New GSL Announcement
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thormagni
Explorer
der_kluge said:
And as a fan, I am baffled that you would be baffled. While I might just be a dumb fan, I'm smart enough to see how many of my recent purchases have the OGL printed in the back of them. In fact, a significant portion of my gaming interest and dollars are tied up in games which are derivatives of the OGL.
I am already miffed that I will soon find that all my D&D3.5 books are suddenly out-of-date. But I would be downright angry to find out that Wizards was a) forcing all of my OGL-derived books to become out-of-date, or b) putting the producers of those game books into a position where they have to choose to support either D&D4e, or the other OGL games that I enjoy.
The only thing that would make it even worse is to find out that a company whose products I deeply enjoy was no longer to stay in business because of such a situation.
So, yeah. I care what is being discussed in this thread. And I can see why so many non-professionals are chiming in. We've got an interest here, even if we don't have a printing press contract or a copy of Adobe Acrobat.
Urizen said:
The problem as I see it, Dave, is that if you want to update your OGL to the GSL, you have to make sure that you remove the old OGL copy from the market. But since the OGL is derivative in many ways, you'd can't realistically do that since you'd need to remove the Section 15 sources of the material as well. Which limits you to only updating material that the publisher owns, and not any other OGL material. Which means a lot of products simply cannot be updated to the GSL or a portion of their material would be gone (that derived from other OGL sources not owned by the publisher). It might not be a problem for many publishers, but it can be for some. I'm not sure what the section 15 of M&M says, but it might be a problem.
Pinotage
Hi.
I'm... well, I'm not really 'new', per se. Been on the 'net years. Jeeze, a decade? Been playing RPGs for a while. D&D since the EXTREME tail end of the 2nd edition on a PC, skipped right over 3.0 tabletop, and hit 3.5 running.
I've been following the announcement of and discussion of D&D4 since it was announced at GenCon, but not closely. I've seen and heard some preview materials, liked the way it seemed to be going, better streamlining, etc, and was generally interested and a bit excited to give it a whirl once it got released.
I just got home from work (at 9AM, so you can imagine what sorts of hours I work), popped on the 'net, and 'lo... Slashdot article on D&D4. Prepare to be Slashdotted, BTW.
Anyhow, this article on Slashdot (and page four of this thread which the article links to, and is the only page of this thread I've read) seems to state that any publisher who wishes to publish for what may very well be the biggest tabletop RPG for the next decade has to DROP all of their currently successful material which they happened to base off of a licensing agreement Wizards whipped up back in the day? Huh?
Please realize, I buy almost exclusively Wizards published D&D material. In fact, it's the only D&D material I buy, as I rarely have time (or money) for any other systems or games. Plus there's something of a purist in me.
However, in hearing that Microso... er... I mean Wizards wants to pull a Microsoftian move, essentially shutting down their 'competition' (Windows XP.. er, I mean D&D 3.5) in order to force folks to move to Vist... er, I mean D&D4, I can't help but think:
"Does Wizards/Hasbro have any confidence in their own product's viability?"
I mean... seriously. You don't see Sony or Nintendo saying "Ok, we've released the PS3/X360/Wii/DS, so all of you game makers and publishers, you now HAVE to stop making games for older systems! Or else!" No. You see the natural, usually fast shift from the old to the new. Game makers stop making products for the old systems and make them for the new ones. Why? Because the newer system is usually better. The only time that I recall this not happening is recently with the PS3. It was too expensive, too hard to make games for, had very few if any good games on it, etc, and thus sold poorly. And thus, people are still making (and buying) PS2 games, even to this day (the PS2's sales figures were newsworthy even for March of this year, despite the PS3 being out, what, a year now?). The Gamecube? Games for that were dropped like a hot potato once the Wii came out. Why? The Wii was better. The Xbox? Gone, the 360 was better.
D&D 3.5?
Wizards/Hasbro: "Oh. Uh. Well, D&D 4 is so much better than 3.5! We have all this cool new whizbang stuff, awesome tools, it's a blast to play, and we think people are really going to love it! They're going to have to love it anyway, because we're going to force them to switch, using legal maneuvering and pressure to force publishers to switch, because in reality we don't actually believe our product is fun enough to cause the switch from 3.5 to 4 to occur naturally!"
My own confidence in D&D 4 dropped several notches this morning. I really hope they rethink this (and I wouldn't be surprised if this is a Hasbro-From-On-High decision, and out of Wizards' hands completely... doesn't make me any more happy about it).
EDIT: However, a scroll through some of the comments of the Slashdot article seem to indicate that all of this is misinformation, and that Wizards hasn't made any sort of announcement of this kind at all, just that they might be THINKING about providing such a preventative measure in any license they attach to D&D 4. Which is the story?
