New GSL Announcement

[S'mon]

Well, for starters, WotC doesn't have anything even remotely resembling a monopoly position. For goodness sakes.

WoTC certainly have market dominance within the RPG industry; enough that in various EU jurisdictions (and before the European Commission) they'd be vulnerable to Unfair Competition investigation. Most EU nations don't have the strong freedom of contract presumptions of US law; a German lawyer pointed out to me that in German law schools they don't teach 'Contract Law', they teach 'Contract Regulation'.

 

[mxyzplk]

Oh, I agree. The sad thing is people that decided to pick up the OGL "in good faith" as a true industry standard effort and produce open games without any relation to d20 at all, just using the OGL as a CC-like open license (Spirit of the Century, Action!, etc.) Of course their quick fix is to "rip and replace" OGL with CC to avoid the poison pill, but then there's no guarantee that WotC won't say "Oh yeah? Well NO other license then!"

Considering that the GSL only appears to forbid simultaneous use of the OGL, this idea is kinda crazy. I mean, sure, the OGL is the most commonly used open gaming license, but it's not the only open license out there that is applicable to gaming, nor is it the only open license under which RPGs have been published. There is also, for example, the Creative Commons license, which is much more open and not tied to any single corporate parent. It doesn't sound - correct me if I'm wrong - as if the GSL forbids the use of ANY open license for gaming, just the specific, Wizards of the Coast created OGL.

CC works just fine for most artistic endeavors. People do quite decent business publishing books, art, poetry, recordings under a CC license (I ought to know, I publish artwork under a Creative Commons license), so it's not like CC and OGL are mutually exclusive, or like CC is a kiss of death while OGL means that the game will succeed. And the GSL doesn't seem mention CC (it shouldn't, CC is not a license that WotC has legal control over, unlike the OGL), so you can publish all your non-D20 games under Creative Commons and your 4E stuff under D&D GSL. All it means is that the companies that want to do D&D 4E have to finish up their 3E lines and switch, which is the point of an edition change anyway. None of this halfass one-toe-in-the-water crap. The only companies that could conceivably be harmed are the ones with a heavy investment in 3E game mechanics who don't want to stop publishing 3E-compatible game materials.

One of my bugaboos with the OGL is the fact that a number of game publishers just slapped it and the d20 System onto their games without thinking, "Is this REALLY the best expression possible for my ideas?" This ended up producing a lot of games that are not very good - the d20 System is designed for adventure fantasy, not Generic Roleplaying. Yes, there are some great d20 based games out there - Spycraft for one - but there's also a LOT of dross in the market.

 

[S'mon]

The key distinction here is the fact that all products using the OGL are considered derivitive works, simply by virtue of having used the licence. They are not considered stand-alone products in the same way that a PC is a stand-alone product from an OS.

They may be derivative, but they are rarely just that (except maybe for 'Pocket Players' Handbook' type stuff that just repackages the SRD). Most OGL products are original creations in their own right, combining both WoTC licensed IP and original IP. A court isn't likely to hold that the creators of eg Mutants & Masterminds have no rights in their work just because they legally used some WoTC licensed IP in its creation.

That said, I think under US law (not EU laws) anti-trust issues won't arise unless WoTC were to try to prevent 4e GSL licensees from publishing non-OGL games (eg BRP Call of Cthulu, Savage Worlds etc), which does not appear to be WotC's intent. It could get very nasty in the EU though.

 

[mxyzplk]

WoTC certainly have market dominance within the RPG industry; enough that in various EU jurisdictions (and before the European Commission) they'd be vulnerable to Unfair Competition investigation. Most EU nations don't have the strong freedom of contract presumptions of US law; a German lawyer pointed out to me that in German law schools they don't teach 'Contract Law', they teach 'Contract Regulation'.

That's a good point, the EU laws are a lot more severe about stuff like this and WotC/Hasbro operates there. Maybe a European with more money than sense will take them to task there

 

[mxyzplk]

WotC isn't a Monopoly. The Microsoft complaint was based on the fact that they were a monopoly, and so the other companies had no other choice. Wizards isn't a monopoly. You can walk away and do your own game at any time, and be very successful at it. In fact, I THINK the reason Microsoft won that case is that they declared Microsoft wasn't a monopoly (the case went up so many times I'm not positive on that one). Since WotC isn't a monopoly, you aren't forced.

WotC has a stronger monopoly position in the RPG industry than Microsoft has in the desktop software position, in terms of pretty much any metric (number of competing companies, installation base percentages, revenue percentage of overall pie."

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

That's a good point, the EU laws are a lot more severe about stuff like this and WotC/Hasbro operates there. Maybe a European with more money than sense will take them to task there

Yeah.

We're talking a 99/1 split, at least. Maybe 100/0.

 

[mxyzplk]

I'm not sure how this is a "judo throw" to our announcement of the Pathfinder RPG. We weren't planning on supporting 4th edition with Pathfinder anyway... the whole POINT of Pathfinder RPG is to give us something of our own to build on. It looks like that means we won't be able to support 4th Edition at all, which is very disappointing, but it's certainly not anything like a death blow to Paizo. We're doing quite well as it is right now without any 4th edition support.

Sure, it's not harmful to Pathfinder per se, it's less of a judo throw more of a "spiteful slap in the face" saying "Oh yeah, then you can't support 4e too."

 

[SSquirrel]

Gotcha - thanks, guys. I was just searching the thread for WotC's posts, so didn't see Clark's.

I had summed the shifts in the thread nicely in #163

 

[Psion]

I had summed the shifts in the thread nicely in #163

Yeah, but you have a malformed quote tag. Can't have that.

 

[BadMojo]

The Lion needs to eat, or it will starve and die. It's not as if WotC was starving when it released the SRD under the OGL. WotC won't starve now if it released 4E under a GSL (or better yet under the OGL) that doesn't enforce draconian limitations.

If WotC is the lion and the third party companies are the gazelle, does that mean the consumers are the mice that get stepped on while the lion eats?

As someone who loves D&D and RPG's in general, I can't recall the last time I've been this disappointed (with the GSL, 4E itself, communication between Wizards and its fans). I'm sure most people will just buy 4E no matter what happens and won't even notice any of the GSL related stuff, so my opinion is probably so much in the minority that it's entirely worthless.