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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dmccoy1693" data-source="post: 6189680" data-attributes="member: 51747">Advantages to Wizards:1) greater exposure. Which is better: A) 1 company with a huge budget doing all the advertising and product creation or B) 1 company with a huge budget doing all the major advertising and product creation while 100 other companies produce products for your game that you do not have the time, energy, interest or resources to produce and spreading the word about your game (even if indirectly) using social media, word of mouth and kickstarter? All those little companies are small individually but essentially work to promote your game in a huge way in aggregate.2) Larger pool of designers that are highly experienced with your game to choose from. Take Mike Mearls for example. When Wizards hired him, he was a top notch designer and thoroughly experienced with 3.5. Had there never been an OGL, Mearls probably would have written for someone on some other game system (we'll never know for sure, but ...). Maybe it would have been Wizards, maybe not. But the one thing that is certain is that they would not have had as large of a pool of designers to pick from. The larger pool means the top producers are generally higher quality. 3) Higher sales ... indirectly. Here's the science of the OGL: You play a game, you get bored and move onto something else. But if you have a large pool of options for that game, you are more likely to stick with it that game. Its the basic "replayability" argument of many video games and board games. So if a DM gets tired of playing basic fantasy and wants to fantasy with guns. If there is no option for guns in a Wizards book, the group will probably goto an entirely different game. But if a D&D Compatible Publisher makes a supplement on guns, then the group can stick with D&D. But the mage doesn't use a gun, he is still using spells. So he buys the latest mage expansion for new spells. And that is a sale Wizards would not have had had the group switched to a different game. While Wizards had not sold as much to that one group had they produced a gun book themselves, they had higher sales with the mage supplement then a book on guns will. EDIT: The reason Wizards' did not (in this hypothetical scenario) produce a gun book themselves is basic business: opportunity cost. By taking one opportunity, you are turning down another. This means that if Wizards has the resources to produce 5 splat books/year, they can do martial classes, roguish classes, spellcasters, elves/halflings, dragonborn/tiefling books. Or they could do guns, space hamsters, androids, incarnum and an Ancient Canadian setting book. Which of those opportunities gets them more money. The first. This means they get higher sales because they could ignore those opportunities despite that 1% of gamers begging for guns in their ancient canadian themed setting. Without a sizable Compatible market, that 1% of gamers will go elsewhere. Do that often enough and you lose your market share. So either you A) produce to a 1% niche at the expense of the 99% that are not interested in that product or B) you slowly lose customers. Or you could go C) encourage a vibrant Compatible market that can cover those kind of niche markets that you never will that ultimately keep people in the game.You should notice A and B are both lose-lose while C is a win-win.</blockquote>

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