I'm... well, I'm not really 'new', per se. Been on the 'net years. Jeeze, a decade? Been playing RPGs for a while. D&D since the EXTREME tail end of the 2nd edition on a PC, skipped right over 3.0 tabletop, and hit 3.5 running.
I've been following the announcement of and discussion of D&D4 since it was announced at GenCon, but not closely. I've seen and heard some preview materials, liked the way it seemed to be going, better streamlining, etc, and was generally interested and a bit excited to give it a whirl once it got released.
I just got home from work (at 9AM, so you can imagine what sorts of hours I work), popped on the 'net, and 'lo... Slashdot article on D&D4. Prepare to be Slashdotted, BTW.
Anyhow, this article on Slashdot (and page four of this thread which the article links to, and is the only page of this thread I've read) seems to state that any publisher who wishes to publish for what may very well be the biggest tabletop RPG for the next decade has to DROP all of their currently successful material which they happened to base off of a licensing agreement Wizards whipped up back in the day? Huh?
Please realize, I buy almost exclusively Wizards published D&D material. In fact, it's the only D&D material I buy, as I rarely have time (or money) for any other systems or games. Plus there's something of a purist in me.
However, in hearing that Microso... er... I mean Wizards wants to pull a Microsoftian move, essentially shutting down their 'competition' (Windows XP.. er, I mean D&D 3.5) in order to force folks to move to Vist... er, I mean D&D4, I can't help but think:
"Does Wizards/Hasbro have any confidence in their own product's viability?"
I mean... seriously. You don't see Sony or Nintendo saying "Ok, we've released the PS3/X360/Wii/DS, so all of you game makers and publishers, you now HAVE to stop making games for older systems! Or else!" No. You see the natural, usually fast shift from the old to the new. Game makers stop making products for the old systems and make them for the new ones. Why? Because the newer system is usually better. The only time that I recall this not happening is recently with the PS3. It was too expensive, too hard to make games for, had very few if any good games on it, etc, and thus sold poorly. And thus, people are still making (and buying) PS2 games, even to this day (the PS2's sales figures were newsworthy even for March of this year, despite the PS3 being out, what, a year now?). The Gamecube? Games for that were dropped like a hot potato once the Wii came out. Why? The Wii was better. The Xbox? Gone, the 360 was better.
D&D 3.5?
Wizards/Hasbro: "Oh. Uh. Well, D&D 4 is so much better than 3.5! We have all this cool new whizbang stuff, awesome tools, it's a blast to play, and we think people are really going to love it! They're going to have to love it anyway, because we're going to force them to switch, using legal maneuvering and pressure to force publishers to switch, because in reality we don't actually believe our product is fun enough to cause the switch from 3.5 to 4 to occur naturally!"
My own confidence in D&D 4 dropped several notches this morning. I really hope they rethink this (and I wouldn't be surprised if this is a Hasbro-From-On-High decision, and out of Wizards' hands completely... doesn't make me any more happy about it).
EDIT: However, a scroll through some of the comments of the Slashdot article seem to indicate that all of this is misinformation, and that Wizards hasn't made any sort of announcement of this kind at all, just that they might be THINKING about providing such a preventative measure in any license they attach to D&D 4. Which is the story?
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TheLe
First Post
Moleculor said:
Thanks for pointing out the article, Moleculor.
If anyone is interested, they can find The Article Here.
snippet: "It seems to me that this is the equivalent of Microsoft telling people "If you want to make and sell software for Windows Vista, you can't make and sell any Linux/open source software!""
~Le
gideon_thorne
First Post
Matthew_ said:
TLG's sticking with its current line of quite successful products. So the 4e business wont affect C&C or TLG's other product lines since the company isn't going in the GSL/4e direction.
TheLe said:
I saw that little bit and technically, if I understand what's being discussed here correctly, that comparison is -not- actually correct.
What would be more correct would be saying "Ok, here's how to make programs run on Vista. The super-secret code that makes it all actually run. But now that you have it, you can't ever make a program for Windows XP ever again, even if it is a far more popular OS right now." Nothin' to do with Linux in any way, since Microsoft had no hand in making Linux (lets not get into the "recent" (last year or so?) claims by Microsoft that there IS code by MS in Linux distributions. Lets not mix crazy <censored> claims like that into a reasoned argument about facts).
As I stated in an edit of my above post, I'm reading some comments on the /. article, and noting that many people are saying that this isn't an official announcement yet, that nothing has been confirmed, that Wizards employees and Hasbro folk are all making conflicting statements, etc, and that many things that have come out of Wizards over the past months have later ended up being retracted. I'm hoping this is the case now. I'm far too tired to truly grasp what's going on right now.
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