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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5486267" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think this is a bit unfair. Even with the so-called "poison pill", the GSL was a very generous sharing of commercial IP.The OGL + SRD was an experiment. From the point of view of WotC it must surely count as at best a mixed success. It is very hard to know how much the availability of d20-licensed material contributed to the growth of 3E. My personal view is that pure OGL+SRD games - like Arcana Unearthed, Conan etc contributed little or nothing to the growth of 3E - and that they more likely redirected consumers away from WotC. If WotC shares my view, then from there point of view the question becomes - how can we leverage whatever advantage we might get from d20-style material, without exposing ourselves in the way that we did with pure OGL+SRD? The GSL is one candidate answer to this question.Here's another way of looking at it. Dancey's professed goal with the OGL was to lock in the d20 SRD as the default RPG for mainstream gaming. The growing success of Pathfinder suggests that Dancey's goal here has been accomplished to a significant extent. Certainly, releasing the world's best selling RPG rules under a non-revocable, indefinite, free licence seems always to have had a good chance of producing this result.But this was only in WotC's commercial interests if it could be taken for granted that they would always do the best out of d20 sales. Dancey seems to have believed that this was so. Assuming that WotC is even half-rational as a commercial actor, it's decision to break from the SRD shows that this was in fact not true - hence the move to 4e. And in light of this realisation, hence the move away from an SRD+OGL model and towards the GSL instead.When you look at the situation from the commercial perspective of WotC - which includes, assuming that they're even half-rational, their appreciation of the need to shift the mainstream RPG market away from OGL+SRD games and onto games which WotC (in virtue of retaining control over the IP) dominates the market - you can also get a better handle on their ads for 4e. For those ads to work, they had to rapidly shift the bulk of WotC's customer base from 3E to 4e. Any delay in effectiveness would give time for Pathfinder (or some similar OGL+SRD competitor) to emerge, effectively stifling 4e at its creation. In fact the ads didn't work, and something like this has happened - but from WotC's point of view it's not as if anything has been lost. They had to try it, and perhaps those ads were the best that they could come up with.Now all the above has been written from the point of view of WotC as a commercial entity. From the point of view of a player of RPGs, it's rather different. For those who like diversity, the OGL+SRD was a great thing. But reality is still a constraint. It's simply irrational both to be thankful for the diversification in the market that was made possible by the OGL+STD, and to be regretful that the company which was the market leader has moved on and is trying to leave OGL+SRD games behind. You can't rationally both enjoy the destruction of the monopoly, and be regretful about the consequecnes of that destruction for WotC's publication schedule and it's ongoing attitude towards the IP that it continues to control.</blockquote>

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