side effect.

And possibly, what I think [MENTION=221]Wicht[/MENTION] was referencing, this from '06, though it seems to be from a message board post that may no longer exist:

With so much of the 30+ year legacy D&D game in the SRD, I believe it is impossible to ever make a game that would be accepted by the fans as "D&D" without it being possible to alter whatever is necessary to make the Open Game version of D&D compatible with whatever product is being currently sold as "D&D" by WotC. A game divergent enough to break that legacy with the SRD is simply not going to be tolerable to anyone vested in the D&D player network. Such a radical break would almost certainly result in a 3rd party version of the game, published under a new brand name, becoming the de-facto inheritor of the D&D player network externality, coming into direct competition with whatever faux "D&D" product is being marketed, and probably crushing it.

Crushing it may be overstating the case a bit (Pathfinder's clearly a big success, but it's not as clear if 4e's been a constant struggle or just kind of a struggle), but his prediction certainly seems to follow the arc of 4e's life-cycle.

And then that mischievous scamp Erik Mona chimed in:

I think leaving the door open for someone to publish a "more D&D" version of D&D called something else was part of Ryan's secret plan all along.

So, Ryan Dancey may have had a stake in making the 3e version of D&D THE version of D&D in the minds of anyone, regardless of what company held the reigns. Since the OGL has been a feature of the top-selling fantasy RPG since the OGL's debut (aside from the first few months of 4e), there may be some wisdom there.

....kind of makes me want to go work for the guy over at Goblinworks....

 

[billd91]

Just as a point of history, virtually no WOTC content made it into the OGL, 3.5 or 3e.

And that's WotC failing at the OGL. Right there.

As another point, the OGL was not a means by which WOTC should start giving free advertising to 3pp by including 3pp material in their products. I mean, WOTC spent millions more dollars on D&D than any single 3pp ever did. What possible advantage is there for WOTC to include 3pp material in their books?

Look, the presumption here is that 3pp material was hugely popular and made a big difference for gamers. I don't believe that it did. When the biggest selling 3pp material sold maybe 10-15000 copies, it just wasn't big enough for WOTC, where WOTC sells tens of thousands of copies of almost every book it publishes.

The only people who would benefit from WOTC putting out OGL material is the 3pp, not WOTC itself. The 3pp just didn't reach enough people to even consider it. Never minding the huge mess that 3pp made of OGL material for years all by themselves - books with broken OGL for example were hardly a rare find.

What does WotC get out of it? A progressively evolving game that gets better over time and stays evergreen.

But, this isn't going to go anywhere. I look at Pathfinder and see the primary reason to not have an OGL. WOTC is spending tens of millions of dollars developing 5e. There is no benefit to allowing 3pp to piggyback on that. There just isn't, IMO. 3pp will never generate enough revenue for WOTC to justify allowing them access the way the OGL did.

There are just too many examples of licensing burning them in the end.

See, I look at Pathfinder and say "Thank you, Ryan Dancey, for making it possible for a company to keep a palatable D&D alive when WotC drops the ball." And for that matter, if Pathfinder weren't putting up such a fight, I'm not so sure WotC would be putting so much effort into D&D Next.