OGL 1.2 survey is now live

[raniE]

Misremembered the exact number when I said "under a percentage point."
I tend to ballpark it at 2 million. Which seems like the average ratio of DMs to players. (But a lot of players might sub as well.) Which is 2.5%.
Keep in mind that in 2021 D&D grew by 33%, the seventh year in a row of growth. And Stranger Things and Vecna gave a huge books last year.
So a dip of 2.5%—not all of which will stay unsubscribed—might not even cancel out the growth for this year.

Unless you have actual numbers though, you don’t know. It could be 2 million. It could be 1 million. It could be 500 000 or 100 000 (or it could be that 5 million number). We don’t know. What we do know is a lot of D&D Beyond accounts will be inactive, like mine was. Either from former players or players who don’t use Beyond anymore. Deleting it is a whole process and usually pointless. So, even if 20% of active players being subscribed is correct, those 10 million are all accounts, including inactive ones. How many are inactive? Again, we don’t know.

 

[FormerLurker]

Frankly, this is preferable to me. I don't play D&D. I play role-playing games. I don't care which one. And if we're entering the second age of TTRPG litigation, I want Hasbro to hurt for calling off the truce.

Which is choosing your feelings over the financial health of 3rd Party Publishers.

See, the cost to make an RPG book is pretty set. You're paying for art with some words. You need a certain amount of sales to cut even and sales above that becomes profit. So if your sales are reduced by 3/4ths you don't make 3/4ths less money. Because most of that reduction is coming off your profits. Instead, you might just be looking at cutting even or even losing money in printing & shipping.
Suddenly it becomes essential to switch to Print on Demand rather than traditional printing. Or reducing costs by cutting the art budget. Writing things yourself instead of hiring freelancers, and doing fewer products.

And it just hurts the hobby as there's no standard entry point. It's hard enough finding a good new player for your D&D table, let alone finding someone to play Fantasy Age or Numenera or Shadow of the Demon Lord. Fracturing the community into a half-dozen competing minor games means more spread out gamers and increased difficulty in finding games. Which discourages people from playing, shrinking the industry.

 

[raniE]

Which is choosing your feelings over the financial health of 3rd Party Publishers.

See, the cost to make an RPG book is pretty set. You're paying for art with some words. You need a certain amount of sales to cut even and sales above that becomes profit. So if your sales are reduced by 3/4ths you don't make 3/4ths less money. Because most of that reduction is coming off your profits. Instead, you might just be looking at cutting even or even losing money in printing & shipping.
Suddenly it becomes essential to switch to Print on Demand rather than traditional printing. Or reducing costs by cutting the art budget. Writing things yourself instead of hiring freelancers, and doing fewer products.

And it just hurts the hobby as there's no standard entry point. It's hard enough finding a good new player for your D&D table, let alone finding someone to play Fantasy Age or Numenera or Shadow of the Demon Lord. Fracturing the community into a half-dozen competing minor games means more spread out gamers and increased difficulty in finding games. Which discourages people from playing, shrinking the industry.

All of this is wrong. There are freelancers right now producing stuff for other game systems than D&D. They're even making money off it. There's also nothing saying that your sales would be cut 3/4ths just because D&D's audience is, that's assuming that people buying specific third party titles now will be randomly split among those 4 games, and that people who buy third party D&D books don't already buy stuff for many different games. More likely is the people who like a particular kind of content migrate to wherever that content goes. As for print on demand, theres nothing wrong with that. But I would like to point out that Lamentations of the Flame Princess has been able to put out some of the highest physical quality books (never mind if you don't like what's inside them, just look at the books as physical artifacts) in the industry, and it is a small OSR game company.

Splitting the popularity of D&D around many different games would be a huge boon for the hobby and for the industry. There would be no titan like Hasbro able to throw its weight around. Trying more systems would be more common, thus buying more books would be more common.

Everything you wrote is wrong.

 

[FormerLurker]

No, this is wrong. The 5 digits are not cancellations, they are deletions. Just accounts completely gone. This is different from, say, what I have done and simply cancelled my subscription.

