D&D General OGL, Pinkertons and WOTC Oh My!

[Deset Gled]

... (On second thought, let's not.) ...

 

[Umbran]

WotC is a multi-billion company, not a mom-and-pop store. I hope they are better prepared to take on unforeseen tasks than the Umbran household

This is not an "unforseen" task. They've known about it for years. This is a low priority task.

true, but that means unless someone gets bugged enough this will never happen as there are always more important things to do than something with no practical benefit

Yep. I think that's the basic issue here. This is a task that will earn them pretty much nothing. Heck, there's a significant change that, even if they do it, nobody will use it for any publishing projects. It's a checkbox item on a secondary list, basically.

 

[jayoungr]

Which is why the ultimate outcome (5e in the creative commons) is such a good occurrence.

Well yeah, I agree that's the ideal!

 

[mamba]

This is not an "unforseen" task. They've known about it for years. This is a low priority task.

it was unforeseen at the time it got added to the list

 

[gban007]

My opinion on what happened:
Someone at WotC made a poor decision, and they should have known better. I don’t believe it was an attempt to shut down third-party creators; more likely, someone looked at licensing models in other industries and assumed a similar approach would work here. It didn’t. The important part is that WotC listened and changed direction—something not every company would do. They should never have proposed the new contract, but the final outcome was positive.

To me, this is water under the bridge. I don’t see the value in bringing it up in every discussion about WotC’s business practices. They didn’t double down, they didn’t try to force the contract, and they didn’t take anyone to court. They backed off. People make mistakes and I judge WotC by what they’re doing now not by a misstep, even an idiotically stupid one, they corrected years ago.

I think i generally agree with this.
Ultimately I think someone saw all the 3PP products out there that WoTC wasnt getting a cent on, and they felt they should get a slice of that pie .
The problem being it wasn't going to be a case of the 3pp just carrying on but suddenly paying a portion to WoTC, 3pp were more likely to just stop doing 3pp products for dnd - indeed we saw a number take steps away from it. So it was more, either way WoTC would get 0 cents, but under one scenario at least there is 3pp products out there that could encourage people to buy WoTC products as well.
They shouldn't have tried, but im glad they reversed course.
It doesn't come up in my thinking of whether to purchase from them today or not, it is more their current actions, and while im concerned about the whole union thjng and Hasbros agreement with Wizarding world, things havent tipped to point where id stop buying dnd products.

 

[Echohawk]

it was unforeseen at the time it got added to the list

I think a task has to count as foreseen by the time you are adding it to a "to do" list.

 

[mamba]

I think a task has to count as foreseen by the time you are adding it to a "to do" list.

so if your basement flooded Monday night, you having to clean it up on Tuesday is a foreseen task because you added it to the list that morning? That is not how I understand that word

 

[jayoungr]

That doesn't mean companies are going to join in throwing money towards a lawsuit though. Most likely would just have sat on the sidelines waiting to see how things panned out is all.

Maybe, maybe not. Fortunately, we'll never have to find out. I just think people are being a bit too doomy by assuming there was no possible way to fight Hasbro legally on this.

 

[DEFCON 1]

What does WotC/Hasbro get for releasing 3.X to the CC in a practical sense? As people have mentioned... pretty much nothing except generating goodwill.

But of course... for a lot of people (including many here on ENWorld)... that goodwill means nothing because it doesn't matter what WotC/Hasbro does... they will never be forgiven by those people for anything they do. The bridges have been burned and not being rebuilt.

Which makes the need/desire to finally get around to doing it even less of a priority. That's the problem with the idea of perpetually complaining about things... you do yourself no favors because you are not inspiring the other person to actually change.

 

[mamba]

What does WotC/Hasbro get for releasing 3.X to the CC in a practical sense? As people have mentioned... pretty much nothing except generating goodwill.

But of course... for a lot of people (including many here on ENWorld)... that goodwill means nothing because it doesn't matter what WotC/Hasbro does...

they had a poll recently and basically asked what they could do for that. My reply was release the 3e SRD under CC because I cannot think of anything else they could do to generate more goodwill.

They are not going to toss out 5e and bring either 4e back or create a 6e OSR game. They are not going to radically change how they do adventures either.

So, if you want to generate goodwill, how are you realistically going to do that if older SRDs in CC are off the table? You can argue that the amount of goodwill this would generate is not worth the effort, although I find that hard to measure, but I am not sure there is anything they can do that would generate more goodwill, maybe outside of actually releasing PDFs or putting the whole PHB in the 5e SRD

That's the problem with the idea of perpetually complaining about things...

there would be a lot less complaints if the people talking about how WotC did nothing wrong would not constantly talk about that and rush to their defense at the slightest lack of praise for WotC in a post. Most complaints I see (and all of mine) are in response to that