Source?
The Gizmodo article on the "5 digits" number was complaining tickets in the system, which would be cancellations.

Cancelled D&D Beyond Subscriptions Forced Hasbro's Hand

Swift consumer action prompted Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast to to scrap licensing updates. The players aren't done yet.

gizmodo.com

Uh, why? It's still up in the air whether or not OGL 1.0a goes away, whether it be Wizards' choice or in a courtroom. You talk about bruised egos, but the person who did the wrong thing here is Wizards. They are the ones who clearly had bruised egos when they also claimed victory. I don't see any reason to forgive a company that has been recklessly going after their partners, breaking contracts, and just acting in bad faith all around. In fact, it makes me want to never forgive them because they haven't shown any sort of contrition. At all. They've just tried to keep it more under wraps.

It's not going to go to court. It might have had they prevented Paizo from selling their back catalogue or stopped them from releasing new books. Now, it likely won't happen.
WotC seems dead set on removing the OGL 1.0a. I doubt much will shift them at this point.

And you're welcome not to forgive and nurse that bruised ego.... but you're also not helping the companies everyone said they wanted to help. You're welcome to choose yourself over 3PP. That's your decision. Just be aware that's the choice you're making.

Not when they can just kill any 3PPs at their whim. They'd be constantly living as hostages where their entire output could be destroyed if they did not do what WotC wanted.

If this was a REAL concern you'd be focusing on adding that to the survey feedback and figuring out better wording.

Alternatively it makes them permanent hostages of Wizards, who can decide whatever terms they want in the future. Splitting up the market would be way better than allowing someone to behead it any any given moment, especially when it comes to getting away from having a massive market leader who can do such things.

Splitting the market is just a slow death. It would kill most 3rd Party Publishers. Sales of smaller games just can't sustain them like sales of D&D products.
There's a reason there's not any million dollar PF2 3PP Kickstarters...

 

[Justice and Rule]

Which is choosing your feelings over the financial health of 3rd Party Publishers.

See, the cost to make an RPG book is pretty set. You're paying for art with some words. You need a certain amount of sales to cut even and sales above that becomes profit. So if your sales are reduced by 3/4ths you don't make 3/4ths less money. Because most of that reduction is coming off your profits. Instead, you might just be looking at cutting even or even losing money in printing & shipping.
Suddenly it becomes essential to switch to Print on Demand rather than traditional printing. Or reducing costs by cutting the art budget. Writing things yourself instead of hiring freelancers, and doing fewer products.

Hey, so what's the cost to 3PPs when Wizards decides they don't want some of them around?

And it just hurts the hobby as there's no standard entry point. It's hard enough finding a good new player for your D&D table, let alone finding someone to play Fantasy Age or Numenera or Shadow of the Demon Lord. Fracturing the community into a half-dozen competing minor games means more spread out gamers and increased difficulty in finding games. Which discourages people from playing, shrinking the industry.

What shrinking industry? The industry is exploding. I don't know what problems you are having, but finding people for games has not been a problem for me. Further, it's weird to think that we have to have a single entry into the industry: if anything, we should have more, given what RPGs can be. Just having it as generic fantasy gives rise to so many misconceptions about the hobby that it's honestly a weakness ("I really don't want to play a game with elves and Dwarves" - Person responded to me wanting to play Delta Green), and tying it to a single company is dangerous for the reasons we are seeing right now.

 

[FormerLurker]

For me, it's not about whether to "forgive" or not - it's not like I'm in a relationship with Hasbro. It's about the optimal result going forward. I'm also not interested in punishments, or in gratifying an emotional response to the situation. We're here now, so how do we realistically get to a better place, particularly for folks who have their livelihood at stake, but also for those of us who have a lot invested, both financially and otherwise, in the game?

This!

 

[mach1.9pants]

Well, that was definitely the most negative survey I've ever filled in.

 

[FormerLurker]

Hey, so what's the cost to 3PPs when Wizards decides they don't want some of them around?

3PP are nothing to WotC. All of them together are a rounding error on the D&D books, let alone WotC's total revenue.
Unless they're doing something that hurts D&D, they're not worth thinking about.

What shrinking industry? The industry is exploding. I don't know what problems you are having, but finding people for games has not been a problem for me. Further, it's weird to think that we have to have a single entry into the industry: if anything, we should have more, given what RPGs can be. Just having it as generic fantasy gives rise to so many misconceptions about the hobby that it's honestly a weakness ("I really don't want to play a game with elves and Dwarves" - Person responded to me wanting to play Delta Green), and tying it to a single company is dangerous for the reasons we are seeing right now.

It's exploding because of Dungeons & Dragons. If D&D goes away or gets hurt by this, it's not going to keep growing at the same rate. Because a common well known entry point makes it easy to find games. And once you have a group, it's easier to get them to try other games.

The last time D&D went away (4e) the entire industry shrank and contracted.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Source?
The Gizmodo article on the "5 digits" number was complaining tickets in the system, which would be cancellations.

Cancelled D&D Beyond Subscriptions Forced Hasbro's Hand

Swift consumer action prompted Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast to to scrap licensing updates. The players aren't done yet.

gizmodo.com

My source is that article:

In order to delete a D&D Beyond account entirely, users are funneled into a support system that asks them to submit tickets to be handled by customer service: Sources from inside Wizards of the Coast confirm that earlier this week there were “five digits” worth of complaining tickets in the system. Both moderation and internal management of the issues have been “a mess,” they said, partially due to the fact that WotC has recently downsized the D&D Beyond support team.

So please, stop spreading misinformation trying to stop the current moment.

It's not going to go to court. It might have had they prevented Paizo from selling their back catalogue or stopped them from releasing new books. Now, it likely won't happen.
WotC seems dead set on removing the OGL 1.0a. I doubt much will shift them at this point.

Explain to me why it won't happen? Because here's the thing: just creating ORC doesn't suddenly prevent this. OGL 1.0a is still a crucial part of what's going on. And again, if Wizards wants to follow through it either has to scare everyone or go to court. I see the latter being much more likely.

And you're welcome not to forgive and nurse that bruised ego.... but you're also not helping the companies everyone said they wanted to help. You're welcome to choose yourself over 3PP. That's your decision. Just be aware that's the choice you're making.

Uh, all those companies are saying what I'm saying, not what you're saying. Be aware, the choice you are making is for any 3PP to become permanent serfs of Wizards, to constantly have the threat of dissolution because Wizards can basically cancel their entire catalogue if they agree to the new "OGL".

If this was a REAL concern you'd be focusing on adding that to the survey feedback and figuring out better wording.

You said they are already committed to destroying 1.0a, so it's not about wording here. Feedback is meaningless when they are going to do exactly what they don't want us to do. This is a weird line of argumentation when your previous lines on this are basically "This is going to happen and nothing you do can stop it". I take a different view: I'm going to try and stop it, and if not then Wizards can do what they want without myself and many others.

If you want to negotiated, that is much better position compared to open supplication.

Splitting the market is just a slow death. It would kill most 3rd Party Publishers. Sales of smaller games just can't sustain them like sales of D&D products.
There's a reason there's not any million dollar PF2 3PP Kickstarters...

There aren't any million dollar PF2 kickstarters because we have one big dominant company. This whole argument misses that the most stifling part of the industry is WotC's own dominance of it. 3PP will continue on, just as they did with 4E: that didn't hurt the industry, just Wizards. With the massive expansion of the market since then, it'd totally be better to have multiple companies as entries rather than relying on one megacompany that dominates everything.

Long story short: Wizards being the God-king of RPG companies is not a plus, but a minus.

 

[dave2008]

That doesn't address the actual problem of using existing OGL 1.0a-licensed Open Game Content, because most existing Open Game Content regardless of edition wasn't created by WotC, and thus is beyond WotC's ability to add to the Creative Commons.

I wasn't trying to say it was trying to address that (at least I don't think so, I just got back from taking my dog to the emergency vet because of an accidental poisoning so I don't really remember what I was responding to, nor do I really care).